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Agnosticism
So, i was listening to some GN and felt i should even try to present my argument to be an agnostic.
First the definition, from wikipedia:
"I neither have a belief in a deity nor do I have a belief in the absence of such a deity."
But why?
Godlike creature always "escape" the natural rules, or physics. To escape the laws of nature you always need infinity something, like time, knowledge or most likely energy...
God, if it exist, belong to a "realm of infinity".
Our brain is finite so we cannot understand it.
If I can't understand it, why keep questioning it?
Therefore I am agnostic...
Looking from the other side, if a god has infinity knowledge I being finite can be fully understandable, why should it care about me?
I am a spiritual guy, I have my own believes and my own little rituals but I do it for myself not to a possible god that if exist just probably doesn't care ...
...
First the definition, from wikipedia:
"I neither have a belief in a deity nor do I have a belief in the absence of such a deity."
But why?
Godlike creature always "escape" the natural rules, or physics. To escape the laws of nature you always need infinity something, like time, knowledge or most likely energy...
God, if it exist, belong to a "realm of infinity".
Our brain is finite so we cannot understand it.
If I can't understand it, why keep questioning it?
Therefore I am agnostic...
Looking from the other side, if a god has infinity knowledge I being finite can be fully understandable, why should it care about me?
I am a spiritual guy, I have my own believes and my own little rituals but I do it for myself not to a possible god that if exist just probably doesn't care ...
...
Comments
Think of holding a glass which can easily break in your hand and letting it fall to the ground. You will obviously predict that the glass will fall down and break into shards, and it will. But if you were to be perfectly honest with yourself you'd have to admit, that everything you know that lets you predict that the glass will break is only form experience. Everyone remembers how things happened in the past and then predicts certain things. Thus certain phenomenons like gravity have become rules in physics. But how can we really be sure that the glass will fall down? Only because gravity was true in the past, doesn't mean it must be true in the future. You can make even more absurd statements like: only because wood is wood now, doesn't mean it won't be an elephant in the next second. We really can't say for sure that won't be true.
The reason I bring this up is because David Hume, after discovering this said that although everything we know may not be true in the future, there is no point in believing we can't know anything, since it won't help us get on with our everyday lives. I believe the reasoning is quite similar for Atheists. No one can know for sure if there is a god or not, but we can be pretty sure there isn't.
But dude, to keep it short. You are an atheist, and you don't know it. When I write the blog post, perhaps on Sunday, you'll see why. For now, trust me, before the thread goes crazy.
Most religions state, we are the one true faith, believe in us or go to hell(or equivalent).
This alone should be enough to tell you that religions, and gods, are a construct of man. Everything we have found and observed that is not from man is amazingly consistent. Things like gravity, chemistry, physics. These things work with or with out us.
And yet some how we have told ourselves that some omnipotent and omniscient (In the God Delusion Dawkins does an interesting "proof" that a being can not be omnipotent and omniscient at the same time, however it is much in line with the "Can god make a rock so heavy he himself can not lift it?" sort of questions) created everything and that this being is not universally revered.
Seriously for the Christian god to be the one true god he did a very shitty job at getting his presence known out there. We can historically prove when belief in him started (within a reasonable amount of time) and show that belief in him did not spontaneously start elsewhere with out prior contact to those who already believed in him. Throw in the fact that certain cultures that stayed pretty isolated through out history never heard of him until the west came barging in then for him to be the one true god really is a quite shaky.
Julia Sweeney pointed out that Christian faith is evidence based. It is based upon the evidence that is given in the bible. It is supposed to be the true chronicles of history and yet we see contradictory evidence to the claims made in the bible all the time.
I just don't understand how anyone can sit there with a straight face and tell me that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that it was created by an omnipotent, omniscient being who cares only for us out of the billions of other creatures on this planet alone. That this book that has been written by dozens of different authors, translated by people from language to language, through 3000 years of history, is the true and unaltered word of god.
How can you say that in the face of all the scientific evidence of physics and biology and chemistry and astronomy and not burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, or maybe tears?
A gnostic theist may be crazy and think they know that god exists, and believe it. However, at least they are consistent.
An agnostic theist is simultaneously admitting they don't know god exists while also admittedly believing in it anyway. You don't know whether or not Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or Tooth Fairy exist, but you don't just randomly decide to believe in them despite your lack of gnosis. The agnostic athiests and the gnostic theists both have in common that they believe in what they know or don't know. They have a consistent standard of evidence behind their beliefs. The agnostic theists just decide what to believe in, and it has no connection to any knowledge or evidence.
Agnostic theists who believe in a particular religion (with all of the historical means of demonstrating a clear secular origin, thus providing evidence AGAINST) are either dim or ignoring massive amounts of cognitive dissonance.
In the grand scheme of things, the presence of (and the associated identity) of a thing in the sky, as it were, is ultimately less important to me than doing right by others.
About theism or atheism, I think the answer does not matter.
And think saying that it has no real answer or if has it does not matter, instead of saying NO, is very important.
The controversy about the question is a major problem and the way to go is: DOES NOT MATTER!
So you're all very nice people, GN was right I really like the forum.
So, if you don't believe in a deity, even if you don't know for sure, you are an agnostic atheist. That's what the words mean when you put them together. It just so happens that all intelligent atheists are in the same boat as you, we don't believe in a God, and we don't know for sure.
I should say, most likely not...
But i think that there things to believe, but they are the nature of our physics...
Quoting George Carlin: "I pray to the sun"
but not literally...
Some people say that this nature is god, about that argument I would agree with Frank Zappa: "It's just words..." (I know he said this on other context but I'm using it here :]) I know, but i was not answering that question before... I care, I'm not indifferent to the question, I just strongly believe that the question is the wrong one.