This article provides a simple insight into Agnosticism. It draws mainly from my own experiences and follows my thought processes that led to my conclusion that there may or may not be a “God” or “Gods”. (Let’s arbitrarily, stick to the singular-“God”)
I was brought up in a Christian family and followed all the Christian traditions (mixed with the so-called “traditions” of my native-Tamil Nadu as well).I am a self proclaimed agnostic (for now) , but I was not always as such. This article draws on some of the trains of thought that brought me to conclude that- Human reason as of now, is incapable of rationally justifying the belief that deities do or do not exist.
Humans are sentient beings,that is they feel and perceive.Inquisitive as they are,they try to explain phenomena based on their earlier experiences,or come to some deductions based on what is already known. If some phenomena seemed inexplicable,they attributed it to the gods. These gods created lightning, sent rain and did other such bizarre stuff. When man in his quest encountered certain deep philosophical questions such as “What is life??”,”How did we come here??”etcetera, he fell back to the reasonable explanation that we were created! The stars , Earth and ourselves were so complex that there had to be a sort of divine explanation.
Now fast forward to the present day, many of the unexplainable phenomena that were attributed as “the work of deities” have been proven by science to be otherwise. Even then,the basic philosophical questions remain-“Why are we here ??” seems the biggest question of all.
We as humans need a sort of purpose to live. That purpose is given by having (I will be using the Christian paradigm as that is what I am most familiar with) God the almighty,”maker of Heaven and Earth”,who is the loving god, who looks over us. It gives people a sense of security to know that they are loved and that their lives are being guided by the goodness of the Lord. The purpose of having humans is to “praise god”.-that’s the brief gist anyway.
The actual bottom line is that this sort of explains how we came to be,the present happenings in the world (“war,famine,natural disasters anybody ??)and the future, where we will all be judged on how good we were in this life ,which decides our fate, heaven or hell. Now this seems like a bunch of hokum ,but then ,I will demonstrate how certain factors make all this seem kind of believable to the christian community and such factors also apply to other religions. I will call these factors “the theistic sanctuary”.
The Theistic sanctuary
Now, when we start observing the world around us (world here may refer to all the natural phenomena that can be perceived by our senses or otherwise observed through scientific means),we find a lot of symmetry and complexity in nature. The most complex of formula one cars cannot hold a candle to the complexity of the compound (human) eye, a microprocesssor is no match to the ingenuity of the human brain.
A car or chip has to be meticulously engineered and manufactured and cannot just appear on the Earth (or anywhere for that matter), even given billions of years, Earth, Human beings and the very atoms that make up everything in the universe, must have been engineered by somebody-ergo ,we were created.
Let me put it more rationally. We are here (“we” refers to the human race), in our present state, due to an incredibly large number of factors and if we could make the assumption that “all effects have causes” and if we trace all the causes that led to us being here in our present state, we will finally reach the first cause-God.
Even if we somehow evolved from the first single celled organisms that existed around 4 billion years ago, How could we explain to ourselves how it all started?: the “Organic soup” or such did not just become living beings for no reason.and thus we have god,who sort of kickstarted life on earth for his(assuming god is male) own reasons.
It seems highly unlikely that the amino acids in the organic soup somehow linked together to form proteins and DNA. It is akin to saying that,if bricks occurred naturally,they would form houses!
There are a huge number of natural phenomena ,the questions regarding the origin of life, formation of the universe, that remain as of now unanswered. The only rational solution is that these phenomena are beyond our comprehension and thus we should accept that there is a divine creator who engineered the universe and created life as we know it.
Also consider the fact that we are living in an age where war,famine,natural disasters are widespread. Human beings do not have any peace any more, constantly living in fear and anxiety,which are the hallmarks of the end of the age. The nearing of the day of judgement.
Now I come to the major reason for the survival, or should i say mass acceptance of theism-purpose and meaning of life. Why do we even exist?- this is a question not easily answered by non-creationists (I will not use the term evolutionists because then we make the false assumption that life came ONLY either through creation or evolution.we must also give some sort of concession that there may an entirely different cause/theory for our existence) .The existence of an all seeing omnipotent God gives us a sense of security and that he sees to it that we come to no harm.
Our life is in his hands,we may say. Religion as a whole gives human beings a sort of “Moral compass.”. Who is to say what would happen to us if we were Godless. We may become cannibals, or do terrible things-look at Hitler!! look at the Communists!!. There is always a sort of period in a human being’s life where he/she searches for the meaning of their existence. God gives them a meaning, it is comforting to know that there is someone who cares for them.
Let me come to factors that lead to the denial of any such claims that we were not created and which leads to the conclusion that life ultimately has no meaning.these I’d like to call “the Atheistic storm”
The Atheistic storm
In the movie “Prometheus” (which raises more questions than it answers), we come across a race of “Engineers” ,who creates life on Earth by “sowing the seeds of DNA”. Even though this is just science fiction, assuming that we were created by a race of “Engineers”, would we call them Gods?If so ,who created them? We can go on speculating.
The human crew are on a search for their creators expecting answers to questions of life and death,while the humanoid “david” is among his creators and is underwhelmed. The crew find a race of superior beings who appear Godlike in comparison to humanity, but we cannot label them Gods.
If there existed a God-being, then how did he come to be?.
Maybe we were programmed to never find out these answers. But these are just unfalsifiable hypotheses. If god did create humanity,would he actually care about us? We may come to visualise God as a being in human form, But if you could ask a horse to paint a picture of God, it would undoubtedly paint a horse! There is no reason that, if god existed, he would consider the welfare of some humans the sole reason for his own existence.
It is considered highly probable that there is life on planets other than our own, Intelligent or not. How can creationism explain this?? Would god just randomly create life on planets and leave them to their respective fates??
There has been huge scientific and technological progress in the last century alone and the pace at which we are making discoveries is astounding. A lot of phenomena that could not have been explained a few decades back, can successfully be explained now. The number of phenomena which we attribute to the eternal fallback of unexplained phenomena -God, is continuously decreasing. Superstitions being proven false etc. It’s only a matter of time before we remove the “theory of God” once and for all.
Moral compasses are present in every human being. The perception of good and bad is entirely relative and depends on a huge number of factors-the most important of which is the society itself ! Other factors include those that affect the individuals own sense of judgement.
The claims : if we lose religion,we will become “like animals” is not justified as many religious beliefs go against the current norm of what is acceptable. Human rights, The government and the upbringing of the person will provide morality to everyone.
These are some of the many musings and ramblings of thoughts that have gone through my mind over the years and I certainly haven’t listed all of them. These factors have made me decide that our present knowledge (as a species), is insufficient to conclude whether or not we have been created
After all, I may just be one of the many program segments in a matrix created by a programmer.
I hope you reach your own informed conclusions.
John
Cognitto 