What I Believe

There are many things that I believe in. I believe that sunsets are beautiful, that love is wonderful, and that rainbows are both beautiful and amazing – especially when you understand the refractive index of a raindrop. For me, understanding such phenomena only enhance their beauty and the wonder that I feel about them. Knowing that love is something that happens in the software of my mind that runs on the wetware of my brain does not diminish the awe I feel over this feeling.

I lack any belief in a deity.

This is a “default” position for me. I have not found sufficient evidence to encourage belief in a deity. That doesn’t mean that such evidence doesn’t exist, somewhere. As soon as that evidence is presented I’ll reevaluate my position. But it is as silly for me to believe in a deity “just in case” as it is for me to put bowls of milk on my doorstep “just in case” Brownies actually exist.

I have also seen that a coherent, falsifiable definition of God is yet to be given, by any religion. So talking about who God is, or what he/she/it wants is premature at best.

I will admit to the chance that our universe could have been created through intelligence.

The philosophers and scientists of the past who have said we were nearing the end of our journey of knowledge were wrong. I see us in the infancy of physics. And some of the infant ideas of physics include the hypothesis that universes are a “zero sum game” of quantum mechanics. That daughter universes can form out of the action of parent universes.

Some physicists have the idea that an intelligent action in one universe can result in the spawning of a daughter universe.

But this is not something we can prove one way or another now. I must admit that we might never be able to prove this idea.

In order, the three things I discuss here are given as atheism, ignosticism, and agnosticism. As you can see, these positions are not mutually exclusive. But they are not weighted the same.

To me evidence is key. I place much less weight on those ideas that lack sufficient evidence. I’m in large part an atheist due to an overwhelming lack of evidence. I’m Ignostic due to a lack of a good definition of deity. And I’m agnostic because I lack evidence that the universe was NOT created. However the evidence that everything in Nature came into existence through natural methods is so overwhelming, that the spot left over for an intelligent creator as described in modern religions is very small. I assign an equally small probability to my agnosticism.