Thursday, September 11, 2008

Thoughts Part II

So I'm sitting in class (let me specify: a science class) and I feel the need to blog. I was just thinking about what a terrible atheist I am. Even though I am a Biology major, and I believe all the stuff that goes with it (AKA stuff "proven" (as much as something can become fact) by the scientific method), I must say that I am not an atheist because of science but because of faith. Even though I know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the vast majority of my belief, or lack thereof, comes from faith. To be honest, I am no better than the religious folks. After a while I just felt in my gut (like Stephen Colbert!) that nothing like god or souls or spirits or afterlives exist. In fact, I don't believe anything exists, but that's another story. Maybe all of this comes from some sort of self-association with the philosophy of nihilism, but who knows? I blindly walk, led only by feeling, through much of my life, and this is no different. People can cite logical arguments against god at me all they want, and I will believe them. But they don't move me to really feel strongly about an issue like, well, gut feeling does.

2 comments:

ANDON said...

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad atheist! However, I understand that "gut" feeling completely. Even as a little kid, I never, ever took the bible literally, nor did I ever really believe in spirits and such. Obviously, this wasn't because of my advanced understanding of science, it was just a feeling in my little kid gut.

Only later did the scientific arguments and such fly in to back up that gut feeling. I do think those feelings are valid, as long as we're willing to analyze them and expand them with science. I have a gut feeling that gut feelings are the mind's way of coming up with ideas, based on the whole of our experience, that we could never consciously come up with.

Popey said...

I was just now reading this and I totally agree, and I don't think that makes you a bad atheist, it just makes you the regular kind. See, deciding once and for all about these things requires what some might call a "leap of faith" which is ironic, I admit, but without doing it, you're just a pansy agnostic.
Science can only take you so far--you are always talking about the 'absence of evidence' =/= 'evidence of absence' thing, so in that sense any atheist has made this important decision to go beyond what can be proven and to make a stand. And I respect that much more than being an agnostic about the whole deal. Everyone should read "Life of Pi", he talks about this.