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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
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.
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.
Post a Comment