Me and Religion

I try to keep this blog impersonal, with my opinion playing a backseat to the various thoughts and ideas that I've had. However, the best way to analyse what somebody says is to know exactly what their stance is on the subject that they are discussing. I run into religion alot (especially when discussing evolution) so I've decided to go into detail about my take on the matter.

Occam's Razor. DONE!

Ok, let's be serious. The first thing that we have to start with is that there is no evidence for the existence of a god (hence he term faith). There is no evidence that could disprove the existence of a god. Anything that happens could be caused by a divine power. Steven Hawking talked about this in A Brief History Of Time when he said "The expanding universe does not disprove the existence of god, but it does place limits on when he could have carried out his jobs". If god exists than he does everything according to the laws that we have extrapolated from the evidence.

On the other hand, there is lots of stuff that could happen to imply a god. If events occurred completely randomly, or according to purely ideological reasons than that would imply a higher power. Of course, when we discover a phenomenon it always takes some time to figure out what caused it, but if we spent 4000 years trying to figure out the laws that define gravity it would be fair to say that there isn't a description that really works. If gravity is the only thing that we couldn't describe, than we should assume that we haven't developed the proper math yet. However, if we make no progress in any scientific field over that time than the idea that there is a god doesn't really break Occam's razor anymore.

So, we have seen steadily increasing rates of progress in science and everything seems to hold up quite well (pending further evidence). So, why should I add a god?

Let's look at a big question as an example of applying Occam's razor. Where did the universe come from? Right now we don't think that we can infer anything that happened or existed before the big bang. So, god could have set the universe in motion. But then where did he come from? It's another layer of complexity that we don't need. Science works by putting the answerable unknowns right behind what we already know. So putting something as big as GOD behind that curtain makes a huge number of assumptions. And even if god did exists before the big bang than he almost certainly doesn't exist now, because he fundamentally changed the way the universe works. He becomes a massive anomaly in a causal universe. Oh yeah, and why haven't we found heaven or hell yet? And why aren't all skeptics struck down by lightning bolts? Just a thought... It almost seems like god wants us to believe in a causal universe...

The nutty religion of Scientology was invented about 50 years ago by a science fiction writer named L Ron Hubbard. He did it to avoid being thrown in jail for making medical claims and left a paper trail of allegations and statement. The guy even wrote about how much money you can make by creating a religion. So, what if that happened when the Bible was written? What about the Koran? Of course the evidence for that is gone. If a scientific study is done a while ago, we should probably redo it now in order to test our base assumptions. The only reason to believe that any one religion is correct (again, assuming that there is a god) is if we derive it from religious texts. Unfortunately there are a gazillion religions and texts, with no method of determining if one is more legitimate than another. There is no subjective way of determining that the christian god exists and that Allah does not. This question is unanswerable unless god herself (god couldn't be male, since she essentially gave birth to the universe) were to come down and set things straight. So even if I accepted god, It's highly unlikely that the REAL god is YOUR god.

The last point I want to make is in a similar vein (I know that this is an argument from final consequences, but it's not like I'm debating anything but real evidence anyway). Who does god think that she is, judging people all the time? Depending on which account you believe, I'm going straight to hell when I die. But I don't think that I have done anything so horribly wrong that it deserves eternal torture and neither does society. So because one consciousness doesn't like me, I go to hell. how is that fair? God sounds like big brother to me. Big Brother was built on faith to. Big Brother both loves and punishes his people. Creepy.

So, now having offended just about everyone in some way, I will finish describing my take on religion. Ok, so god might exist but if she does we don't know what she is like. So that makes me agnostic. I think the whole idea is silly and my gut reaction is atheist, but my intellectually honest self is agnostic.

"There was a time when religion ruled the world
It was called the dark ages"
-Greydon Square