When it comes to faith, spiritual belief, higher order, etc., there is only one thing that I am certain of: human beings have an inescapable spiritual drive. This is true now, was true in antiquity, and was true in prehistory. I find the discovery of Gobekli Tepi an extremely fascinating demonstration of sophisticated religious observance that predates written history by a significant amount, and there is at least another 50 years before the entire thing is unearthed.
God is real, be it a well-defined deity and set of laws by a developed religion, a vague perception of a higher order or power, or simply a human construct. The unmistakable reliance of humanity on spiritual matters from before recorded history make God very real. Scientific inquiry can help to debunk the superstitious, and indeed should, but in all of it's advances, the one thing it cannot do is disprove the existence of God. Disproving the existence of God is an impossibility, whereas recognizing the reality of God in the lives of human beings is much easier to do. In that spirit I have always believed that God exists, even if at the very least in the way that ideas exist, especially ones that have been around as long as religion.
One of my favorite thinkers is Carl Jung, who recognized this very well. He held that to dislocate the religious drive one must replace it with something else. He held that to most this came in the form of the state, with state processions and "hoopla" carrying many times a fervor rivaling the religious processions of old. Modern positive atheism replaces this drive with a similar fervor for science. Indeed I have seen this fervor demonstrated here an elsewhere, a sentiment that science can give us virtually everything. And so, the feeling of providence by a deity is dislocated and replaced with a feeling of provident by science, or the state. I'm sure some atheists may feel offended by that, but I have seen too many instances of atheists demonstrating a reverence for science that is every bit as intense as the reverence I have seen amongst the religious. I think most honest atheists, however, will probably acknowledge this.
Science and religion have always had their little disagreements, but in the last 200 years or so, there is a schism between the two that was not always the case. Battle lines have been drawn between science and faith, with political lines being drawn right over them. This is unfortunate, because we're not moving forward as a country or society. We're stagnating, maybe even falling backwards. Today we don't see people observing their religious freedoms (including the freedom not to be) and being happy to have them. Instead, we see theists and atheists competing with one another over what gets taught in schools, how much legal protection unborn life has, how marriage is defined, etc. The result of this is that more and more Americans are finding it impossible to live their lives without either being swept up into the conflict, or giving up and losing all interest in any sense of civic duty or awareness.
Blah blah blah blah. I guess I went on a rant.
Well written and well explained. I agree with this 100%.
I'm not sure how you define me, I have been called an atheist and agnostic, but I believe in god and spirituality. I think the fact that I do believe god exists, prevents me from being an agnostic, because I have no question in my mind regarding this. The term "atheist" kind of makes my skin crawl, because it makes me think of someone who rejects belief in god, and I fully believe god exists. I describe my personal belief as "spiritualist." My beliefs are "atheistic" because I don't subscribe to any organized religious dogma. In fact, I think religion often misses the point of human spiritual connection. It's a personal connection, not confined to what any particular group or preacher has defined it to mean.
I personally believe that organized religions are mankind's way of dealing with something they can't comprehend or understand. In order for the human mind to 'relate' to spiritual connection, men have developed human-like attributes and applied them to spiritual god. We can understand and relate to human-like attributes, so this makes perfect sense. However, it has always puzzled me, how an "omnipotent deity" retains attributes like jealousy, anger, desire, compassion, etc. Why would such a god NEED us to do anything, or even care? If god is omnipotent and perfect, couldn't he just make us all understand and believe in him, do the right things, make the right decisions? I mean, if that is what he wants us to do? I just find it odd that he supposedly gives us "free will" but gets angry at us if we don't obey his will, and sends us to hell as punishment.
Why does god need to punish us, couldn't he just instantaneously 'zap' us into another existence, if we started being evil and doing bad things? Can you imagine, we're witnessing someone commit "sin" and suddenly, they vanish before our eyes? What happened to them? Well, they did wrong and god zapped them to hell! Seems like a much more efficient and effective way for 'omnipotent' god to get us to do good and not sin. Religious people may say, well, he wants us to stick around so that maybe we will "repent" before we die, but why would "omnipotent god" give a crap if we are "saved" or repent?
So what is it that I believe in as "god" who isn't necessarily a deity or omnipotent? The best way to describe it, is a form of energy we can't measure with physical science, or at least, haven't figured out how to do so at this time. This spiritual energy force, doesn't have feeling and needs, doesn't possess human attributes, and doesn't care whether or not we acknowledge it's existence. However, through meditation and concentration, humans have the ability to connect to this spiritual force, as a conduit, and it provides a variety of beneficial results. Mental strength to overcome challenge, physical strength to achieve the otherwise impossible, inspiration and enlightenment regarding the universe around us.
I also believe this same spiritual force is responsible for a number of physical phenomenon, which physical science can explain, but can't really justify. For instance... we can prove what electricity is, and how it works, but can science tell us why the electrons behave as they do? We know what gravity is, and we understand how gravity works, but we can not prove why it exists. We've theorized it exists because of mass and density, then we've discovered this is not always true, it also exists because of atmospheric pressure. But these are "causes" of gravity, they don't explain why it exists. The solar wind, we know what it is, and we know how it happens, but we don't know why it happens the way it does. Why does two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen, form a material that is the building block of all physical life we know of? We can explain HOW, we can't explain WHY. We observe phenomenon, we can sometimes explain it, but we can't ever really explain why it exists in our universe.
Science is literally built around asking the question of Why? Science is never conclusive. As soon as a scientific discovery is made, the next question of why is born. Science is a never-ending quest for knowledge, but lots of people wish to assume science infallible and conclusive. Those who do this, have perverted science and scientific theory, usually to advance a personal agenda or idea. Science is supposed to present theory of probability, and nothing more. Every law of physics and every discovery of science, is based on probability.
To exemplify this, Dr. Michio Kaku says he presents his physics students with the following problem: Calculate the possibility that your physical body will dismantle cells and reform on the other side of a brick wall? His point is, it is indeed a possibility. To calculate this possibility would take longer than the universe has existed, but it's still a possibility. In other words, science simply never concludes something is impossible. Yet people will often say... "That contradicts science!"
This brings me to one last point, the arrogance of human nature. We tend to arrogantly believe man has answered all the questions, and science has proven all we ever need to understand. If something challenges what science predicts, it's viewed as "impossible" because it "contradicts science," and in our minds, science is infallible and conclusive. But we can see that this is not the case, science has had to reevaluate many theories, or completely abandon them, because we learn something we didn't know. We observe phenomenon in our universe that science can't explain. I believe spirituality is one of those things.
