I believe there is life beyond our earth. I was only making the point that it's unknown and doesn't apply here.
On the contrary, the topic is my source of faith. If that's your view that's fine, but with respect, you are no one to say what is or is not relevant to my source of faith, which is the topic I expanded on from your question.
You tell me that your were indoctrinated into being a believer at childhood, but you're questioning your faith. You're going to have to fight hard to escape that indoctrination. You most likely won't.
With respect, you misunderstand, and I've told you no such thing. I said I was agnostic most of my life, my mom never indoctrinated us, we never attended Church. My mom is Catholic indeed, but she has a lot of distrust for the institutions and people, and she never forced her beliefs on us. In fact, I remember arguing with her as a teenager about these things lol. Since about 13 I considered myself agnostic, especially as I learned more about space. This was true until I was about 28.
The wearing of the Cross came about 3 years ago, before that I did not wear it. This was all after being agnostic and tending to believe there was no purpose, like I stated in my first long post. In fact, in college, I remember being surprised to learn some of my close friends held personal beliefs on God, despite not attending church either, since I thought most people in academia and science paid little attention to the idea of God.
I'm not really hearing any indications that you are trying to escape mainstream religion in a church.
I was never in mainstream religion. Or a church of any kind. Since I cared to decide for myself, I identified as agnostic, because I saw too many contradictions when I tried to ask questions to people who did believe, like my mom. In this thread I've basically had disagreements with both the believers and the nonbelievers.
For the believers, I'm not mainstream, since I don't follow orthodoxy and I don't believe agnostics or atheists will necessarily go to a 'hell'. At the same time, even the mention of faith marks me in the eyes of closed-minded atheists, as evidenced by your own words here. You think me as just another member of some 'mainstream, 'primitive' and indoctrinated group. Despite my honest efforts to outline my path to you, you are nothing but ready to fit me into a nice box you already understand.
If you hear none of these indications, I think it's because you refuse to listen... I found my faith through a perspective inspired by Gnostic ideas. I found these ideas from a symbol that, in my view, represents the character of the physical Universe, given what we know about science, that symbol being the Ouroboros. The Gnostics were persecuted by the mainstream church you claim I belong to... The church is mainstream as a consequence of the destruction of these Gnostic ideas, and others.
Same again, with all due respects to your point which escapes me.
What I'm trying to get at here, is the perspective that 'sealed' my faith, that convinced me (in a genuine way) of God's existence. That perspective involves nonphysical 'features' within meaning, that I believe (thanks to how I found this perspective) were created by the supreme God.
These features have two important properties.
1) They are tautologies. The Pythagorean theorem, as a logical implication, can be stated as (Axioms of Euclidean geometry) => (right triangles have a^2 + b^2 = c^2). Stated this way, it is a tautology, it is true by virtue of the meaning of the terms alone. To give another example of a tautology, the sentence (John is a bachelor) => (John is single) is ALSO a tautology, since it is also true by the meaning of the terms (bachelor, single, is) alone. The simple sentence DOES NOT require proof, it's obvious, while the Pythagorean theorem is a much more intricate statement and does require proof. The proofs however use ONLY the meaning of the terms, they don't need to make reference to anything external, so PT is also a tautology (though not obvious).
2) Being that the truth of these features, like the PT, depend only the meaning of terms alone, they are NOT physical in nature, but something else. Something more fundamental, independent of time and space but still impacting them.
I can't make the connection to creation.
Continuing along the lines above, there is an important third point.
3) These features in meaning, which are more fundamental than anything physical, are (in my view) also creations. I believe they exist as a consequence of the supreme God, who created a vast infinite structure within meaning itself, within which the Pythagorean theorem and many other features like it exist. These features existed 'before' there was a physical Universe to depend on them, before physics required their existence. This is why I see all of the physical Universe, AND the much vaster world of 'features in meaning' I try to allude to, as creations.
I believe that life on earth evolved and I can't reconcile 'creation' as being part of it or consistent with it.
Do you accept life comes from physics? Meaning, it is the result of natural processes explained by science (physics, chemistry, etc)?
