Posted By Ing on January 24, 2012
I’ve been thinking a bit lately (a dangerous pastime, I know) about faith and religion in general. Actually, it’s something I think about a fair bit anyway, but the newspaper has been alternating opinion columns from an atheist and a faith-based guy, so it’s top-of-mind at the moment.
I have to say that I agree with the atheist’s line more often than not. I wouldn’t say I’m an atheist, though.
Agnostic would be more like it, or maybe skeptic. I’d rather err on the side of science and hard evidence, but I’m not willing to toe either party’s line.
I’m just not sure how it’s possible to have the kind of surety so many people profess. I have a hard time with faith. I waver. I shift from one side to the other, and sometimes in an inexplicable sort of sideways direction. I can’t believe, yet I can’t reject belief completely.
One of the problems I have with the religion-vs.-atheism debate is that we set up a lot of false dichotomies for ourselves.
Like the evolution vs. creationism thing, for instance. Does it have to be either evolution or god? I don’t think so.
Atheists tend to treat science, particularly the theory of evolution, as Truth (with a capital T, as if it explains everything), but it doesn’t. Some people say science proves God doesn’t exist, but that’s not logically sound; lack of evidence is not the same thing as positive proof. I’m not anti-evolution, far from it. Evolution does a great job of explaining what we see now in the natural world and how it developed. It has gaps and gray areas (as theories always do), and it’s kind of fuzzy around the edges, but it works. But science as a whole, let alone evolution, can’t explain everything. The question of how life on earth got started, for instance. At best there are only some plausible hypotheses; as far as I know there’s no hard evidence, no working theory.
If the current state of science is enough to convince you that it has the answer (or will inevitably find it), that’s fine…but you still have no way to prove it.
Likewise, the Bible — or religion in general, but I’m taking Christianity here because it’s what I know — does a great job within its limits. Even if you believe it’s divinely inspired, there’s only so far any book, tradition, or human institution can take us. Like any book, the Bible has gaps and gray areas; large parts of it were written by (and for) people who lived in a time and culture very different from the modern day. And though it has mythical and spiritual power galore (not to mention being a great work of literature in its own right), it can’t explain some pretty big questions (like why the Earth has all those fossils in it and how come every scrap of evidence says the planet is not a few thousand, but billions of years old).
If you believe what your religion tells you, then you’ve got your answer…but you still have no way to prove it.
This is where theism and atheism come together. It’s belief that matters in both cases.
Each side can make some compelling arguments for its own ultimate-truthiness, but at bottom that’s all they are: arguments based on assumptions. Atheism assumes that because there’s no hard proof of deity and people have the innate ability to make their own rational decisions, deity doesn’t exist. Religion assumes that because people have the innate ability to feel that deity exists and the conscious ability to worship, deity must exist. If you believe the key assumptions of one side, then it will be compelling for you.
These seemingly opposite sides share the same thing. Faith. Either the faithful belief that there’s an omnipotent guiding deity behind the universe and life on earth, or that there just can’t be.
Atheists have a lot more faith than they think.
So I’ve decided to coin a new term. I and my fellow agnostics — the truly faithless minority — will now refer to the rest of you, religious and atheist alike, as as Faitheists.
Heh. :)
Category: Maunderings |
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