I fully understand all the arguments in atheism which explain existence (universe, planets, our planet) and our existence (animals, humans, us, me) but there are times when the sheer magnificence of it, that it all happened, and the complexity of it, bump up against my natural atheistic pessimism and create a contradiction - I believe all this with my mind, but with my heart I feel clueless - that there’s some apiphany that I haven’t had yet and that I should have that will satisfy the wonderment. If it all makes sense then why do I still think about it more often than I think about any one other thing.
I will never stop being an atheist - because the alternative is even more OTT than our fantastic no-god explanation for everything.
I guess one answer is - why should a product of all this ever be clever enough to understand it. Why should the made understand the maker? (in this case, chance, not god)
I’ve never had that problem; I’ve never seen any contradiction between my sense of wonder and my reason. For one thing, as a mathematician I realize just how much complexity and structure can spring out of the simplest of rules and settings, so I’m never left with the impression that anything is so complex that it’s unexplainable. There are many things that are so complex that I can’t explain them now…in fact some things I expect will never be explained by anyone in my lifetime…but that’s a far cry from unexplainable.
For another thing, even if something is beyond my grasp, beyond my ability to comprehend or reduce to its inner workings, so what? While it would be nice to understand everything, it’s certainly not required that I understand everything before I go on about my life. The only way that the magnificence of existence would contradict my atheism would be if the only choices were “I understand this completely” and “God did it”, but those aren’t the only choices, and to assume that those are the only choices is a fallacy.
Why should life ever evolve from lifeless chemicals? Why should civilizations ever emerge from uncivilized animals? Because in many ways, we are more than the sum of our parts. Our potential is more than our component chemicals.
And even if we never understand the universe completely…again, so what? Better to strive and fail then never strive at all, in this instance.
The arguments that explain existence come from science, not atheism. A theist who believes that God works through science can be indistinguishable from an atheist in this regard. all we have to believe is that a god is not necessary.
But look around at things which you can be certain of having natural origin - a rainbow; a snowfall, the Grand Canyon. I have a desk calendar with pictures of stars being born, right now. If those wonderful things can be natural, why not everything else?
Why? Because we are intelligent, that’s why, and we can create tools to help us understand. It might be thousands of years before we understand some things, but what matter is that? The universe is very big and we’re standing on a tiny part of it. If we can find planets dozens of light years away, and identify the constituents of stars, what can’t we do?
Having an epiphany is certainly not delusional. Given our social background, neither is one where you feel you are touched by God. Now, if after this you think you are touched by God, it might be another matter entirely.
Well, whatever the form of the epiphany, be it God, or feeling the heartbeat of the universe, or being as one with the cosmos after a baptism in bong-water, does it have any provable meaning outside of your own perceptions?
If not, I don’t see what the basis of your internal conflict is.
You mention a dichotomy that I hear about all the time … the mind vs. the heart … your loyalty to what reason tells you, vs. your childlike sense of wonder.
I was religious until about the age of 13, when I decided to see reality directly, through my own eyes. I remember at a younger age, pondering the beauty of the night sky, what a magnificent universe God had created. Then years later, viewing the night sky atop Haleaka on Maui, witnessing the Milky Way in all its glory … being much more awestruck that magnificence can come into being in a ***secular ***universe, that the universe is such a place that beauty can exist without having been consciously created … that simple cause-and-effect can result in a more powerful external and internal state of being that is so much more meaningful than any mere God could have designed.
So I’ve got my intellect, my reason, swooning and overwhelmed by natural beauty … while my heart feels reverence toward the ability of science to comprehend what little we comprehend. And I know that what I’m responding to has nothing to do with “chance,” but a simple respect for cause-and-effect (an unpopular concept these days) and our scientific “free will” (an even more unpopular concept). And my consciousness can never be divided between my brain, over here … and my heart, over there … because there’s no difference between “thinking” consciousness and “feeling” consciousness. My brain and my heart … my reason and my emotions … they are both responding to the same input in exactly the same way … and are fundamentally identical ways of describing the same thing.
Odd, Lobsang, it’s my sense of wonder at the Universe and my appreciation of how small I am in it that reinforces my atheism. I’ve had mystical experiences, that moment when you know it all makes sense, a kind of kenshō (not satori) but these were always linked to a nontheistic appreciation of nature. Looking up at the Milky Way, touching garnets embedded in the base of a desert canyon…what need of something as limited as a god to explain that which simply is.
I fully subscribe to the notion that existence precedes essence, so the thing is there before its nature, which only arises from perception. With that in mind, I see the Universe as complete before I think about what it means. So why even ask what it means - the question is redundant.
Ooh, I got a bit deep there, didn’t I? Ummm…look, an IPU! d&r
I remember this one time I was in a national park, far from the lights of the cities, under a seeming infinity of stars and in a moment of clarity, began seeing them as connected in an interweaving pattern of lines that held the entire universe, and me, in a container both simple and strong, held by God and carried to a future that must surely not be feared, but embraced for it must be like the simple clear pleasure of good meal enjoyed with friends on a warm summer day.
But then the moment was lost, because a bear stole my epiphanic basket.
The problem you have is this: in our society, any opinion / experience that could be considered “spiritual” is automatically equated with theism.
For example, I have had experiences where for a brief moment, I feel as though I’ve transcended the everyday and the mundane. If I mention this to people, oftentimes they will immediately come back with “Oh, so you do believe in God”.
I find this very frustrating, because to me I find, say, the tooth fairy easier to believe in than a personal god.
Are you sure that’s not just your heart asking your head to pause for a second so that you can just enjoy the wonder of the universe, without having to ask for every bit of it to be explained?
Why shouldn’t it be understood? By giving “it” a power that is forever beyond understanding, or something that we shouldn’t understand, you’re “godifying” it. The fact that we don’t understand all there is to understand today doesn’t mean we won’t be able to grasp it tomorrow.
I’ve never understood that argument, even when I was an atheist. I think it is silly to compare one’s physical size to a galaxy and draw a conclusion about moral significance. As I see it, your tiny mind can comprehend the galaxy in all its splendor, but the mighty galaxy is oblivious to your existence. I say the human ability to perceive makes the comparison weigh decidedly in favor of the human.