[quote]smh23 wrote:
Not a religion, but I’ll defend my position.
Broadly, I am agnostic; if I’m forced to choose, I tend toward theism in its most general manifestation. This is, in my view, the most rational conclusion that can be reached on the basis of the evidence available to me:
I do not believe that anything accurate has ever been said or inferred about God, if He/She/It exists, through revelation. Personal experience and history overwhelmingly suggest to me that men are and have always been inclined to concoct myths which explain their existence and the circumstances of their lives (and, oftentimes, why they, their tribe, their race, or their country is entitled to hegemony). It is through this prism that I understand all religion and, as a consequence, I afford no more credibility to Christianity and Islam than I do to Native American folklore and Scientology.
Simply put–and this is not intended to offend anyone–I do not believe that a snake has talked to a human being at any time in the history of all that exists, and it would take substantially more evidence than the fact that it’s written in an old book for me to even begin to consider such a claim to be worth investigating, let alone believing. The same can be said of Noah and his ark, and the sun frozen in the sky at Joshua’s request–any miracle that can be found in Scripture. And if I find that a book purported to be non-fiction is full of what I’ve deemed to be primitive nonsense, I discount it entirely as a reliable source of information (though I continue to admire many of Jesus’ teachings, in much the same way that I admire Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations).
I furthermore believe that if people were not exposed to religion in the credulous pre-dawn of their youth, the vast majority of the (educated) world would not allow such fantastical superstitions to enjoy immunity from the skepticism they deserve.
That takes care of what I don’t believe. I do believe in general terms that the theoretical reductionists are correct and that physics sits atop a hierarchy of the natural sciences. Its explanatory power is unfathomably far-reaching and its progeny–the tangible power to control our environment–is a testament to its merit if not its infallibility. However, it fails to explain the single most fundamental question that can be asked: how does anything exist? The Big Bang? An explosion is a culmination of a series of events, a meeting of extant fuel and extant fire. An explosion does not explain existence, so far as this layman who hasn’t taken a science course since high school can tell.
So: how does anything exist? This question has not been answered to my satisfaction, and I suspect that it won’t be, at least not before the sun explodes and our little experiment on this rock comes to its fiery conclusion.
That said, the cosmological and from-contingency proofs of the existence of “God” are compelling. I’m not qualified to proclaim teleology impossible. I don’t pretend to know with absolute certainty that my flawed capacity to reason can grasp these things in their entirety, but if I had to choose between an infinite regress and a “divine” first cause, I’d choose the latter.
But do I know anything about this first cause? Do I know what it looks like, what it wants, what it does in its spare time? Do I know its opinion of homosexuality or sex outside of marriage? Do I know that it has opinions about the comings and goings of infinitely-small man at all? Do I suspect that the quivering ball of goo between my ears–smaller in dimension and less durable than a soccer ball–is capable of evaluating the character of an architect whose designs are measured in lightyears?
No.[/quote]
The sun is not going to explode. It doesn’t have sufficient mass to ever go super nova.
