Religion, Belief & Science

I'm probably biting off more than I can chew with this one but I've always had a fascination/love hate relationship/morbid curiosity with religion and belief. As a child/teenager I was in the Cubs/Scouts in the UK and it was a requirement that every third Sunday of the month we would attend church parade, marching through the village in our uniforms, flags held high to then sit in our local church and listen to a Sunday service from the local vicar. I was even in the scouts choir for a time, happily belting out hymns to the accompaniment of the church organist. It was actually a happy time looking back on it so I don't feel any kind of negativity from the memory.

As I got older I started to question what I was being taught/reading and over time came to the conclusion that I don't believe in God. So yes I'm an atheist now, not a lapsed believer but someone who clearly states that I don't believe in religion or the existence of a God(s).

Ooh, does that mean I can't talk to people who do have a religious belief, will I burn in hell for all eternity as a sinner? Is that how I will be viewed by anyone who believes in a higher power. Do people think that my unbelief makes me inferior or do they assume that I think that I'm better than them in some way? 

I think this sentence encapsulates the real problem that exists about belief and unbelief in a higher power, and that is the age old human issue of competitiveness (my dad, club, group, party, gang, team is better than yours).

It's this conflict of groups that gives us the ego fix, the endorphin rush of knowing that you are a better human than others that don't agree with you. And how do you know, well you're surrounded by a bunch of humans that agree with you so it must be true. I'm right, they're wrong and nothing they say will change my mind.

Choosing a side in this debate implies that there are opposing sides to pick, and that's simply not true. There are definitely differences because we're all walking talking biological processing machines and we all take in information based on millions of different factors due to our growth, experience, emotions or shampoo choice (well maybe not the last one for me!).

You see my reasoning is that faith in god is a belief, it's a position of believing in something that can never be proven, never be disproven and therefore can't ever be taken away from you by someone else. I don't believe because I don't believe. Me, my choice, my rationale, my position. It belongs to my mind (whatever that is) and is rooted in my awareness of reality. 

So where is the science bit of this inane ramble. Well I'll get to that in a bit, but first let me point out that I haven't used the words atheist or atheism yet. And the reason for this is that they are often used as badges or categories to describe people who don't believe in a higher power, deity, spiritual, religious or other belief. And it's this categorisation that causes some of the problems because by categorising humans then start to presuppose behaviour and outcomes and this leads to opposition and conflict because it creates division and boundaries based on only one set of facts. Because I don't believe in a god then I must be like the other person that doesn't believe, because obviously all the circumstances of my existence are identical to other people who occupy that category. And how someone views a category is based on their experiences, and those experiences don't have to be first hand, or correct. If one person in a group has a negative experience about something and shares that with the group, and the group values that person then they will adopt some element of that person's experience as their own. If this is compounded by other experiences then over time that groups attitude will become skewed in relation to a particular category. Our clever biological computing machines (brains) will even compound and multiply experiences based on our desire to belong, focusing on the aspects of an experience that garner the most positive reaction from our group. Boom, a self feeding bias machine that supports categorisation and isolation and pushes us towards conflict with other groups that we categorise as in opposition to us.

And it's not real, I'm not a card carrying member of Atheists of the World.

Science is a search for the truth of reality, a way to deconstruct how everything works, whereas belief is a search for why everything works. Why does 2+2 equal 4. Not how, but why. Why does a star of sufficient mass collapse into a black hole resulting in a hole in space time? How did those rules come about and why? 

So hopefully you can see that I'm not advocating that science could ever disprove the existence of a God or God's (I'm even capitalising out of respect for my friends that do believe) but rather that it's irrelevant whether science can do that or not. Because belief and science aren't playing the same game. Belief is a personal thing, it's origin isn't a probable fact, equation or scientific theory. It's belief! It doesn't have to be rational, or evidential, or even make sense as it's based on someone's personal conviction. It's not something that can be disproved, in the same way that an apple can never argue philosophy with Pythagoras theorem. It's a nonsense argument to try and put science and belief head to head to see who wins. 

Now here's controversial bit, I keep saying belief instead of religion, because i would argue that religion is an attempt by humans to put a science to belief. It's fundamentally the rules of belief reality and I think it takes the core element of what belief is and squeezes it into a box so it can be managed by others that aren't you. If you have belief in a higher power based on an indefinable feeling that there is something great than you and you want to explore that feeling with others then great, go for it, I'm happy that you have done something that gives value to your life and makes you feel better about this wacky thing called existence.

But let me suggest that your belief should never be curtailed or controlled by any outside factor or agent that makes you feel bad about what you believe. If you aren't hurting other humans and you're growing and improving yourself through your belief and this makes you a better human and benefits other humans then you should be free to choose what you believe. But remember that you can't make someone believe what you believe and on the flip side other people can't force you not to believe, only you can do that!

Here's a thought, science is human agnostic. It looks at the universe irrespective of whether humanity exists.

Belief is human focused. It only exists because humans exist. 

On the day that science states that it has disproven the belief in god is the day that I start arguing philosophy with mathematical constants and apples.