Game of Words
I wrote recently that religion is all about the search for truth. Perhaps that's not true, so much as it is a search for understanding.
I'm still not particularly comfortable with all of this. Until relatively recently, I thought of myself as some kind of Christian, albeit a liberal and non-fundamentalist one. I had this belief not because I had ever investigated the religion itself and found it satisfying, but because I absorbed some of its ideas at a young age and simply never bothered to question them.
Why am I writing about this again? I am, of course, sure that nobody really cares about my thoughts on this. But I long ago stopped writing because I am trying to make some kind of mark on the world, or to change the minds of people around me. I do this because writing crystallizes my own thoughts; it changes me.
And, I'm an engineer at a science-centric company. So I could write blog posts about different concurrency paradigms, Hidden Markov Models, linkage disequalibrium in the human genome, and so on, but all of that is convergent information that just needs to be documented in scientific papers or wiki articles by people better educated on their respective topics than me. I can't contribute new ways of wording old thoughts to these subjects.
To be honest, the question about whether or not any of this Christianity stuff is true doesn't really interest me, in the way that it seems to interest a lot of folks. People construct propositions in order to argue their point one way or another, but Christians and atheists really cannot offer any kind of evidence that God does or does not exist.
At the very least, it is not a simple matter. There is no single piece of evidence you can point to, no eloquent point you can offer, after which you can drop the proverbial mic and be done with it. You cannot prove such a thing in the same way that you can simply demonstrate that multiplication is commutative, for example.
Holocaust deniers are fond of demanding a single piece of evidence that the Holocaust ever happened. Putting aside the fact that they're not in a place to be putting anyone who would disagree with their position on the defensive, it's simply not possible to make a case that would convince them. We don't have any single piece of evidence that would indicate that some 6 million Jews were exterminated in Nazi Germany. What would this look like? A handwritten note from the Führer himself, saying, "Yep, the running total right now is 5.8 millions Jews. And counting! Best wishes, Adolf"? Right.
To be clear, I am not saying that the Christian religion is like Holocaust denial. The Christian religion has been the cause of much Jewish persecution and genocide over the course of last 2,000 years. Holocaust deniers simply refuse to acknowledge that a particular instance of Jewish genocide in the 20th century took place on the scale that historians believe it did. Clearly the two are radically different. The similarity I wish to point to is that both are things for which there is not any evidence, and that large groups of people accept as true.
There is not a chunk of evidence that proves the Holocaust occurred, and that the number is 6 million, but we have a narrative. Within the context of this narrative there are lots of piece of evidence that, in isolation, don't add up to the final conclusion. Even all of the evidence, when taken together, doesn't sum up to the final conclusion. It is only in the context of the narrative that we can get an overall understanding of what happened, to determine motives, assign cause and effect, and so on.
We have Christians and atheists bandying about arguments about things like "first causes" or "argument from design". Whether it's an argument for or against, it's still just a tiny, standalone piece of philosophical opinion. You're apt to accept or reject these kinds of arguments based on whether or not you are capable of contextualizing them within the version of the narrative that you accept as true. This is why I've never really bought into any of these arguments, either way. They're too confined.
For me, the Christian narrative gets hard to swallow when it's put into the long chronology of history. We citizens of the United States seem fond of believing ourselves to be the only country in the world, or at least superior to all other countries. We also seem to favor the kind of nationalism that makes us think we're somehow the greatest country in the history of the world. We are a good country, but far from the only country. And when you put the age of the United States on a timeline with all other nations and peoples that have existed, ever, we are but a small temporal blip.
It seems that every single civilization around the world that has existed since writing was invented has created some kind of creation or origin story about how they came to exist on this planet, has devised one or more gods to be worshipped, and has had some set of religious ceremonies or liturgies they practice. It is a little odd to think that the particular religion that we believe, in our place in history and in our little corner of the world, is somehow the correct one above all others that exist or have ever existed.
It's no small problem that when we talk about a creator making us in his own image, we are only talking about one of millions of species of animals on an infinitesimally small planet in a seemingly boundless universe of potentially life-harboring worlds which has existed for billions of years. It's a narrative so grand that it engulfs any one particular religious mythos in its locality.
Of course, this proves absolutely nothing. The narrative of the universe that is practically infinite in space and time resonates with me, and it's the one that I see myself living through.
The question about what which narrative you choose to believe contextualizes your own life is one of the prime determining factors in what you will choose to believe. It has been said that science, with its talk of the Big Bang, evolution, and other ideas that conflict with the litany of major religions, is in and of itself a kind of religion. I disagree with this, but the idea seems to be popular among Christians to refute the acceptance of science as being somehow more grounded in reality than the acceptance of religion.
I disagree with this in principle, but I understand the spirit of the argument and why it persists. Among Christians themselves there are divisions; consider the gulf between the Catholics and Protestants, as one example. Both of them profess to follow the advice in the same book and to worship the same God and divine human being, but they find themselves at odds with each other. You can find convincing arguments from people on both sides, both quoting from the same holy book, in order to argue against each other. Sometimes the points they make offer conflicting versions of reality that cannot be reconciled.
In this case, the defining question is not "What is true?" but "What or who are you choosing to believe, and why?" The answer defines us, not reality.
I'm still not particularly comfortable with all of this. Until relatively recently, I thought of myself as some kind of Christian, albeit a liberal and non-fundamentalist one. I had this belief not because I had ever investigated the religion itself and found it satisfying, but because I absorbed some of its ideas at a young age and simply never bothered to question them.
Why am I writing about this again? I am, of course, sure that nobody really cares about my thoughts on this. But I long ago stopped writing because I am trying to make some kind of mark on the world, or to change the minds of people around me. I do this because writing crystallizes my own thoughts; it changes me.
And, I'm an engineer at a science-centric company. So I could write blog posts about different concurrency paradigms, Hidden Markov Models, linkage disequalibrium in the human genome, and so on, but all of that is convergent information that just needs to be documented in scientific papers or wiki articles by people better educated on their respective topics than me. I can't contribute new ways of wording old thoughts to these subjects.
To be honest, the question about whether or not any of this Christianity stuff is true doesn't really interest me, in the way that it seems to interest a lot of folks. People construct propositions in order to argue their point one way or another, but Christians and atheists really cannot offer any kind of evidence that God does or does not exist.
At the very least, it is not a simple matter. There is no single piece of evidence you can point to, no eloquent point you can offer, after which you can drop the proverbial mic and be done with it. You cannot prove such a thing in the same way that you can simply demonstrate that multiplication is commutative, for example.
Holocaust deniers are fond of demanding a single piece of evidence that the Holocaust ever happened. Putting aside the fact that they're not in a place to be putting anyone who would disagree with their position on the defensive, it's simply not possible to make a case that would convince them. We don't have any single piece of evidence that would indicate that some 6 million Jews were exterminated in Nazi Germany. What would this look like? A handwritten note from the Führer himself, saying, "Yep, the running total right now is 5.8 millions Jews. And counting! Best wishes, Adolf"? Right.
To be clear, I am not saying that the Christian religion is like Holocaust denial. The Christian religion has been the cause of much Jewish persecution and genocide over the course of last 2,000 years. Holocaust deniers simply refuse to acknowledge that a particular instance of Jewish genocide in the 20th century took place on the scale that historians believe it did. Clearly the two are radically different. The similarity I wish to point to is that both are things for which there is not any evidence, and that large groups of people accept as true.
There is not a chunk of evidence that proves the Holocaust occurred, and that the number is 6 million, but we have a narrative. Within the context of this narrative there are lots of piece of evidence that, in isolation, don't add up to the final conclusion. Even all of the evidence, when taken together, doesn't sum up to the final conclusion. It is only in the context of the narrative that we can get an overall understanding of what happened, to determine motives, assign cause and effect, and so on.
We have Christians and atheists bandying about arguments about things like "first causes" or "argument from design". Whether it's an argument for or against, it's still just a tiny, standalone piece of philosophical opinion. You're apt to accept or reject these kinds of arguments based on whether or not you are capable of contextualizing them within the version of the narrative that you accept as true. This is why I've never really bought into any of these arguments, either way. They're too confined.
For me, the Christian narrative gets hard to swallow when it's put into the long chronology of history. We citizens of the United States seem fond of believing ourselves to be the only country in the world, or at least superior to all other countries. We also seem to favor the kind of nationalism that makes us think we're somehow the greatest country in the history of the world. We are a good country, but far from the only country. And when you put the age of the United States on a timeline with all other nations and peoples that have existed, ever, we are but a small temporal blip.
It seems that every single civilization around the world that has existed since writing was invented has created some kind of creation or origin story about how they came to exist on this planet, has devised one or more gods to be worshipped, and has had some set of religious ceremonies or liturgies they practice. It is a little odd to think that the particular religion that we believe, in our place in history and in our little corner of the world, is somehow the correct one above all others that exist or have ever existed.
It's no small problem that when we talk about a creator making us in his own image, we are only talking about one of millions of species of animals on an infinitesimally small planet in a seemingly boundless universe of potentially life-harboring worlds which has existed for billions of years. It's a narrative so grand that it engulfs any one particular religious mythos in its locality.
Of course, this proves absolutely nothing. The narrative of the universe that is practically infinite in space and time resonates with me, and it's the one that I see myself living through.
The question about what which narrative you choose to believe contextualizes your own life is one of the prime determining factors in what you will choose to believe. It has been said that science, with its talk of the Big Bang, evolution, and other ideas that conflict with the litany of major religions, is in and of itself a kind of religion. I disagree with this, but the idea seems to be popular among Christians to refute the acceptance of science as being somehow more grounded in reality than the acceptance of religion.
I disagree with this in principle, but I understand the spirit of the argument and why it persists. Among Christians themselves there are divisions; consider the gulf between the Catholics and Protestants, as one example. Both of them profess to follow the advice in the same book and to worship the same God and divine human being, but they find themselves at odds with each other. You can find convincing arguments from people on both sides, both quoting from the same holy book, in order to argue against each other. Sometimes the points they make offer conflicting versions of reality that cannot be reconciled.
In this case, the defining question is not "What is true?" but "What or who are you choosing to believe, and why?" The answer defines us, not reality.