Why I Am Agnostic
I talked a bit about why I am not a Christian, and a bit about the Christ I see and follow, now I’d like to begin stepping into why I don’t believe in god. I’d like to thank everyone that’s read these posts so far, all the comments I have received have been of good character, which does surprise me a bit. Undoubtedly I’ve ended up on a prayer list or two (if I wasn’t there already), but I’d like to say this, if you don’t agree with me, don’t think I’ll bash you if you tell me so, trust me, I understand I’m in a minority here.
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For most of my life I have clung to certainty, often in a vain attempt to feel secure in the world that is, at its core, innately insecure. I grew up certain of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, absolute truth, because I needed these things. The world needed to be orderly and neat, it needed to work for some grand design and purpose, I needed there to be a God.
The more I’ve grown up, the more I understand the innate disorder in the world. While, at many levels, things follow upon a central chain of causality, but at the same time, I’ve seen things that are far outside of the comprehension of order. I’ve seen both good and ill come outside of order; I’ve read a story about an enlightened individual that sacrificed himself to break the “orderly” understanding of violence. I’ve read other stories of “senseless violence”, in which the perpetrator had no cause to inflict pain, (BTK killer, anyone?), yet did so.
Then I began to move away from my modern need for absolute truth, and towards a postmodern understanding of truth. I am not implying that postmodernism ultimately leads to an agnostic/atheist understanding, many of my postmodern friends are devout believers in (a) god, I am simply stating that my view of god was influenced by my understanding of truth. I began to understand the world more in terms of contradiction (which, I likely picked up from my eastern philosophical influences), than absolutes, and saw less and less the need for order.
For quite some time after I began to understand the world in new terms, I held to God. I held to things like the vast number of requirements needed for the world to continue on as reasons for an intelligently designed evolution, and things like the argument of first cause to explain how “it” all got started. I think, however, at some level I realized I was beginning to make excuses to hold on. I started moving ever more towards simply admitting that there may be a god, but I don’t know, and I won’t state either way conclusively.
I was having dinner with a friend one night, when I finally started voicing the questions I had been playing with in my mind for a while. “What if the world just doesn’t make sense? What if there is no point? Do I need a god to give my life meaning?” In my mind, I was saying no to all these questions. My friend and I had a little back and forth over it, and then I started to dwell on the subject more after that night, until I finally jumped ship a couple weeks ago.
I think I’ll have to expound on this a bit more, it’s a rather broad subject to poke around, and this post is more of a “here’s how I got here” than any sort of defense of my opinion.
As always, the better conversations happen in the comments.
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