I still remember the world
From the eyes of a child
Slowly those feelings
Were clouded by what I know now
Where has my heart gone
An uneven trade for the real world
Oh I… I want to go back to
Believing in everything and knowing nothing at all
I still remember the sun
Always warm on my back
Somehow it seems colder now.~Evanescence “Field of Innocence”
Sometimes I wish I could go back. Innocence and naïvety. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
I’ve oscillated between deism and atheism for a while now, not sure which way to swing on the god issue. My main reason for leaning towards deism is the whole “how did the universe begin” question. Being just recently out of Christianity, the idea of a deity starting it all is very familiar to me. I no longer believe there is any kind of deity that directs, affects, or intervenes in the affairs of the universe, but I COULD accept that one got things started before walking away and letting things go.
I was reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion recently in which he talks about the bad habit some people have of shoving god into any question or problem they don’t have an answer to. Just because the answer is currently unknown doesn’t mean we won’t one day find one. Even to “how did the universe begin?”
“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.” -“quote” from St. Augustine’s “Confessions”*
This quote from Augustine really bothered me when I first read it in The God Delusion. It’s that kind of thinking that holds us back from understanding our world. Fortunately I can’t think of anyone of my religious friends, family or acquaintances who would agree with him, but it sounds to me like “the god of the gaps” taken to the extreme. I realize it is extreme and that your average religious person would disagree with his sentiments, but now I see how stunting it is to use “god” as a gap-filler instead of acknowledging there is currently no known answer and searching for one.
I am now an atheist. Not because I “know” there is no god (because I don’t), but because I do not see how a deity fits in my life aside from filling gaps.
*I wanted to read St. Augustine’s quote in its original context to see if its meaning changed, but I discovered it’s less of a quote and more of a summary of the chapter. Having read the chapter here, I think the “quote” still sums up the general idea.
“[T]he impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand such religions stood [Christianity], the thousand and first, labeled True. But on what grounds could I believe in this exception? It obviously was in some general sense the same kind of things as all the rest. Why was it so differently treated?” -C.S. Lewis “Surprised by Joy”
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