Chris, once again, you have hit the nail on the head. This post encapsulates for me the struggles I’ve dealt with, being a spiritual person working in a field I’ve found to be dominated by skeptics (sci-fi fandom).

I can’t ignore the the reasoned, logical side, nor can relinquish the feeling of “something more” we can’t yet understand.

In this case, I feel like Occam’s Razor cuts both ways: what’s more likely? That all of the symmetry, patterns, and natural rhythm we see around us was created by a yet-unknown progenitor, or that it all came to pass through sheer chance and the outgrowth of inexplicable forces of nature?

To me, they both sound equally likely (or unlikely, depending on your point of view).

What I find is most people fall on one side of the argument or the other, not based upon the actual argument, but based upon their experiences with the people representing it.

For me…as much as I prize reasoned thought, I can’t shake the feeling like I’ve been dropped in someone else’s house, and I’m going through their cabinets, eating their food. So a little humility, and appreciation for what I take, seems in order.

Balance…all I know is to put it in simple terms. When I start to feel too skeptical, I feel removed so I then know I need to do something to bring me back to feeling a connection to the spiritual, or “what is good in people.” That can be something as simple as a phone call to a friend or a walk in the park. When I start feeling too immersed in spirituality, I also start to feel removed, like none of it is real or it starts not to feel like it’s a good “fit” for me. I then step back from that too, and let logical thinking set in for awhile. It’s balance, it works, but truth be told, it still leaves me floating around somewhere in the middle. That used to scare me, a lot. Now I’ve claimed the middle as my space and I’ve let my sense of “what feels right” take over and guide most of mt decisions. Not what I “should” or “should not” do or what is logical or what is “best for the common good” but what feels like it’s right for me. Scary, different, can’t define it, but it works (so far anyway). Cheers!

At church, however, sermons were dogmatic, at Sunday school, questions were not answered.

And yet I kept faith in God. There were times I went through some really hard struggles, and I prayed very hard for my doubt to go away. But it didn’t, and I had to trust in myself and friends to get through. And I did overcome. And though my faith that God could “fix” things changed, I still believed in God. But also in the adage “God helps those who help themselves.”

Also, I met a dear friend who changed my beliefs by her very existence. She is the best person I know, but she is not really any religion. If anything, she’s sorta Jewish. And though many of the Christian denominations these days tend to downplay it, anyone with critical thinking skills can parse that “Jesus is THE way” means that every other way is NOT the way. (Except the Mormons…)

There was no way I’d even consider condemning this friend, so I suppose that’s when I stopped being a Christian. But even today, I still believe in God.

But I don’t believe in a fire-and-brimstone god who promotes the just and punishes the wicked. Seen too much for that to make sense to me, and after many years, I think I’ve finally rejected it.

I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to prove God exists, in something like Creation Science, for example. But I also don’t see God at odds with science or the natural world.

Don’t tell anyone, but I believe in Intelligent Design.)

Not the way it’s normally presented, though. I do not understand why evolution is thought to be at odds with intelligent design. Or why the set of circumstances that caused the Big Bang and the laws of the universe are incompatible with a creator. It seems silly to me when people try to minimize the amazing features of life, the universe, and everything when they ignore the science and say “god did it.”

I like to think “god did it” BY science. To me, God is the ultimate scientist. Maybe he’s knowable. Maybe not.

I guess you might call me a deist. I’ve coined the term “theistic agnostic,” when I wrote about a similar topic on my blog.

I don’t ever think we will know what happened “before” and we can’t find out what happens “after” until we are gone, and we can’t come back and tell anyone.

What matters the most, I think, is what matters to everybody, Christian or Atheist, Democrat or Republican. And that’s doing the best we can in this world to make a good living, take care of ourselves and our family members, and maybe try to contribute to humanity and make the world a better place in some small way, using our God-given talents (irony intended).

Everything else is just gravy. whether we do that through teaching public school science, working at a soup kitchen, or praying at someone’s bedside who is gravely ill but a believer.

Which is why it is sooo important to try to engage with other people and get their perspectives, IMHO. This blog post and responses are a great start.

And moderates need to speak up more! Most people are neither vehement atheists, or fundamentalist Christians, but that’s most of what you see out there.

I’m still a very symbolic person. I go to church on occasion. I’ll argue with athiests who believe that atheism is the only way, and anything else is to be intellectually dishonest. But I’ll also argue with people who call me an “evolutionist” and say that a believer in evolution cannot be a Christian. I’ll try to gently inject a little critical thinking into a friend’s wholehearted acceptance of alternative medicine. But I’ll also respect her right to seek the alternatives (to a certain extent).

But mostly I’ll try to listen to people with different beliefs, try to find common ground, and try to share my perspective in the hopes that we can learn from each other.

For example, Dark matter is hardly “real” in the tangible “I can touch it” materialistic sense and yet the scientific method has come to show that it is there. We’re not quite sure what it is of course, but its presence is still observable and real.

Art that moves, poetry that inspires, and music that soothes may forever remain areas of scientific study where we can only hope to better understand their influence on us and our minds. That said I must respectfully disagree that any religious explanation tacitly amounting to “God did it” explains absolutely nothing. To accept any religious explanation for anything is to cede to authority, ignore any evidence to the contrary, and to accept a forgery of understanding that only serves to keep those who accept it from more fully exploring those mysteries themselves.

I most certainly am not saying “stop asking”. Far from it. I would however beg you to consider that in our entire existence, every mystery that has ever been solved has been found to be:

Not magic…and not God.

Every. Single. Time.

The only places we continue to see “evidence” for God is in that which we don’t yet understand. If real evidence for God shows up then I will happily concede you were right all along but based on the past pattern I’m willing to bet that won’t happen.

I was raised in a very strict, Christian religion, but left freely when I was 20. Since then I have been very hesitant to join another spiritual community or church and found that most (as JIM notes) appeal solely to emotionality. They don’t even teach their own doctrine, for the most part.

This was NOT what I was looking for.

On the other hand, atheism isn’t a philosophy, it’s a negative statement. “There is no god.” What people are calling atheism and skepticism is really an adherence to Scientific Materialism. Now, that’s a philosophy! And while it works and has lead to more advancement and better lives, SM is ill suited for all spheres of human experience. And that’s where the rub is. Part of ‘hard’ SM is that not only is it the best way to rationally explore the physical world, but that is the ONLY world. Further, the proof is a tautology. “SM can only addresses issues that are physically provable & grounded in the material world. The material world is the only world that exists, everything else is empty symbolism or meaningless myths. The proof that everything else is empty symbolism or meaningless myths is that they cannot be verified via SM.”

So, much of human experience get’s ignored or trivialized. Does SM have much to say about why some pieces of art touch me and others don’t? Why some works of fiction drive me to greater ambitions and others ring hollow? Why do people like seeing sunsets and listening to the sound of moving water? Where does the sense of destiny and a divine plan come from? How does the power of belief empower ordinary humans to do great and amazing things, or terrible and horrifying things?

There is an internal realm of meaning and feeling that is either poorly explored, ignored, or trivialized by SM. Often, that is why people turn to religion, or spiritual traditions, or to something else. It’s not immaturity and it’s not ludditism. One can fully drive a car, program a computer, and believe in the moon landing while STILL feeling that SM has only addressed a portion of ones experience and not the entirety of it.

And that, is what is frustrating to me. It’s like an itch which is very hard to scratch. I don’t need a religious person telling me that by showing up in church and singing hymns and trying to ‘feel’ spiritual while in the building is the answer because it does not address any of the questions of meaningfulness or my sense of being part of a greater whole or my experience of life as being more then the collection of physical realities. I also don’t need a scientific materialist telling me that there is nothing else and that I don’t actually experience what I do and that I’m a weak, faulty person for wanting to know and experience more. One is telling me that “there is nothing more, stop asking” and the other is telling me “this empty platitude is all you need, so stop asking,” So, who is saying, “there is something there, I have no easy answers, so keep asking?”

Alas even after so many years it seems little has really changed.

While we collectively understand orders of magnitude more than our ancient ancestors there is still much out there we do not and it still terrifies us. Death of course is the big one and without our mystical stories it scares many of us right back into the churches of our parents in our continuing quest for solace through an artificial sense of control over the unknown.

Unfortunately for the skeptical and thoughtful seeking god those original old myths don’t work as well as they used to. Without herculean levels of faith and suspension of disbelief those hollow tales, even selectively chosen, cannot stave off the inevitable feelings of insecurity and doubt.

So while I recognize that Atheism frequently sounds overly self certain and strident to those of faith it is perhaps ironic because it is the very embracing of the unknown that brings (for me at least) the most comfort. Being allowed to concede that we don’t know everything means there is always more that we can learn. If there is more we can learn then there is more we can change, more we can do, more that we can become. When we force ourselves to believe the stories of a creator we are constrained by the rules and perceived limitations that come with such mystical beliefs. We pray for things instead of working harder to figure it out and do it for ourselves.

Happily we are not controlled by the stars nor our fate destined by the lines on our hands. We are free to make this word better if we can muster up our collective courage, shed the limitations and biases of the multitude of ancient myths that constrain us and instead choose to move forward together instead of fighting progress every step of the way.

And I don’t feel that I am bitter or angry when I’m skeptical (but I don’t doubt that the faithful often view me that way). But like evangelicals I do have the very best intentions at heart. So while the faithful slave to save my soul and I in turn strive to free their minds.

PS: I can tell you miss Socrates’s Cafe.

My greatest criticism of churches today is that, while their intentions are good and righteous, they appeal wholly to an individual’s emotions and not to the great intellect that God has bestowed upon us. We are frequently asked to believe and never to question what it is that we believe, to understand on an intellectual level why our faith is not foolishness.

To this end, I recently read a book that helped me out immensely titled ‘Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul.’ Basically it talks about how God bestowed upon man a great intellect and it was therefore right that we use that intellect to understand Him. It’s an attack against the anti-intellectualism of the modern church and incredibly helpful for heady guys such as ourselves to articulate the truth behind faith. I heartily suggest you check it out.

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Your-God-All-Mind/dp/1576830160