Deltaville wrote:
Perhaps one of my greatest peeve in when some garner the conviction that Atheism makes someone smart or more logical. I too was an atheist, but ironically, the more I learned about physics and the sciences, the more that I came to the conclusion that God is really the only plausible explanation.
This is my story as well. I was brought up in a household where we weren't necessarily religious. My mom told us things like "God loves you... and we go to heaven when we die... etc, etc. So I can say I was brought up with an underlying "belief" in a generic God. Well... I around the 7th grade, when I was 12 years old, my cousin who is 3 years older than me, heard me mention God and proceeded to make fun of my belief in God... saying that God doesnt exist... basically giving the most trivial atheistic rejection of God (santa claus/tooth ferry/flying spaghetti monster). Well, because this cousin was my "role model" I was instantly converted to atheism. I adopted his ideology on faith (trust/confidence in his ability to reason to the correct conclusion.)
Well... wind the clock forward to my Sophomore year of high-school. I was taking a biology class. I had procrastinated to study for my microbiology exam and needed some help studying. I asked my dad who is a professor of biology, human ecology, and botany to help me study for the exam. Basically in that car ride which i will never forget he explained the molecular machinery that operates in our cells. I was absolutely blown away by what he was telling me "intelligently" occurred within our cells. I first saw the "thumbprint" of some sort of Mind in operation behind nature (which is what the atheists were saying did not exist.) I quickly began to investigate this new possibility that "wait... wtf... maybe there is a God?!" The book I read when I first "chose" to become a theist was Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, where he too starts from the single seed of truth from which you can build a tree of knowledge. That single seed is the awareness of your own mind-- Mind is primary. Again, I also took the correct interpretation of pascal's wager into account from when my Dad scolded me for belittling a Christian years ago.
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“In the same way that you see a flower in a field, it’s really the whole field that is flowering, because the flower couldn’t exist in that particular place without the special surroundings of the field; you only find flowers in surroundings that will support them. So in the same way, you only find human beings on a planet of this kind, with an atmosphere of this kind, with a temperature of this kind- supplied by a convenient neighboring star. And so, as the flower is a flowering of the field, I feel myself as a personing- a manning- a peopling of the whole universe. –In other words, I, like everything else in the universe, seem to be a center… a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself- comes alive… an aperture through which the whole universe is conscious of itself. In other words, I go with it as a center to a circumference.”~ Alan Watts
11 Mar 2016, 6:23 am
It is only ironic for those who establish a false dichotomy between science and religion, reason and faith, intelligence and religiosity, logic and intuition.
