onlooker wrote:This planet has enough biodiversity and awesome weather and geology that this keeps me enough in awe that I do not need to overlay this with the idea of a creator. This biodiversity I view as precious and sacred as it stands without having to formulate a theology around it. Period.
Ibon, please accept this reply as being simply out of curiosity. I am just wondering how you can see so keenly the awesomeness of Nature and its marvelous interplay, beauty and complexity and yet not be led to the notion that surely a Supreme Intelligence is behind it. How could all this have come out and come into existence by mere chance? The Universe guided by universal laws and thus having organization. To me, this a definite sign that a Supreme Intelligence must have made it come about.
OK here goes, you know, I never delve too seriously into these questions beyond being playful...
Atheism is vulnerable to fall in the same dogmatic trap as religious belief systems when it makes the assumption unequivocally that the order of the universe and all life forms is just a product of physics, chemistry and natural selection. It is unknowable what drives this seemingly perfect order. Not in particular, but in its entirety. Natural selection cannot be disputed as a driving force behind the biodiversity on our planet, including the rise of Homo sapiens. But that in and of itself is not the final word is it?
This is related to simple game mortal finite humans play when they contemplate infinity. There is no end of the universe because there has to be something outside that end. That question already arose with my friends and I when sleeping out in our backyards with our sleeping bags on warm summer nights when we were 12 years old looking up at the heavens. Or if there is a creator then who made the creator? These are fun examples of trying to fathom that which cannot be known. We are finite creatures and when you contemplate infinity you are in the realm of the unknowable. Within that realm all you can really do is hang there. But few can do this.
Humans always want answers, whether it be a religious or scientific explanation. What makes the universe tick? from where this seemingly perfect order arise? The atheist says physics, the religious say a creator, both attach dogma to the unknowable, whether it be atheist dogma of a purely mechanical universe or religious dogma that there is a creator behind it all. For the atheist can never really know if there is something beyond just physics just as every religious person with a sense of inquiry has to confront doubt (which conveniently is the work of the devil). Faith is one of the ways of resolving this unknowable, cultivating a deep love for Christ as Christians do or to Allah as muslims do). Letting faith swell the heart, allowing love to blossom so that it touches the divine….this is powerful stuff that the religious are able to manifest, but for me, at the end of the day, it is all a construct to resolve the unknowable.
And so we create a schism, a dichotomy, a split, between two explanations that are only explanations created by the inability to just simply hang and accept the unknowable nature of the universe.
This for me is the sweet spot. Embracing and accepting deeply the unknowable. I can look at the biodiversity of insects here at Totumas, or the stars at night, or the weather that exhales and inhales daily. As a scientist I can do taxonomy on a sub family of moths and tease out the genus and the species and the possible candidates that are new to science. This is a cerebral exercise. At the same time I can walk in the forest and feel a hum there like the entire ecosystem is integrated and this can be down right metaphysical in how seemingly perfect it all fits together.
I like hanging in the unknowable, maybe the question mark is my talisman.
This probably wont satisfy your curiosity Onlooker, since it didn't do much to confirm your belief in some divine order. But that is the best I can do.
My views are something more than simply being agnostic, which is on the fence. I don’t see myself on the fence, because the fence for me is a false division that really isn’t even there except for those that want to make this a split between a secular or theist world view. I don’t split this way.
The only thing I really really know for certain, 100% guaranteed bonafide certain, is that those that proclaim that they do know are full of shit.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
blog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/
website: http://www.mounttotumas.com
