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Asked by mikeyandhenry to Sarah, Dalya, Derek, Tim, Tom on 17 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by logic.
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Sarah Thomas answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Hey there,
This is a tough question!
I was christened as a baby and my grandparents went to church but my mum didn’t. And then when I was 14 my mum started making me go to Bible Class at church (don’t ask, I don’t know why). But the more I learnt about religion, the more I didn’t like it. I took Relious Studies at school because it was something that I was still interested in and I wanted to find out more. But the more I read the bible, the more things I found that I disagreed with.
I used to say that I was agnostic, that I wasn’t sure if there was a god or not. It seemed reasonable that there must be something. Surely we aren’t here by accident, there must be meaning to our lives. I didn’t think the bible was perfect, I saw it more as a collection of stories that are supposed to teach your morals like aesop’s fables.
But as I read stories about how people were treated, particularly women, something just didn’t feel right. And as I read the 613 rules in the bible, the more I started to feel like it was designed to put fear in people, to control them. And I listened to my minister’s sermons and it started to sound like threats. If you don’t do as we say, you will go to hell.
In the end, I decided that there just can’t be a god. I can’t understand why a god would allow so much innocent suffering in the world. And I believe that you can be a good person even if you don’t live your life by the rules of the bible.
Sorry if all that sounds kind of negative, or offensive. It is something that I have thought about a lot.
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Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 15 Jun 2011:
If you look at ancient societies, they would try to explain the unknown with “gods”. There would be a god of the forest who made the trees grow and a god of storms who lived in the clouds and would throw down lightning bolts and so on. As societies grew and expanded, they realised that their gods were insufficient to explain the way their limited world is, so they invented new gods… more sophisticated, but still limited. Rather than the village or the island, these gods were gods of the empires or even the entire world. But then we can take another step out and all of a sudden these “new gods” become just as unrealistic as the gods of the ancient village.
A while ago there was a photograph taken of the earth. Although there was some technical name or number for that photograph, it has become known as the Pale Blue Dot photograph. It is a photograph of the earth, taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from the edge of the solar system. The gentleman who requested that the photograph was taken was Carl Sagan. He wrote a very moving article about it. From that perspective, our earth, with all its religions and ideas and histories seems pretty insignificant. For me, it is like stepping outside of the village, and seeing that the “god of the village tree” is not so special after all… in fact it doesn’t even exist. And you can do this not just with space, but also with time. In the same way we know that our earth is a tiny place in the scale of the universe, it is also much older than a few thousand years people used to think. So instead of saying “why here?”, you could say “why now?”. Human history, especially religious history, is pretty trivial compared to the history of humans, or of animals, or of life, or of the planet, or of the universe.
Now I know that some people would then say that there are other gods that are gods of the whole universe, but even now, many cosmologists are theorising about multiple universes and infinite time stretches. And then what? The gods continue to somehow magically move out a notch. To just beyond the limits of our understanding. We should stop trying to personify what we don’t understand.
Sadly however there are a lot of people who believe very passionately about gods and such things. Some people use them as a way of not taking responsibility for their own lives and simply blame the gods or use the gods to justify their actions. And there are also many who use them as a way of gaining power and controlling people. As Sarah wrote, there is much suffering in the world that comes about because of this. From threats to extortion, denial of education or the oppression of women, and even to wars and genocides, so many people have suffered needlessly because of gods that don’t even exist.
It is a strange world that we live in, where people take such great offence when others do not believe in their gods… gods who rely on trust and blind faith, and yet so many stubbornly remain in denial over things such as global warming, causes of disease, political actions and so on, when concrete evidence is presented time and time and time again.
No, I do not believe in any of these gods. And, like Sarah, I have given the matter a LOT of very careful thought.
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Dalya Soond answered on 16 Jun 2011:
Yes. I do not believe in any one religion since different cultures create different religions based on the unique characteristics of their society. But I do believe in God.
For a long time, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t because I thought that’s what scientists must believe. But actually, I have never seen any convincing proof that God doesn’t exist
I grew up in a very devout home where religion was at the centre of everything we did. I never felt comfortable with the religion and have not followed it since I left home at 18. However, God was psychologically programmed into me from such an early age, it would be hard to change the neurons in my brain to deny He exists.
And actually, I am proud now to say I believe in God or a Creator even if I am wrong and there is none. I also have no problem saying that, ya maybe there was a Big Bang and all that but but I feel it was God that sparked it off.
For me at least, I see absolutely no contradiction between belief in God and what I do on a daily basis. In fact, being a scientist to me is my way of worshipping him. Every day I am privileged to see the amazing glorious things that were created in the world. For me, understanding Nature is the same as understanding God and the gifts he has given us. And sometimes when I am down, it does help me to feel that there is a God looking over me, kinda like one great big Mummy now that I am all grown up and supposedly don’t need my mother anymore. My parents are still extremely sad that I do not follow their religion, but I think they feel a bit better knowing that science is my way of being religious.
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