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Thursday, January 23, 2020

My Faith… Let Me Just Get This Out of the Way

I was born and raised under the Roman Catholic faith of Christianity. Even though I went to a public elementary school, once a week, someone would teach religion to us. Come high school, I already had a regular religion class because I was attending a Christian high school. By college, I had philosophy classes that taught other religions. So in a way, I come to understand other religions as well.

That's the key here, understand. I am better off understanding things first before believing in them. As far as I am concerned, that should follow; once I understand, I believe. So please don't get me into a discussion on Flat Earth because none of the Flat-Earther logic is understandable to me. They seem to throw away the science. Even without the science, the math alone cannot prove that we live in a flat Earth. But this is not the topic.

Religion. What is it? To me, it's a division of beliefs, norms, way of life, depending on whichever greater being or beings you worship in order to attain salvation for some, for others enlightenment. It's a vague description but that's how I understand it. In religion, there is always a divine god or gods. Of course, there are also the atheists, and they don't believe in any god.

So where do I stand? I do believe in a supreme being that created us; this planet, the whole universe, the multiverse if you believe in that, all the natural laws. Everything. Also, I do believe in science. But some people find it difficult to fully believe in both. Actually, I think, people find it difficult to fully believe in science and religion, and not science and a supreme being.

I say religion because that comes with the belief in the many creation accounts, which contradicts many scientific discoveries. There are probably more but, I am only familiar with what the Holy Bible has.

So how did I come to believe in a supreme being when I believe in science? Simple. Logic. At least, my logic. Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, we are able to clone animals, and probably even people. Some say there is an "ethical" issue to that but then most (not all) of what we know about ethics and law is dictated by religion. We are also having breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence. Clones are technically alive. Artificial intelligent machines are almost sentient. We, humans, are the creators of these technologies. And to these technologies, which someday may have their own "lives," we are their creators. So following that reasoning, similar to our "creations", there must be a being that have created us.

However, the word "divine" still escapes me. I still cannot scientifically grasp the concept of a soul. But there is a so-called Noetic Science that is trying to explain the divine. Take note, divine, not random chance. Random chances can be explained by probability and statistics. And a I count the soul as divine. Most miracles are, as far as I'm concerned, statistical anomalies that lie at the extremes of a normal curve. They can happen, the probability is just extremely low. The so-called miracles that have zero probabilities have been debunked. Hoaxes.

And this is my stand, my belief. There is a God, and there is science.

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