the truth alludes us

something that’s been on my mind today: I’ve been thinking about how I define myself as an atheist. I am an atheist. that isn’t debatable. but, at the same time, I’m not simply an atheist. so here, I guess, is the blog post about why I don’t believe in a god. I’m still trying to work out my own thought process myself so if you are reading this—bear with me.

I’m an atheist first and foremost because I think “god” as a solution to how life came to be and what all this is all about and where I’m headed bla bla is way, WAY too simplistic. More importantly, it’s way too self-righteous. I’ve always been fascinated with the pomposity of other human beings to assume that a theory that they came up with is the absolute and ultimate theory. who says you know for sure how the universe came about? some dude wrote the bible, some dude inferred all this about a god, made up some details along the way, and then changed the whole thing several times before he slapped a title on it and called it whatever form of Christianity/ Catholicism we have now. the idea that something so arbitrary and so decidedly of HUMAN creation could be the absolute truth is ridiculous to me.

what are humans anyway? if you compare the time that humans have existed on earth with the time that the earth itself has existed, and then project that time out to the time the whole universe has existed, and even beyond our universe—then really, we’re so so insignificant it’s laughable. in my opinion, what we know about the world could be rounded to zero, even after all these years of science, philosophy, whatever. we just haven’t had enough time to be able to understand anything like “the whole truth.” we’re not significant or important enough to have that ability or ever have that! think about all the scientific knowledge that has been refuted over the centuries. everything that has been proven wrong. who are we to insist that all the scientific knowledge scientists have so meticulously researched up today won’t be all refuted ten years from now? the whole scientific process strikes me as so unbelievably futile. so yeah, we might be inching closer to the truth every time, but we’re moving slower than a snail’s pace. we’re barely moving faster than standstill.

truthfully, I don’t believe the human species even has the capacity to understand absolute truth. I think our brains would all explode if it ever got to that point. science is hard enough for a lot of us to understand even now, and when you think about how all the science now is probably just the tiniest fragment of what truth actually is, then you see how infinitely more difficult it would be for us to attempt to understand the entire truth even if we stumbled upon it. in fact, we probably wouldn’t even know the truth if we chanced to bump into it—we really aren’t smart enough. humans greatly overestimate their own capacity for knowledge. even thinking about division by zero and black holes and quantum physics perplexes us- then who’s to say that truth won’t allude us? it absolutely will. we’ll never understand truth!

at least that’s how I see it. and that’s why the idea of religion is so ridiculous to me. religions insist that their theory is the absolute truth, that their god is the absolute god, that their scripture is entirely accurate and reliable. is there a possibility for a god? sure there is. but that possibility is as small as any other possibility you could come up with to explain the world. we simply don’t have enough information and will never have enough information to determine, with some confidence, what theory could have a higher possibility. and even- let’s say just even- that there is a god- what are the chances that he, uh, did everything the bible said he did and he lives up in the sky and his name is Jehovah and his son is jesus? I think we can pretty safely round that probability up to zero.

so, even though I’m an atheist, I’m not a great lover of science, either. I just don’t think science is going to help us get there. ultimately, I’m a pessimist. I’m a cynic. I’d rather live with the knowledge of our incompetency as a species than try futilely to counter it. I love reading books like “the hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy” or anything that speculates on how things could be because I’m interested in it, I think about it a lot, and it fascinates me. but I’m not going to take anything at face value and I’m not going to believe anything that can’t be proved. and right now, we don’t have the ability to prove anything. I wish I could say that my whole life’s mission is to find out the truth about everything. but how many people before me had that same life mission? didn’t Newton, didn’t Galileo, didn’t Einstein? and they all died before they knew. I don’t want to waste my life trying to go somewhere I can’t get to.

I just want to live every moment I have the way I want to, and to stop having people try to shove in my face what they think is true, whether it be gods or deities or any other shit. trust me, you don’t know. none of us do.

now go home and make yourself a hamburger.