I am, very much, not religious. My father is Catholic, my mother doesn’t go into her spirituality but it’s not Christian. So I was taught about different things and given the choice to believe in what makes sense to me. If there’s one way to describe what feels to me like what I imagine faith to be like to someone who’s religious it would be the messages of hope and of passion for discovery and learning that Carl Sagan showed. The Pale Blue Dot speech is a sermon. It inspires me to be a better person and to try and be the change in the world that I want to see. But ultimately science doesn’t know everything and at some point even with it you must make assumptions and have “faith” in the process.
As far as divinity goes, I’ve always struggled to believe. I just don’t see the extraordinary evidence that would be required for me to say “Oh, that makes a divinity-free universe impossible”. And by the same token it is impossible to prove that the universe was not crafted by some all powerful being last Thursday with all our billions of years of history baked in for us to pour through. So I figure, I’ll find out on my last day and until then I’ll just focus on being as good a person as I can be.
I am, very much, not religious. My father is Catholic, my mother doesn’t go into her spirituality but it’s not Christian. So I was taught about different things and given the choice to believe in what makes sense to me. If there’s one way to describe what feels to me like what I imagine faith to be like to someone who’s religious it would be the messages of hope and of passion for discovery and learning that Carl Sagan showed. The Pale Blue Dot speech is a sermon. It inspires me to be a better person and to try and be the change in the world that I want to see. But ultimately science doesn’t know everything and at some point even with it you must make assumptions and have “faith” in the process.
As far as divinity goes, I’ve always struggled to believe. I just don’t see the extraordinary evidence that would be required for me to say “Oh, that makes a divinity-free universe impossible”. And by the same token it is impossible to prove that the universe was not crafted by some all powerful being last Thursday with all our billions of years of history baked in for us to pour through. So I figure, I’ll find out on my last day and until then I’ll just focus on being as good a person as I can be.