Do you believe in God?
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
When I was younger, I used to believe in God. However, sometime around when I started the university in the early 2000’s, I lost my faith. A contributing factor might have been that I am a STEM engineer, and we might be more inclined to think of the world in objective numbers. I know that at least I was. That’s why Atheism might seem like an appealing new religion instead of Christianity in the modern world. As I learned more and more about physics, mechanics, mathematics, electronics, fluids, optics, etc, I became increasingly convinced that science could find the answers to our difficult questions. But later, when I started my PhD education and encountered the courses in philosophy, especially Philosophy of Science, something changed. When I got my PhD degree in 2017, I had found my way back to God again. I realized that God was the only rational, logical and coherent answer that would explain everything I had learned. Since then, every single area of my life that I can think of have improved. Massively.
It’s not that surprising either. Science is all about finding and improving explanatory models of the world that can better predict not just what we see now, but what we will see in future too, in the pursuit of Truth. It is very easy to develop an explanatory model that describes in hindsight. If we know the outcome, we can always create a “red thread” to connect the dots. To count as real science however, an explanatory model also needs to predict what will happen in future, i.e. to connect the dots, before they appear. What naïve people – like my past self – may get wrong, is that science is not just one single entity where everyone agrees. It is a set of explanatory models. The models who are better at looking ahead will, given enough time, replace models who only work in hindsight and lack prediction ability. This is what progress means. We all have our own image of the world in terms of what has been, what is, what should be and what actions we should take to get there. If your worldview correlates with Truth, and you align your life accordingly, good things tend to follow. Your explanatory model works. If your life is miserable, it might not be the world who is at fault. It might be your view of it that is the problem. And that is good news! Because you cannot change the world, but you CAN change yourself. That is within your power. Revise your explanatory model, and chances are that your life will improve accordingly. We require the ability to predict the outcome of our actions if we are to survive.
The key factor that I changed in my explanatory model, the one that has produced the massively improved quality of my life, is that I realized that everything matters. Every single thing and every little action you do, will ripple through eternity, and not just 2-3 generations on. You will not get away with anything, ever. Start treating your life as if every action you do has infinite potential for both good and evil, and perhaps you won’t need to “get away” with anything ever again. A rock consists of billions of atoms and a good life consists of billions of small positive actions. You cannot build something great if the individual building blocks are corrupt. To do this you will need to take on a huge responsibility. Not just for yourself, but for everyone that has ever lived, that live now, and that will live in the future. That, my friends, is TRUE sustainability. I am inclined to believe that the small actions are even more important than the big ones. Because the small actions we do millions of times, and the big ones only once or twice. The water beats the stone, one drop at a time.
Do you believe in God? To answer this question with a simple Yes or No, we need to have exactly the same definition of what is meant by “believe” and also what is meant by “God”. And we don’t. Not by a thousand miles. The probability that our definitions correlate, are zero. With that said, do I believe in God?
Yes, of course.