My Personal Search for Truth:
Laying my stall out before I start:
I began this journey as a child, when the questions I was asking of the adults around me did not bring forth any answers I could make sense of or rely upon. Something did not quite fit. Having been adopted, with no legitimate bloodline, no insight into my ancestry, no legacy and with no one guiding my future, I had always felt alone, different and cautious. As my adoptive parents had always had a somewhat hands-off approach, I had never really felt loved by them (I was never told) or taught anything about life (they didn't speak to me) and had to try and find it for myself. I have therefore written my thoughts to myself since I was at school.
Adult years of informal exploration into all manner of apparently disparate subjects within (broadly) science and technology, music and vibration, theology and religion, philosophy, history, ancient civilisations, politics, economics, ecology and energy, illusion and creative arts, mysticism & altered states of consciousness, conspiracy theories and their double, double bluffs, unexplained phenomena, capitalism and symbols of power, etc, would follow through life, but I am more a dilettante than a polymath.
Although I had always been a seeker; looking for answers to the big questions about life and the universe: where are we, where did we come from, why are we here, are we alone, is there a God, what happens when we die - and the smaller questions: who am I, do I have a purpose, whom can I trust and can I believe what I am being told, etc, I had long been grounded in 'reality,' applying logic and reasoning to my experiences and was becoming aware of an emerging view of what I thought I believed.
I began writing this, not knowing what to believe and looking for answers, which I have been prepared to re-evaluate as more information has become available to me. I believe that we all have our own belief systems that will go on to influence the way we live our lives - and reconfirm our beliefs - whether or not there is any universal truth in what we believe. What we believe becomes our own truth - our own reality.
I am not a religious person. I have explored theology and, whilst religions may have held some idealistic principles for how people could live their lives, any wisdom in ancient scriptures that we ever get to see have been adulterated and mistranslated and I believe that all religions are flawed, man-made concepts and that they are merely a distraction, keeping us all fighting amongst ourselves whilst the bigger picture is being obfuscated. I also believe that most of the substantial religions have an earlier common ancestry that revolved around (no pun intended) the worship of the ubiquitous Sun, the stars and the cycles of the heavens. This was largely a practical, planting and harvesting dependence for survival and should not be confused with modern day astrological quackery and gossip press horoscopes. There may be even earlier connections between religions, which we shall come to later. Apparently, there are nearly a million Catholics who regularly attend church on Sundays in the UK, yet there are 26 million people who are not part of any religion but state they believe in God. The majority of people are working things out for themselves.
I am also not a scientist, although I have explored evolutionary theory, relativity, sub atomic physics, the cosmos, the electromagnetic spectrum, mathematics and more. Though I had always sought answers, lots of things didn't quite make sense - it might have been that I didn't understand them, but I rather thought that it was because science, religion, philosophy and history didn't have enough of the answers. Science is concerned with repeatable, provable evidence in the physical world. It was not really interested in anything outside of this (until of course quantum physics came and turned some of the old ways on its head), but there were too many holes in too many theories; we didn't know enough yet, but we didn't have 'faith' in religion to reveal very much either, precisely because it wasn't concerned with physical reality, but expected us to blindly follow it into some kind of spiritual no man's land.
In classical philosophy, the traditional notion of God is considered to be beyond that which is conceivable. The fact that we do have a conception of God means that this cannot be God. Douglas Adams used this paradoxical concept to humorous effect in his novel 'The Hitchhiker's Guide...' wherein on proving that he existed, God instantly disproved that he exists and "promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
If the existence of God was a generally proven fact, there would be no need for faith. Faith is the domain of religion and, as religion has to protect its existence, it not only has no need to prove anything, it has no interest in doing so - otherwise science will claim it. Science deals with fact, not with the unknown (or, rather, it helps the previously unknown and inconceivable become known). God is therefore destined never to be known because science is looking the other way; it will never conclude that the data it collects points to something it cannot 'keep in a jar'. Even though the Big Bang is thought to originate from a singularity and God is a single point of origin, science will never designate the singularity as being God. This seems to create a rift that they are mutually exclusive disciplines, but they can coexist; they just offer different conclusions to some similar data.
Many notable scientists throughout history and today have also been religious or believed in God (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton); science and God do not have to be diametrically opposed positions. Even renowned atheist Richard Dawkins has stated that he has respect for the Deists who believe that God created the world within which evolution then took place. There is room for both. When I say both, I guess I am really referring to the God or Evolution debate. However, this is just one small argument in a much broader picture.
Even many modern physicists/biologists believe that all life on earth can trace its origin back to the first 'speck' of life; the 'source', called LUCA (last universal common ancestor): the point to where all unbroken bloodlines of all the generations of everyone currently alive actually go back to. So if this 'singularity' is available to them in the physical domain, why not in a spiritual one? What is the difference? They have their proteins and carbon atoms combining in DNA in a completely "non-random way" (it is fortuitous that the male and female of species evolved around the same time), but the originator is not considered to have been 'intelligent', whether or not natural selection changes things thereafter. Furthermore, all matter that has been or ever will be, is considered to already exist (matter can neither be created nor destroyed) at the point of the Big Bang. Again, this is so close to the concept that everything is connected to everything else; it is only the conclusion regarding the origin that varies. I don't see any area of conflict here.
Unfortunately, many who have a scientifically biased outlook, especially militant atheists, will then ridicule anything that cannot yet be explained as provable fact. This is where their view is also fundamentally flawed; science is always playing 'catch up' and what was not provable yesterday often becomes so tomorrow. Our minds need to remain open.
I am not an atheist. I believe that sitting too firmly on either side of the argument is equally irrational and gives us a narrow view, which we need to keep proving whilst ridiculing the 'opposition'. Whether you arrive here from a point of faith or from science, I believe that they don't have to be oppositional; 'faith' can be arrived at from intellectual enquiry and science fact, just as much as those who have total 'faith' in science being able to deliver the answers to life's big questions. It is merely the conclusion that differs.
However, it is doubt, not certainty that is the opposite of faith; having certainty about something just limits other possibilities. I have mostly been staunchly agnostic, both in my nature and regarding the notion of our origins. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, as agnosticism is also a belief-based position, it too must be equally irrational. Even so, I do not believe that any conclusions I may reach are through blind ignorance or by following the herd. Although I'd always had the fancy that the answers would be revealed to me the moment before I died (the microsecond that lasts an eternity), I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that the 'ultimate' answers would never be known more widely in my lifetime, otherwise this might be akin to witnessing a scary, paranoia-filled Armageddon.
