When we are born, we are automatically trapped within a culture with a certain belief system. This shapes how we understand all things around us. In most cases, it also dictates how we should behave. It pervades our whole personality so much that when it is challenged and we realize that something is wrong about it, it can shatter our orderly understanding of the world and leave us utterly confused.
Once we stand on a new belief system, we will be faced with suspicion, indifference and worse are stigma and discrimination from people that we don’t share the same beliefs with anymore. This is the price each one of us has to pay if we change the way we see things…if we change our worldview. I would understand why many people would just stick to what they were raised with and never dare to challenge it, much less to adopt a better and more realistic one.
When I was a child, I saw things from a blend of animistic Catholic Christian worldview. As early as high school I realized that there is more to reality than what this view can offer. I began to question my beliefs, I doubted the existence of God, I tried to understand how science can explain how things came about. Hence I became known to be an “atheist”. (I didn’t know then the difference between atheism and agnosticism.) Due to a poor grasp of the science behind evolution and cosmology, I reverted to the Christian belief system but I struggled to understand what true Christianity really is.
Having no solid catechetical background of Catholic doctrine, I easily fell prey to many “Bible only” Christian groups. I jumped from one of these groups to another in trying to get as close to Biblical Christianity as possible. In the end, I bemoaned the lack of external standards to which “Bible only” Christians can test whether they are interpreting the Bible correctly or not. I sought to study how the Bible came to be and through this I rediscovered my Catholic faith, though not the same Catholicism I used to embrace before. It felt liberating how the biblical message is protected from being messed up by private interpretation through the infallible authority of the Church.
However, this new vantage point enabled me to tackle questions at higher levels. I began to scrutinize the historicity of Jesus Christ, the proofs of his resurrection, and other miraculous claims of Christianity. I realized that the very bedrock of Christianity is actually shaky. It is built on shallow evidence of testimonies of witnesses. This kinds of evidence can suffice to establish murder or any crime in a court but would not be enough if you want to prove a very incredible claim such as the resurrection from the dead. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The same is true with other religions. Extraordinary claims are proven by testimonies of witnesses, which are accepted by most, despite the enormity of the claims and the conflicts of these claims with reason and science.
Confused once again, I managed to slowly understand things without the baggage of revealed religions. All that was left was my belief in a personal God, which I sought to justify using the often repeated philosophical arguments for God’s existence. Along with my growing interest and knowledge in science, the weight of these arguments began to lighten. The argument from design is not very appealing now as it used to be. Without the need for an intelligent designer, the argument from causation can lead to any picture of the ultimate cause, only one of which is a personal intelligent God. The ultimate cause could then be just energy or some simple but universal physical law.
However, since these are purely philosophical arguments and are beyond what science can prove or disprove at the moment, the only honest answer is that we are not sure…that we actually don’t know, which is what agnosticism is, essentially. As Richard Dawkins pointed out though, agnosticism is actually a spectrum. In one end of the spectrum are those who are 99.9% sure that God exists while on the other extreme end are those who believe with 99.9% probability that God does not exist. For the moment, I am probably lying somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, 50-50. I think it is still possible that we can discover in the future a form of a God governing the universe, maybe (just maybe) the kind of God that Albert Einstein and Baruch Spinoza thought about.
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