A Statement of Belief

I didn't start paying attention to politics until after the September 11 attacks. I quickly developed fairly-to-quite liberal views on most issues, although I rarely referred to myself as liberal then and do so even less frequently now, despite the fact that I still hold many of those same views. I'm a registered independent and have never belonged to a political party.

For the most part, I've tried to avoid labeling myself as one thing or another. Partly because I'm sort of attracted to the idea of ideological independence and partly because labels are often conversation killers. One of the things I noticed about political discourse in the Bush Era was how quick people were to pigeonhole their opponents and ignore them, so to avoid that, I tended to shun specific labels.

The problem with this approach is that it can create confusion if you're not clear about what you do think. Now that my interest has shifted more towards larger philosophical issues, I find myself occasionally running into this problem. I was baptized as a Lutheran and proudly referred to myself as such for a good chunk of my life. At some point, however, I decided I wasn't a Christian anymore and started calling myself an agnostic, which really doesn't say a whole lot. Agnosticism is simply one particular view regarding the validity of spiritual claims, not a complete philosophical package.

Most of the people I discuss this stuff with have reasonably clear systems of belief. I know whether or not they believe in God, which god they do or don't believe in, and how this belief affects their worldview in a general sort of way. Being a wishy-washy agnostic who refuses to align himself with any one philosophical or political ideology, I feel that I'm sometimes less clear about what I believe than I ought to be. This lack of clarity once led one of my friends to ask me if I could write down exactly what I believe. I said Yeah, I could probably do that. That was nine months ago. Tonight I'm going to make good on that commitment.

So what, briefly, do I believe? I think I'll start by asking myself two questions.

Question 1: Do any of the gods described in any of the human religions exist?
Answer: Probably not.

Question 2: Does a god or god-like thing exist, one that is perhaps above and beyond anything yet described by human beings?
Answer: Maybe, but I don't know for sure.

In short, I don't know, so I usually just say I'm an agnostic. Granted, based on these two answers alone I'd probably fit into some definitions of atheism as well. I guess the reason I don't call myself an atheist is that I place a larger emphasis on that second question than many of them seem to. I think the question of why there is something rather than nothing is a very good one, and one that we're not ready to answer yet. According to Wikipedia, there's a strong version of agnosticism claiming that the answers to spiritual questions are inherently unknowable, but I don't know if I'd go that far. It may be that once we learn enough about the universe we'll find something that we can call god or, alternatively, be able to prove definitively that all of existence came about through purely natural means. But we're not there yet and it's possible that we never will be.

There are a couple other issues that usually come along with the God one that I should probably touch on as well. First, although I'm not religious, I'm not a science supremacist either. I think scientists and scientific thinking are subject to a lot of undue romanticism by a lot of people who see science as sort of the opposite of religion, and that the scientific process is perfectly vulnerable to human abuse and politics. That said, I think the scientific process is still the best tool we have for discovering how the universe works and that it is slowly helping us piece together an accurate picture of the physical world. As for its supposed conflict with religion, I see no reason why certain kinds of religious belief can't be reconciled with science.

The other thing I want to address is morality. Discussions of God's existence often lead to the question of what basis we have for morality, especially if there is no god. My own thoughts are that while I don't see any obvious signs of an objective, divine basis for morality, I don't think that's as big a problem as some people think. There may not be an objective basis for moral law, but I would say that there's a biological one. Without going into the details, there is good reason to think that our moral tendencies are built into us and I don't think you necessarily need to invoke a god to explain this.

I'll most likely discuss these in more detail in future posts. My goal here is more to summarize my positions rather than give thorough justifications for them. Given that this blog will function largely as a self-indulgent vehicle for my opinions on important things, I thought it'd be good to start by providing a rough sense of where I stand as of now.