The Christian Left part 2

Regulars may remember that I started a series on how I ended up as a member of that slightly obscure group, the Christian Left. Apologies for a lack of an update, events dear readers, events! Anyway, here I am, carrying on. If you are new to this then you may wish to read my first post on this subject before this one where I essentially said that I was a dualist.

So how does this lead to God? While dualism suggests that there is something that doesn't fit with the material world as we understand it I totally accept that this does not lead to the concept of there being a God. Having A does not necessarily lead to B. Hence I have to fully accept that this is the most tenuous area of my thinking and is a clear demonstration of the fact that all religious belief is based on faith. If anyone sits down and tries to convince you of the existence of God through science or logic then they are fooling themselves and, maybe without realising it, fooling themselves as well. But I digress.

Part of it has to be that I can't help myself. No matter how I think about it I keep coming back to the idea of a God. Recent reports suggest that we may have evolved this way, that there is an evolutionary advantage to believing in God, even if there is no God. It's possible that that is true, but if it is true it's hardly surprising that some of us end up believing is it? The big bang doesn't disprove the existence of God (in fact if anything the idea of the universe having a beginning and an end suggests the idea of a deity even more strongly) and neither does evolution, both simply debunk creationism (and I am no creationist by the way). Every time at the back of my mind is always this idea of God.

Part of it, as I suggested before is almost certainly cultural. We are at our most suggestible when we are young, and growing up with a Christian mum and a Theist dad was never the best environment to turn out an atheist!

Part of it must be that I have found a lot of peace and confidence in prayer. Of course that is no proof of the existence of God (and no, I don't believe that there has been any divine intervention in my life either a result of prayer or any other reason, we'll come onto the whole "why pray" thing in another post), but there can be no doubt that the happiness I have found there has reinforced my belief.

All in all taking a step back from things and looking at me from the outside it would be very easy to see a fool that is fooling himself. And maybe you are right, maybe I am, but that thought still doesn't switch off that bit at the back of my mind that still believes.

So over all though it must boil down to faith. Logic suggests that I could be fooling myself (logic if anything leaves to agnosticism), and I also know that dualism doesn't lead to theism, although the two do sit very comfortably together in that dualism suggests that reality stretches beyond the material universe as we understand it.

Next up, why Christianity and not some other religion? Not sure when, but it is on it's way!

The Christian Left - Part 1

Ok, as promised, it's time to start my series on the Christian left. So lets start at the very beginning (a very good place to start!), and it's not with Jesus, or faith or all that jazz, but, over two parts, with God. Why does someone like me, someone with a science background, that reads the Guardian et al, believe in something I can't see or touch or prove the existence of?

Well to start with I guess we can't get away from the whole cultural side of things. I was brought up in a moderately religious household. My Mum is what you would call Christian with a small c and my Dad is one of those who believes there is a God but hasn't settled on any particular religion. We were semi regular at church, maybe 8 times a year (plus weddings and funerals) and it was fairly standard CofE. No guitars and tambourines for the Akela household!. You could very easily point at me and say if I had been brought up in Iran I would have been Muslim, or in Thailand I would have been Buddhist. And there is a good chance that you would be right.

It wasn't though something I thought about hard until later in life when I did a philosophy subsid at uni along side Biochemistry. And it was then that I firmly concluded that there must be something more to this world than just the material world that we see around us.

Consider this, consider what it is like to be blind. Not like shutting your eyes but no sense of sight at all. Scary isn't it? Now strip away your hearing as well, and all your other senses. What part of you is still there? Is there anything? You may think no, but it seems to me that there is something. It is that sense of being self aware. That sense of a passing of time.

Consciousness, that is what I am talking about.

Now consider the universe and what it is made up of. It's made of matter, which is interchangeable with energy, as per relativity. It's pretty freaky stuff and a lot is not yet understood about it. Yet if I am just made of matter/energy, how has it come to be aware of its own existence? I can understand how it can form complex organisms, how my body can be formed, how plants and animals can all be formed (yes I am very happy with the concept of the big bang and evolution) but for those to be self aware?

It is my feeling that there must be something else there, something else that makes me conscious. Yup, I am a dualist.

Now this is the point where someone normally pipes up with something about the Turing Box experiment. Now if you don't know much about it the google it, I can't be arsed explaining it here. Now many people will say that Alan Turing proved that you could create a robot that is fully conscious, and those people have completely misunderstood. What Turing actually proved was that theoretically at least you could create something so life like that you couldn't tell the difference between it and a conscious entity. And that is a different kettle of fish all together.

Of course dualism opens up many many more questions about sleep, death, brains, how it fits with our bodies etc etc. I don't pretend to have all these answers at all, but that doesn't mean I wont keep looking for them.

So anyway, that briefly, is why I have concluded that we have souls and in the next part it's how this leads on to God!