Why I believe in God: Objections and responses

To close out this topic, I'd like to respond to further objections to the existence of God.  I've discussed a couple already (the lack of evidence and the existence of scientific counterexamples of creationist teachings), and there's one more that I'd like to address.  In doing this, I hope that it doesn't appear that I'm simply setting up a strawman argument and beating it to pieces.  Atheists and agnostics have real and legitimate concerns about God's existence and what has been taught concerning Him.  The religious community often does not have complete or even partial answers to these questions.  For example, the problem of evil is something both religious and non-religious people struggle with (although I won't address that topic here).  I'd like to be as complete as possible, so if any readers feel that other relevant questions are important to address, leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer it.

What if you weren't raised religious?

Since this is hypothetical, there's no way for me to be fully accurate in my response.  Also, this seems like more of a statement than a question to me, the statement being "the only reason you believe in God is because that's how you were raised".  But I'll do my best.  The short answer is that, all other things being equal, I don't know if I would have found God if religion wasn't in my upbringing.  Now for the longer answer.

Let's assume that as many other things as possible about my life, my experiences, and my personality are preserved.  Perhaps I am raised in a family of atheists who encourage me to excel academically and follow my dreams, whatever those may be.  They are good, moral people who help others and volunteer in the community.  They do not believe in God, but have no problem with people who do.  I have friends who are religious, and thus I am familiar with the idea of God and with mainstream Christianity.  I devote much of my time to doing well in school, since that is what I am good at and I want to get into a good college.

Somewhere along the way, during my teen years, several of my religious friends notice that I am not involved in religion and, with varying degrees of persistence, seek to help me see the reality of God's existence.  At this point I have not thought about whether their "god" really exists or not.  After some time, I decide to read some of their religious texts, mainly out of curiosity.  Much of it I find boring and devoid of meaning, but every now and then I find a story that teaches good principles.  I resist invitations to church services to all except the most persistent, since I don't want to appear as if I am planning on being a member of their church.  I resist invitations to pray for a long time, since it feels weird talking to nothing.  The first few times I try, I begin speaking briefly and then withdraw due to awkwardness.  During times of great happiness or distress, I sometimes reach out in my mind to see if anything is there to respond.

My impression of their doctrine and theology evolves along with my cognitive skills.  At first, I am likely to reject a belief or teaching if it seems too "weird".  Such teachings include stories of miracles, prophets receiving revelation, angels, and the atonement of Christ.  Later on, as I become more familiar with religious teachings, my interest might be hindered by discovery of intellectual discrepancies in their doctrine.  I bring these discrepancies up to my friends, and they try their hardest to answer them.  Some answers satisfy me, some don't.  The more my personality becomes analytical and intellectually based, the less likely I am to entertain much of their teachings.

I tried to mentally construct a hypothetical sketch of how I might feel during such a situation.  I don't think I know enough to make it conceivably accurate, and I think that depends a lot on whether God exists.  Surely God has to make Himself known somehow, and in my experience, much of that has been through thoughts and feelings (as I explained in the last post).  But I think the important thing to mention here is that God's existence is not dependent upon our acceptance of theism.  If God is real, it is completely possible for many people to disregard, disbelieve, or supposedly disprove His existence, but it is equally plausible that a belief in a nonexistent God can be widespread.

Why I believe in God: Evidence

Why I believe God is a reality, not just a plausibility

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I believe in the Holy Ghost as a God along with Jesus Christ and God the Father.  To me, the Holy Ghost is a being who lacks physical form, and is able to communicate to each of us what God would have us know.  In addition, the Holy Ghost (commonly referred to as the spirit) can help us feel when something is true and motivate us to do good.  Mormon doctrine teaches that the influence of the spirit is subtle and usually can only be detected if one is looking for it.

Thus, I try to make my life and myself an environment in which the influence of the spirit can be most easily felt and received.  In the past, I have had a variety of what I call spiritual experiences, in which I believe the Holy Ghost was present to some degree or another.  The vast majority of these have been simple and at a low level of intensity, often small enough that I am unable to distinguish between the effects of the spirit and my own feelings or thoughts.  However, several experiences have occurred in my life which I consider to be much more conspicuous manifestations of the spirit, to the point that I can no longer accept that they were produced by my own mental or emotional processes.  I will describe three such experiences.

The first occurred when I was around 12.  Like many Mormons raised in the church (especially in Utah), I had grown up learning church doctrine, history, and principles.  For the preceding couple of years, I had been giving a lot of thought to what I believed and realized that I didn't really know if it was the truth.  I worried about the possibility of entering the afterlife only to realize that I should have been a member of a different religion.  I had been taught at least a few times before this period that each person should strive to find the truth for themselves, and not have a certain belief system just because their friends, parents, or leaders professed the same.  This is often referred to as "getting your own testimony" in Mormon culture, and this was what I was trying to do for a couple years.  I remember feeling like my case was a minority, that there were not many Mormons who spent a significant amount of time wondering if their doctrine was true.  Because of this, I almost completely kept my doubts to myself.

I put plenty of time into prayer and study of the scriptures, seeking to have some sort of spiritual impression or manifestation that would confirm my faith.  There were times when it seemed as if my doubt was alleviated, but it would later return.  I felt much like Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the Mormon church who also spent much of his youth wondering and searching for the truth (further information about Joseph Smith is available here).  I had a friend at that time who seemed spiritually in tune and someone I could share my thoughts with, so I decided that I would talk with him about it.

I decided to do so at a boy scout campout some time later.  After everyone else had gone to bed, I explained my plight to him and asked if he had had any similar experiences.  I don't remember him giving a direct answer to my question, but I remember the experience he related to me.  He told me about a dream he had in which he was alive during the second coming of Christ (Mormons, and many other Christians, believe that Jesus Christ will return to the earth as a resurrected, immortal being).  In the dream, angels were singing a common Christian hymn, "God be with you 'til we meet again".  He continued relating the story, but at that point my mind focused on the lyrics of the hymn.  At that moment, I felt an incredibly strong wave of emotion come over me.  I cannot describe it as any particular emotion, just strong.  I felt reassurance about my doubts and the wordless communication that my beliefs were true.

The second occurred during my time as an LDS missionary in Alabama.  Since my previous experience years ago, I had never doubted the truth of the church.  I did my best as a missionary to do what I knew I was "supposed" to do, but there came a time when being a missionary out of a sense of obligation wasn't enough, even though I knew it was what God wanted me to do.  I wanted to be motivated by desire, not just duty.  I felt that the missionary I was serving with (Mormon missionaries always live and work in pairs) was an excellent example of who I wanted to be.  He gave me a copy of a talk (Mormon jargon for "speech") he had read earlier on his mission that was given to missionaries by a leader in the Mormon church (the talk is here).  The focus of this talk was the difference between desire and obligation as motivating factors for missionaries, and the speaker described how to gain the intrinsic motivation to serve.

Over a period of several weeks, I studied this talk, as well as scriptures from the Book of Mormon that I felt were related to the issue.  I prayed many times for the true desire to do what was right, and to be happy and content in doing missionary work.  Unlike the other two experiences I describe here, no part of this experience for me was instantaneous.  I cannot pinpoint a time when any monumental change occurred.  But I do know that before this period, I was motivated primarily by obligation.  After this period and ever since then, I have been motivated primarily by a desire to please God.  Something changed in me that I had tried and failed to change in myself before.  It has never permanently left.  I do not believe it came from myself, or from any other person.  It came from the purifying influence of the Holy Ghost.

The third experience was also as a missionary.  I was in a different area with a different missionary at this time, and we were teaching someone we had met quite recently.  I enjoyed teaching this person because he was close to our age and someone we could relate to.  He seemed open-minded and willing to explore and find out if what we were teaching was true.  He had been raised as a Christian, and on this particular visit he asked us what was different about our faith.  We had a good discussion about a few of our unique beliefs, and he was once again accepting and willing to ask questions and learn.  At the close of our visit we asked him if he would pray, and he complied.  We closed our eyes and waited for him to speak, but for a good while he said nothing.  Finally he looked up and said, "Wow.  That has never happened to me before."

My first assumption was that he had prayed silently and felt the Holy Ghost telling him that what we had taught was true.  But he then explained that he was trying to speak and no words were coming out of his mouth.  He wasn't distressed, but wondered why such a thing would happen.  The other missionary and I were surprised to hear him say this, because Joseph Smith's account of his praying to know which church was true includes a description of a similar experience.  My companion urged him to try again to pray.  I don't remember the words he said during the prayer.  I may not have even been paying attention at the time, because at the moment he began to pray, I had the most amazing and powerful feeling of joy that I had ever experienced before.  When he finished the prayer, I looked up at him and the other missionary, and their expression suggested that the same thing had happened for them.  Nobody said anything for a while.  We didn't really know what to say.  We all knew what we had felt, and we all knew it was from God.  We stayed for a couple more minutes.  Nobody wanted to leave and disrupt the moment.  But we eventually departed, and thanked God for what we had experienced that day.

Why I believe in God: Empiricism and human chauvinism

The phrase "human chauvinism" is taken from an idea that Douglas Hofstadter describes in "Godel, Escher, Bach" (although he calls it "earth chauvinism").  I'm extrapolating Hofstadter's ideas into my own thesis here, but let me define human chauvinism as "the notion that humans have a monopoly on information-gathering".  To give you some background, I'll explain what Hofstadter means by earth chauvinism.

Hofstadter prefaces earth chauvinism with an extended analogy of messages, meanings, and how messages are interpreted by intelligence.  A message is compared to a record, the meaning is compared to the music isomorphically encoded within the record, and the interpreting intelligence is compared to a jukebox.  Hofstadter explains that different records could be played differently by different jukeboxes; thus, a single record would not have the same music (meaning) everywhere.  Likewise, the meaning encoded in a message is not invariable; it is not an intrinsic, unalterable property of the object.

In our minds, Hofstadter explains, "the ascribing of meaning to a message comes from the invariance of the processing of the messages by intelligences distributed anywhere in the universe".  We could say that a message's meaning is completely intrinsic if and only if every single intelligence in the universe interpreted it in exactly the same way (which is highly improbable).  Humans, of course, are used to the way that humans interpret messages, although a fair degree of variance does exist between cultures, languages, perspectives, etc.  Human chauvinism, or earth chauvinism, occurs when we assume that our method of interpretation is universal, simultaneously excluding the possibility of messages or meanings that cannot be interpreted using our method.

Breaking free of chauvinism is done by "imagin[ing] that there could exist other kinds of 'jukeboxes'--intelligences--which communicate among each other via messages which we would never recognize as messages".  Such speculation opens our minds to other methods of interpretation beyond those which we are accustomed to using.  The most simple level of "meaning-interpretation" for us is done involuntarily by the sensory nervous system, the five "jukeboxes" we refer to as sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.  From this basic input, through the millennia, we have created additional, more complex jukeboxes such as science, philosophy, mathematics, and every other academic discipline known to man.

What does this all have to do with my belief in God?  For one, I think it highlights the irrationality of empiricism, the idea that knowledge comes completely from sensory experience.  To say that all information comes through the five senses is to say that there are no other ways of interpreting meaning or gathering information.  In a less extreme sense, to say that all worthwhile information comes through the five senses is to say that there are no other worthwhile ways of interpreting meaning.  It is to discredit the existence of countless plausible forms of information and truth simply because they are inaccessible to us.

To those who haven't figured out where I'm going with this, here it is:  a supreme being (or any intelligence for that matter) does not have to conform to our system of information-gathering in order to communicate with us.  The idea that no one has found any sensory evidence of a supreme being does not and cannot imply that such a being is nonexistent.  The only way that this conclusion could logically stand is if our sensory system was, in fact, the embodiment of all possible forms of information-gathering.  I find this extremely improbable.

At this point, one might ask, "If God doesn't have to communicate through the five senses, how will we know of his existence?"  My reply is that we need to break away from chauvinism and entertain the possibility of other forms of information transmission in the past and the present.  As a Mormon, I consider the most important of these to be the Holy Ghost, but I certainly am not limiting it to that.  I intend to give a sampling of some examples of alternative information transmission (that which I consider to be communication from God) from my own life, which leads me into my next post.

Why I believe in God: Evolution vs. creation

I recently finished watching the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham regarding the logical soundness of the creation model vs. the evolution model.  It gave me an opportunity to think about how I really feel regarding science and religion (although I have done so many times in the past), and this time I felt that I could share a few ideas I have relating to the subject of the existence of a higher power.  I will first describe how I believe that the existence of a higher power is not only possible but plausible, and then I will discuss why I personally believe in a supreme being.

Why God is "allowed" to exist

Evolution vs. creation:  How did life and matter come into being?

I don't want to spend too much time discussing the Nye vs. Ham debate (if you're interested, here it is).  There were several subjects, however, that Ham had a difficult time reconciling with Nye's points, and Nye requested elaboration on several topics multiple times that Ham never provided.  I feel that a lot of Ham's difficulty in the discussion came from the fact that he posits a literal interpretation of the Genesis text.  Ham, and all of the creationist scientists he cites, believes that the events of the creation took place in six 24-hour periods and that the earth, as well as the universe, does not far exceed an age of 6,000 years.  Much of Nye's evidence was pretty glaring in its challenge to the credulity of Ham's claims.

Having been raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), I admit that a good portion of my thought process during the debate was what it would have been like for Ham if he had approached the issue from the perspective of Mormon theology.  I am not implying that a debate between Bill Nye and a Mormon would be devoid of intellectual inconsistency on the part of LDS theology, but several specifically LDS teachings regarding the creation are, in my opinion, more in agreement with scientific evidence than those of mainstream Christianity (at least as set forth by Ham).

I don't consider myself an expert on Mormon theology, and much of what I say may be merely my own interpretation of LDS doctrine.  Take it with a grain of salt.  But here are some ideas I find plausible (meaning I am not presenting them as fact), some only loosely based on LDS theology, that may explain some of the events behind the creation:

1. God has created "worlds without number" (Moses 1:33), and they were not necessarily all created at the same time; in fact, they probably were not.  Thousands of planets could have been created before our world ever even began.
2. The six periods of time during which God created the earth are symbolically given the appellation of "days", and do not refer to 24-hour periods of time.  Thus, the creation could theoretically have taken thousands, millions, or billions of years by our time standards.
3. Adam and Eve were the first two human beings to inhabit the planet, but they may not have been the only two human or human-like beings on the earth by the time the Fall occurred and they were cast from the garden.  We don't know how long Adam and Eve were in the garden, and I find it reasonable that if the garden was separated from the rest of the world in the spiritual sense, it could plausibly be sequestered in an evolutionary biological sense.  The process of evolution of various life forms could have happened exactly as modern science describes it, including the evolution of primates to humans or human-like beings, while Adam and Eve remained in the garden.  (If this is the case, I don't have an opinion about how long any pre-Adamic human races remained, or if they intermixed with Adam and Eve's posterity.  I haven't really been exposed to enough evidence to formulate an opinion about either of these ideas.)

I don't pretend that these ideas reconcile all the difficulties between the evolution model and the creation model.  For example, I don't know how to reconcile the Biblical or LDS teachings regarding Noah's flood with several pieces of evidence Bill Nye mentioned during the debate, though I do not feel that there is no explanation.  But what I've learned about the factual process of evolution has not disturbed my perception of how the creation could have happened.  As far as the Big Bang and the creation of the universe in general, I am not enough a student of physics or astronomy to know much of the theory behind this, but I do find it plausible that the Big Bang or something like it could have been wrought by a supreme creator as well.

Invention vs. creation

I'm not as much of a geek as I am a nerd, but I still like to see cool technology at work. Inventors fascinate me at their ability to synthesize creativity with technical knowledge and make something that no one has ever thought of before. I especially enjoy when people draw their ideas from nature and model their creations after things that have already been created. In one of the videos I'm attaching to this post, biologists and inventors worked together to create a robotic gecko that was able to climb walls and right itself while airborne just like normal geckos. However, the robot did it many times slower than a live gecko, despite or perhaps because of its fancy machinery. In another video, Dennis Hong creates a humanoid robot that can mimic many of the movements a human can make, but it is again awkward, tedious, and slow. I wondered what the uses of his "walking" robots would be, because they traveled about as quickly as molasses going uphill in the wintertime. None of these can even compare to the complexity of the most primitive life forms, and this fact strengthens my testimony of the creation even more. It reminds me of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus says, "If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" (3 Nephi 14:11 and Matthew 7:11) God and Jesus have a capacity to create that is infinitely beyond anything mankind can achieve at this time. Ever since taking college, I have learned a lot more about the laws of chemistry and physics that govern His universe, and I am fascinated by the boundless ingenuity that went into the entire process. I've always wondered what it will be like when we become gods and are able to create our own universes. You literally have to know EVERYTHING in order to be able to create something of that magnitude, and don't even get me started on how amazingly beautiful the Plan of Salvation is. God truly does love us, and we can't even begin to understand how much unless we are gods ourselves.

And no, I don't think I can write a blog post without including my religious convictions. Deal with it.

Here's the videos:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dennis_hong_my_seven_species_of_robot.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_learning_from_the_gecko_s_tail.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_the_emotion_behind_invention.html

Science

I knew it was only a matter of time before I posted something about science on here. Frankly, I'm surprised it took this long. Ever since I've been in college, I've had the privilege to taste from the table of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Carl Sagan, Luigi Galvani, Rene Descartes, Johann Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, Democritus, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Sean Carroll, Marie Curie, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Oliver Sacks, Watson & Crick, Daniel Levitin, Ludwig Boltzmann, whoever came up with the brilliant idea of entropy, and (most importantly) God are only a few of the incredibly intelligent scientists that I've come to idolize. I've probably only said about 1% of them here, I could go on for days. Oh, yes, and I'm a geek. I'm going to say it right now because it's going to make the rest of this post so much easier to read. Anyway, the reason I am so fascinated with these people is that they were able to create completely new things. It takes such a remarkably diverse skill set to be able to create things that I can think of these people as no less than utter geniuses. So what does it take to be one of these geniuses?

Determination/Dedication
I would be no less than completely surprised if any one of the scientists I mentioned didn't have absolute passion for what they were doing. Every time I think of the structure of DNA or the wiring of the brain or the organization of the cosmos, I think, Whoever did this much work thinking this up must have had a reason for it. I can't comprehend the kind of passion it would take to stir a pot of radioactive radium for a full day without stopping, try 605 failed medications for curing syphilis before finding one that actually worked, try thousands of ways to light a coiled filament (yes, I know he stole from Tesla), or many of the other spectacular feats of perseverance that famous scientists have come to be known for. I could never do that. I got frustrated enough trying to get only the stupid heading to this paragraph to be bolded and the rest of it in normal type (oh yeah, I'm also terrible with technology). What these scientists must have realized in the course of their work was that they were truly connected to something greater, and trivialities such as fatigue, frustration, and failure should not, could not, and would not deter them. They were truly inspired. I don't believe that science disproves or ever has disproven the existence of God; in fact, I am firmly convinced of quite the contrary (a belief which I could and may possibly write a whole entire other post about). I think that God, being the creator of all worlds and all the glorious, beautiful science that governs them, truly wants us to understand just how He was able to do the things he did, or at least to the puny extent that we can in this life. He wants us to understand science, and I believe many of the people I have mentioned were either directly or indirectly inspired by Him to conduct and formulate the marvelous and wonderful experiments and ideas they did.

Unrivalled Cognitive Abilities
Yeah, I know that sounds weird. Let me explain. If you've ever heard about Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive learning (thanks to Matt Veibell and McKay Easton for letting me in on the wonders of this thing), you'll know that the top two tiers of the pyramid are evaluation and synthesis (it is currently contested as to which should be at the top; even I haven't really decided which is cognitively greater). Every great scientist who has ever lived has possessed one or (usually) both of these attributes to some great extent. Evaluation is the process of critically judging material that has been submitted in the past and making a claim as to its validity. It is what makes science self-correcting. Synthesis is the process of making entirely new ideas out of almost nothing. It is what advances science and allows us to have new ideas about the world. Of course, both of these processes can result in completely dumbfounded and bullheaded ideas, such as that of Venus being an offshoot of Jupiter and causing such cosmological anomalies as the prolonging of the days around Jesus' birth or the lengthening of the days in the Israelites' battle with the Amalekites (not sure if I got the tribe right on that one). Seriously, there was an actual theory about this. Watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series if you don't believe me. So science can create some stupid ideas from some pretty confused people. But the funny thing is, that's not the problem. As Carl Sagan says of this theory in his TV series, the problem isn't that this idea is completely stupid and wrong. The problem is that people rejected it at face value without any proof or evidence. The fascinating thing about science (one of them, anyway) is that ideas can be made that sound completely illogical and indefensible, and still be right. Scientists laughed and ridiculed at Galileo's proposal of a sun-centered solar system just as much as the Venus-child-of-Jupiter theory probably was (maybe even moreso). But Galileo was RIGHT! Everything he said sounded absolutely wrong in his time, but we know it today to be accurate and descriptive of how the solar system really works. Such are the possible results of the synthesis process. What evaluation brings to science is that it takes these ideas, compares them to the data that is present, and refines or rejects the theory with respect to its validity. Evaluation is what threw out the Venus idea and accepted the Galilean model for the solar system. One caveat to this point, though, is that it MUST be done with evidence. Evaluation without evidence is just what happens when people try to judge scientific theories without any justification. Evaluation without evidence is what Sagan said was wrong. It's a slow, tedious process, but we must learn to accept that judging theories relies crucially upon the interpretation of empirical evidence (although I believe this applies more to science than to more aesthetic matters like philosophy and religion). Evaluation and synthesis require the highest of minds to execute. Think of the ingenuity and inspiration it must take to create something out of nothing! How did Newton think of gravity? How did Boltzmann and others think of entropy? How did Einstein think of relativity? Essentially, they had the minds able to comprehend such complex processes, and the imaginations necessary to entertain such impressions.

Luck
Yep...not much I can say about this. (Insert cheesy smile and thumbs-up sign here.) Maybe if you carry Madame Zeroni up the mountain, you can break the curse that your no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather put on your family and finally develop the breakthrough recipe for Sploosh that you've been working on for years (and I truly hope somebody got that reference, or I just looked really stupid). I will say, though, that patience is an important part to having luck. Luck comes to everyone eventually, it just takes longer for some than it does for others. Patience is a principle that is pretty thoroughly tied to dedication and perseverance in that all of them require passion, so I'll leave it alone for now.

INSPIRATION
God gives valuable knowledge to more than just prophets. Although it could be considered that these scientists were a kind of prophet in themselves. As I said before, I believe science couldn't be more in agreement with religion. And I think that many of the scientists I've mentioned believe this way too. I think it's an unfair stereotype to write all physicists off as atheists just because they believe in the Big Bang, or to write all biologists off as agnostic just because they believe in evolution. I think that the Big Bang and evolution are both plausible and supportable ideas that accurately explain many things, and I still believe in God. Science is one of those things that's religiously neutral, just as a white paper viewed behind colored cellophane wrapping; it changes based on your perspective. An atheist could use science just as easily to support his negation of God's existence as I could to support my affirmation of God's existence. It neither proves nor disproves that there is truly a God. I believe that science is in accordance with religion because my whole life has been a background in religion, but if I had a different background I may believe otherwise (although I am thankful that I did not...and I think I could write another blog post about this too). Basically, I think that no one can ever completely destroy or affirm God in his mind at this stage of life. No one can ever fully embrace doubt, neither can they completely get rid of it in mortality. I like to think (and yes, I'm going out on a limb here) that most of the theories that scientists came up with were based on the belief that something made all this. Maybe not necessarily God, but something. And that something is what pushed them. That something is what kept them going through all the failures and accidents and explosions (although explosions are what would keep me going) to push on to victory.