Science, God, and Conspiracy

I am an agnostic. Defined as one who does not know if God(s) exists or not.

It’s different than an atheist, who actively believe there is no god. Atheism is a very fashionable school of thought now-a-days. More people being brought up in barely theist or skeptical households. Most religious and political views are inherited. Much like wealth or waistline these things accumulate over generations.

And you can understand why doubt might catch on. Horrific things have been done in the face of religion. Tribal lines can devalue other humans, and religious doctrine can be used to reinforce those racists beliefs.  What god would allow the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials or the Rohingya genocide.

Yet, on the otherside, dogma has gotten even more rooted. Evangelicals, Jihadists, Radicalists, all are indoctrinated into their beliefs, now more than ever. They continue to self-reaffirm, continue to virtue signal, continue to radicalize.

This happens on every level of every philosophy and if you think you’re above it, then you are only one of the entrenched.

[I’m about to virtue signal as well, but it’s part of a larger point so consider it an artistic license.]

The debate of God is largely finished, and the agnostics have it.

See when Einstein say light is both particle and wave, that can be experimented. When he says gravity is not a fundamental force but a side-effect of space-time those things can be proven. The math works out. Not statistical anomalies. Not studies by phone survey. Not your Aunt’s youtube video of some guy speaking with jump cuts and graphics.

These things are provable, beyond doubt. And when they are disproven, they will be changed. This is the evolutionary march of science.

But God can never be. Proof of God defies what God is. An entity that would never reveal itself like that.

Therefore. You can believe. But you can never know.

That’s why it’s called faith.

The opposition is also true. Believing there is no God is a belief. You can never know (until it’s too late anyway). God is beyond human capacity; either to demonstrate or deny. [If you think science has all the answers, you don’t know a single scientific field well enough.]

Conspiracy Theories operate in the same vein.

There is no ability to prove a conspiracy. By definition, they would be unknowable to the public, hidden in the shadows. The only proof is in the fringes. The “footsteps” they leave behind. And when there is only one trail of footsteps, well the conspiracy is with you.

It’s with this agnostic attitude that I challenge the conspiracy theorists.

You might believe. But you will never know.

It’s reassuring to believe though. We are a story driven society and the stories that steal our imaginations are often the ones we follow. We love the whims of fantasy and we tend towards narrative bias believing ourselves messiahs or truth seekers. They add adventure to our mundanity.

I am not trying to devalue stories. They are important to us. The spoken word has been our way of communicating principles and beliefs long before writing and systems and science. Those stories continue to be the best way to disseminate information.

We all live to have something greater than ourselves, whether we devote that energy to our family, like mothers to children, or to each other, like parishes to a community.

And that power has been misused plenty of times before, from the Crusades to scalping, from Ray Moore to Jerry Sandusky, from Mao to Aung San Suu Kyi.

We want to believe. More than that, we want to be right. To be justified. In all our good feelings and all our bad ones. It’s a lizard brain satisfaction instinct to reaffirm our own histories.

The alternative is to be awash in unknowing, unmoored in the seas of the vast universe, the starburst elements make you insignificant and they do not care about it.

That’s a hard place to be, and probably why true agnostics are rare. It’s like true neutral alignment, its flat surface gives you no purchase to cling on to. Everything slides off its polished face into the shrug of “I don’t know” and the internalization of you cannot know, because you are limited.

Science, and the scientific methods isn’t really about facts. It’s about a process to disprove a null hypothesis such that we can build theories around the natural world.

Religion isn’t about God but about humbling the human experience before Nature, Each Other, and the Greater Good.

My agnosticism is a deference that my understanding is limited to many of the big questions of both religion and science. I am here to observe and to pay respects and hopeful make this place a little better. But these hands are just flesh and bone, and all the magic I can wield wouldn’t summon a drizzle. Yet maybe that’s just enough to do right by the people around me.

Maybe conspiracies exist. Maybe God does too. But neither of those are for me to know. Maybe you actually do know better. Maybe you have all the certainties. Then nothing I’m going to say will convince you otherwise; but seriously. Do you?