document updated 15 years ago, on Dec 30, 2008
I'm a pretty ardent atheist. While always hold out the possibility that there's a supernatural creator, it would take extraordinary evidence to be convincing.
I was raised in a Christian family, but one that was slightly more liberal than other American Christian families (i.e. there isn't a conflict between science and religion (science on the whole — certainly individual scientists can have conflict with religion); Day-Age/OEC are believed, especially to avoid the starlight problem and other things that directly contradict emperical evidence).
So that leaves me more sympathetic to Christian traditions than others. If I ever did go back to believing in some deity (not that I would), and that deity was a Christian one (not that it would be), my beliefs would be something along the lines of:
- Nontrinitarian — Most Christians gloss over the bit about the "three persons in one substance" thing, since it's difficult to wrap your head around. But when you start to dig into it more, it starts to seem really pretty weird:
- Trinitarianism isn't universally believed:
- Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are one of the earliest monotheistic religions, and currently one of the most popular. However, of the three, only Christianity has this "three-part monotheism". (considering the context, that phrase is pretty weird)
- Although trinitarianism is part of the Nicene Creed, it's still something that isn' believed across all denominations. Yeah, some of them are pretty far-out (Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, ...), there are some that are more mainstream (some Pentecostals).
- Trinitarianism makes things REALLY complicated. Just look into the HUGE number of silly arguments that Christian theologins got into from 30 AD - 325 AD over Christology. If you spend an hour looking into that, your head will hurt. It's crazy. Even if you simplify things down to "they're the same personas, just different faces, there's no distinctions between the three", it would make things far more sane.
- Syncretism/interfaith/universalism (if not monolatrism, then at least henotheism) — When you have billions of people around the world all saying "our religion has cornered the market on truth, anyone who believes otherwise will get eternal damnation", that seems ludicrous on its face. A loving god would not send half the population of Earth to hell just because they fervently believe in a god, but happened to pick [or be born into a family that believes in] the wrong god.
- Far less emphasis on orthodoxy — The meme origin of religion makes a lot of sense to me. So I think the tendency to label things as heresy is artificially imposed by the system itself, in an attempt to reduce the mutation rate to a level that allows memes to survive.
Ultimately though, I think epistemology is very important, and religion has one the weakest systems of epistemology around ("religious epistemology" is almost an oxymoron), so it's not suitable for most real-world tasks. That leaves the god of the gaps as the only possibility for me.