Away from atheism

This post is a plea for help, so please read to the bottom.

There are a couple of times I've felt "tricked" in my life. I didn't grow up with Santa Claus, but the tricked I refer to is precisely of the sort that something you were led to believe was true, turned out to be a trick.

In my life these have largely pertained to three core events:

1. The realization in my early twenties that religion was man-made (more on that later)
2. The realization soon after that evolution is unintelligent, random, and unguided (more on that later)
3. The realization in the late 2010's/early 2020's that the state is not so different than religion

The last one is of no existential significance, but the first two are supremely important.

Over the last decade or two, I've embraced scientism (the religion which believes science can explain literally everything), but reluctantly. I'd kept one eye open. Randomness didn't sit well with me.

I'm happy to now add a 4th core event:

1. The realization that scientism is quite literally brain-dead.

My goal is not to convince you of this since I don't give a shit right now what you believe. I'm trying to figure things out for myself. But it is an invitation to go on this journey together, because let's face it, your belief that the universe and intelligent life is self-emerging has caused you nothing but pain, emptiness, loneliness, nihilistic thoughts, and despair. The worst part is, it's completely false.

The universe didn't self emerge. Intelligent life didn't self emerge. Darwin's theory and its updated variant neo-darwinism are really no longer cutting edge science. The consensus amongst any scientist who is not religiously so is that darwin's theory needs replacement.

I will quickly prove this to you, and then move on to more important things.

ONE: Darwin's theory says life is the result of random, unguided, directionless evolution through mutations by natural selection. But Darwin had a doubt. He says:

"...with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value at all or trustworthy."

LMAO. Did you catch that? I want you to really think about this.

If the human brain was built randomly without any direction, purpose, or sense, and this brain tells us that life is meaningless and directionless, why in THE FUCK would we trust anything it says?

Yet in fact, the brain which this seemingly random process created can do math which happens to reveal truths that coincide with actual nature. How the fuck does that happen? How does a random process create a mind that can do math which ends up accurately explaining how the universe works?

Fuck off randomists. I'm done with your bullshit. Yes, I'm angry. I've lost way too many years of my life believing human life was a fluke, and it's led to disastrous consequences for my well-being.

TWO: Darwin's shitty theory does not explain the origin of life, just minor variations between species which largely share the same body plan. I want to repeat this on loud: SCIENCE HAS NO THEORY FOR HOW LIFE ORIGINATED. This is important because actually the origin of life is quite baffling to science. Why? Because to make life, you need information. Information is encoded in DNA. While matter may, information does not randomly coagulate.

If we treat a genome as a sequence of letters, which it practically is, the human genome has been mapped to a sequence of 3.2 billion letters. A single-cell organism's sequence is 580,000 letters.

So to build the first single-celled organism that darwinism claims all of life descended from, you first need to explain how to randomly come up with a word sequence of inanimate matter that when combined into a string animates into intelligent, self-replicating life.

How does randomness make a 580,000 letter sequence that results in a machine more unbelievably complex than anything we can imagine or make ourselves?

Fuck off randomists. I'm done with you.

So where does that leave us?

I have no fucking idea. At this point here are my non-negotiable beliefs:

1. Life is non-random, and comes from an intelligent source.
2. Something can't come from nothing. The universe has an age (13.8 billion years), which means it was created (fuck your oscillating universe and desperate multiverse theory). The creation of the universe is intelligent.
3. The intelligence at the beginning of the universe somehow propagated itself to the earth many billion years later and seeded information to create first life. This information, if it was just an organization of matter already present at the big bang, couldn't have survived the chaotic plasma state of the early universe. Thus, this intelligence acted in the universe after its initial creation. So fuck the watchmaker theory. The intelligence has shown itself to participate in the universe's affairs after its initial act of creation.

Here is where I now get stumped:

I'm comfortable calling this intelligence God. I'm comfortable saying I now believe in God.

The hurdle I am having a hard time overcoming is whether this is a moral God. Does this god care about good and evil? Does he dislike it when humans kill each other or commit adultery?

This is an extremely important question, since it is the leap I would need to make to participate in religion again. Why do I want to participate in religion?

Because belief in an abstract god, without daily rituals that enforce this belief, is practically the same as atheism and completely useless. I need a way to interface with this god. Otherwise, I've gained nothing. There is an infinitely-sized god-shaped hole in my heart that needs to be filled. This hole, which if you've shared my experiences you may feel too, is proof to me also that my agnostic/atheistic beliefs are asymmetric to my creation or evolution. The fact that this hole exists and aches unlike any pain I've ever experienced, is proof I've deviated from my nature.

So, I'd like to interface with this god, and I'd like to be consumed by him. The only way to do that, as far as I know, is through existing religions. Why existing? For one, creating your own religion is super hard. The amount of rituals, affirmations, motions, and background you'd need to provide for your beliefs would take millennia to build up and take shape. I don't have the time or knowledge to create my own rituals. This is something humanity has already figured out.

I like monotheistic religions. Fuck your pantheism—your "the universe is one and we are the universe", etc. I'm not doing that.

(Quick proof against your "we are the universe" bullshit: the universe can't just unfold "beautifully", because it is finely-tuned for human life (ask ChatGPT about fine-tuning). It being finely-tuned means it had to have pre-thought how to unfold first, then propagate these immutable physical constants (gravitational force, weak nuclear force, mass of the proton/neutron, etc). So it's not just figuring itself out as it goes. It had an idea for what it wanted to do first, then executed that idea.)

Here is the hurdle I am having with entering into a religion: you need to believe in the supernatural.

In order to gain this wonderful interface with god, which I am so unbelievably envious of religious folks for, you need to cross the Supernatural Barrier.

1. To believe in Christianity, you must believe that Jesus came back from the dead, and also healed blind people and made paralyzed people walk again.
2. To believe in Islam, you must believe Muhammad flew to heaven on a horse in the middle of the night, met god and all the previous prophets, and returned while his bed was still warm. You must also of course believe that Allah speaks and writes really excellent poetry (and really, if you can read the original text, it is bizarrely beautiful.)

To me, if I can make this supernatural leap, I can easily subscribe to either of these religions. I don't even care which one.

But, I just...can't...do..it. And it's killing me. It's the last step I need to conquer to gain an interface with the creator.

That's my call to help. If you have any ideas how to cross the supernatural barrier, as someone who has spent probably 20 years in the prison of scientific materialism, please write to me.

If you'd like to escape the prison of scientism, here are the resources I recommend:

1. Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer (book, great place to start)
2. By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer on the Evidence for a Creator (YouTube video)
3. The Matter with Things (book; touted as one of the most important books of the last two centuries.) If you're inclined towards pantheism or the idea that we are an expression of the universe, and want to steer clear of religion or monotheism, I recommend exploring this path. I don't think it's as fulfilling as monotheism, but it's infinitely more fulfilling than materialism/atheism/agnosticism. The book comes in at 2,000 pages. I've read only about a hundred so far, and have come away with a lot. But you can read Iain McGilchrist's interview about the book here, which gives you a nice summary. The main points I've gathered so far are:
   1. Matter is a phase of consciousness, where by phase we mean like liquid/solid/gas, and not a temporal phase. This is an extremely interesting perspective.
   2. Complexity is the rule of the universe, not the exception.
   3. Paradoxes come from the conflict between the left and right hemispheres of your brain. The left hemisphere is the "scientific" one that breaks things down and analyzes them. The right hemisphere focuses more on holistic summation. Very simplistically, the left does science, and the right does religion and music. He claims that Western society has become overly dominated by leftern-hemisphere thinking and it's really destructive to us.
4. Mere Christianity by C.S Lewis (book; I've read about 40%, just to try and understand the Christian viewpoint. I kinda get it, but still having a hard time making the leap to a moral god.)
5. Can science explain everything? (book; John Lennox is an Oxford mathematician and great speaker on the subject of science and religion. Just watch any of his interviews on YouTube.)

Ultimately, I believe no matter which path you choose, you will end up with paradoxes and contradictions. Whether you choose religion, atheism, pantheism, agnosticism, you will end up with irresolvable paradoxes and tensions.

Choose your paradox.