Even with all I’ve experienced, I cannot posit the existence of God as a justified true belief.  This requires a very strict set of conditions for proving that we really know something, stating that we can only know something if we believe it to be true, and we can demonstrate sufficient evidence that it is true.

I feel that the concept of there being something outside our normal conscious perception is an innate idea, a thought that I believe to be inborn, or present within the mind at birth.  It has instrumental value because it contributes to a further good, not because it has intrinsic value of its own.

Reality is immaterial or spiritual because its perception is dependent on some minds or mind.

Some reject the use of reason in gaining knowledge of the nature of God and hold that religious belief can be based only on faith.

While some scientific theories are not capable of being proven true or false, they are instrumental in furthering scientific knowledge; also, such theories should only be seen as instruments in the pursuit of truth, not the grander view that they themselves reveal truth.

Belief in anything is wrong without evidence.  This position is usually used in arguing against a belief in God.

Explanations should be as simple and economical as possible and no more assumptions should be applied to an explanation than those that are absolutely necessary.

The first cause argument is a classic argument for the existence of God that states because all events in the natural world must have a cause, God must exist as the first initiator of these events.  It assumes that a regress without end back into time is unacceptable.

Infinite regress is an objection to a solution because it posits a series of explanations, each dependent on a previous one, going back without end into time.  This objection is commonly made, for example, by the atheist Bertrand Russell, of the first cause argument for God’s existence.

There are two kinds of teaching: one the simple dramatic style for the masses which is used to attract people, and second, the real, subtle, less-dramatic teaching that is revealed only to the inner elite.  They both have the same final cause, the end or goal, towards which a thing is brought into being, which in the case of religion is to benefit society.

There will be no eschatological verification.  This is the term used by John Hick to refer to a method, where the existence of God and other tenets of Christianity could be verified after death or after, Armageddon.  “Eschatology” is the study of the final days, hence postponed verification in the future.

The truth is we don’t know what created the universe, and we don’t know if or when or why humanity will die out.  But as far as how life began on earth, higher life forms developed from lower ones.  Through a series of genetic accidents, and natural selection of more adaptive beings in times of competition for scarce resources, living things of the present have come into being through billions upon billions of acts of reproduction over millions of years.

And every cosmological theory of how the present universe began is a great exercise in learning, but we then must figure out what happened before that, and before that, and so forth.  We are just falling further down the rabbit hole.  While the search for knowledge is of the utmost importance, the real goal is to enjoy the ride.

The essence of any human being is completely determined by the free choices made by that already-existing person.  I deny that God or anything else created a human nature that makes humans a certain way.  For existentialists, what we know as “Human Nature” is not something we inherit but is merely a generalization we make from the infinite number of ways of acting that people choose, and hence could have chosen differently.

Existentialism is what I rely on for inquiries into my mind.  It is a term for the branch of modern philosophy that explores an assortment of questions having to do with the individual’s lack of an essential nature, the absolute freedom he or she has to create his or her essence, and the modern problems of meaninglessness, alienation, the absurdity of life, and the absence of rational meaning in the universe.  It most importantly re-poses the question of why we exist.

Why is it so important to find out the why?  Sometimes when we ask the why, I wonder if what we’re doing is daring God to show itself (himself).  I think what we want out of life is meaning; the meaning of life to reveal itself in a way that restores order and gives us hope that all of this isn’t just meaningless chaos.