Interesting. Now I’m thinking about my own journey.
Having been raised Christian… and in a very evangelical, pentecostal tradition no less… I wasn’t exactly encouraged to think like this early on… great swathes of things were simply to be taken on faith, and doubt simply referred over to the appropriately doctrinal section of apologetics. It did not help that both of my parents hold bachelor’s degrees in Christian theology.
Nonetheless… they couldn’t entirely shield me from the world. The start of my journey, so far as I can recall, came while studying physics… which I did before high school, incidentally, as I was always a voracious reader. I read about things like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle… and after thinking about the implications of them, I realized that I was confused.
“Hang on, this can’t be right. God is omniscient, and thus has knowledge of everything, everywhere in the universe, irregardless of such pettiness as the speed of light being the maximum speed for transfer of information. The tools of Science may not be able to determine both the exact position and momentum of a particle, but God must know!”
Of course, my initial reaction was wrong. But I’d spotted a problem in my worldview, and additional study of science seemed to reinforce my nagging doubts. I didn’t have a word to explain it, then… indeed, I didn’t have the words to fully articulate the problem until I read Atlas Shrugged in college, and thereby learned of the law of non-contradiction. But it was seeing that contradiction that first got me thinking in terms of “either my religious beliefs are true, or a large body of experimentally verified science is true, but not both”… and having realized that, it left me open to changing my mind on the subject later on. Which, fortunately, I did.
The most common Christian answer to that contradiction, when translated into modern parlance, is that God is the hardware on which the universe runs. Not only can he know both the position and speed of a particle at any given time, but he, in fact, must know it at all times or it would cease to exist.
The fact that some philosophers could figure this out over a thousand years ago is impressive. The fact that the majority of “believers” just blink in incomprehension and then go right on thinking of God as just a slightly mutated human who lives in the sky is disheartening. Especially now that we routinely fly above the blue and know that what’s “up there,” in the physical sense, is just more sky.
Interesting. Now I’m thinking about my own journey.
Having been raised Christian… and in a very evangelical, pentecostal tradition no less… I wasn’t exactly encouraged to think like this early on… great swathes of things were simply to be taken on faith, and doubt simply referred over to the appropriately doctrinal section of apologetics. It did not help that both of my parents hold bachelor’s degrees in Christian theology.
Nonetheless… they couldn’t entirely shield me from the world. The start of my journey, so far as I can recall, came while studying physics… which I did before high school, incidentally, as I was always a voracious reader. I read about things like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle… and after thinking about the implications of them, I realized that I was confused.
“Hang on, this can’t be right. God is omniscient, and thus has knowledge of everything, everywhere in the universe, irregardless of such pettiness as the speed of light being the maximum speed for transfer of information. The tools of Science may not be able to determine both the exact position and momentum of a particle, but God must know!”
Of course, my initial reaction was wrong. But I’d spotted a problem in my worldview, and additional study of science seemed to reinforce my nagging doubts. I didn’t have a word to explain it, then… indeed, I didn’t have the words to fully articulate the problem until I read Atlas Shrugged in college, and thereby learned of the law of non-contradiction. But it was seeing that contradiction that first got me thinking in terms of “either my religious beliefs are true, or a large body of experimentally verified science is true, but not both”… and having realized that, it left me open to changing my mind on the subject later on. Which, fortunately, I did.
The most common Christian answer to that contradiction, when translated into modern parlance, is that God is the hardware on which the universe runs. Not only can he know both the position and speed of a particle at any given time, but he, in fact, must know it at all times or it would cease to exist.
The fact that some philosophers could figure this out over a thousand years ago is impressive. The fact that the majority of “believers” just blink in incomprehension and then go right on thinking of God as just a slightly mutated human who lives in the sky is disheartening. Especially now that we routinely fly above the blue and know that what’s “up there,” in the physical sense, is just more sky.