Agnostic Guide Chapter 1 - Creation

In The Beginning

I was born. This was a momentous event in my life. It was truly a defining moment for me. Nine months before my birth there was a physical conception literally defining me from the DNA of two people, but I really felt like I became an independent part of this world when I was finally born. Truthfully, I don’t know if I felt that way or not when it happened since I don’t remember the event at all. However, this description of how I came to be is an indisputable fact regardless of your views on how momentous it actually was for anyone other than me.

I’ve now seen the birth of my own two children so I can sort of imagine how they might have felt beyond the complete shock of coming out of the womb. They might have been thinking “What the heck is going on here?” which pretty much describes the beginning of life. It also describes the middle bits and probably the end of our lives when we finally get there. I’m not in a real big hurry to find out that last part for myself but I think it’s safe to assume I’ll have some variation of “What the heck was all of that?” rattling around in my head at the very end of it.

I do know my birth was the beginning of the universe for me because I lack personal knowledge for anything before that event. The people existing before me can tell what they know about the past before I existed, but I have to trust what they’re telling me is true since I wasn’t there. My own children have to trust I’m telling them an unexaggerated truth when I talk about my life before they were born.

It’s fairly easy to craft stories and tall tales about how much better it was growing up ages ago while making the stories sound plausible. All you need to do is have enough people share similar stories with enough conviction for false stories to seem true. The romanticized past is usually better than reality in the present and those stories can be comforting to believe. The best example of an overly romanticized past is the story of Santa Claus. I'll discuss that more later.

I sometimes joke about not being born and instead say I mysteriously fell from the sky one day. It’s a bit of a play on the tall tales like the stork bringing babies or finding babies in cabbage patches. I sometimes told my children they also fell from the sky. Perhaps it’s just something in me knowing about our connection to the stardust. Regardless, I think I say it because it sounds more unique than saying they’re simply a combination of me and their mother.

Think: Have souls always existed along with an established ancestry and related family traits?

Children clearly possess psychological characteristics and physical traits of their parents and ancestors, for better or worse, which shows they're most definitely products of our physical human bodies. They don’t have their own spark of life and humanity completely separate and distinct from their family. They wouldn’t necessarily adhere to the same physical ancestry if the essence of our being was a supernatural soul detached from all other souls.

I have to rely on the universe around me for any clues it may reveal concerning the truth about what my fellow humans tell me. Some people tell me we have an eternal soul, but our personalities appear to be related to our genetics. The creation of our bodies is a physical event and the idea of our souls always existing just doesn’t match what I’ve seen and experienced.

I can’t take all of the stories of my ancestors as an unquestionable truth when they don’t have a flawless track record of describing the universe at large. My words shouldn't be taken as an absolute truth either, regardless of the number of people concurring with anything written here. Eventually more knowledge may be found which will be the truth no matter how many people believe it.

Think: Copernicus determined the Earth revolves around the Sun somewhat recently, in 1543.

What we believe about new ideas is tainted and influenced by everything else we think we know. The Earth revolving around the Sun was finally established as a fact and confirmed by scientific methods. The discovery was achieved despite what everyone else thought at the time.

The sun as the center of the solar system was still true even when people thought some dude in a chariot brought us the big yellow light every day. Truths exist regardless of the popular beliefs contradicting them. There are countless truths existing in reality right now even though we don’t know them yet. Human knowledge doesn’t make or break a truth.

It took some time, and many arguments, for simple physical truths about our solar system to be believed by the masses. Long held beliefs invented by more primitive minds than ours imagined the Earth was the center of the universe with a heaven up in the stars. People were incarcerated and executed for challenging these old beliefs. It used to be logical to think the Sun revolved around us. That view was based on what we could observe from our vantage point as the conceited center of existence. All of the universe must exist for us if you think you’re the center of it all.

Additionally, if someone believes in a flat Earth they can easily take a nice long trip around the world and report back on the locations of the edges. I’ve traveled quite a bit and haven’t come across an edge of a flat Earth yet. Granted, I haven’t made it across every bit of this planet but I can still understand and believe in evidence for Earth as a roundish sphere. We now have the luxury of technology to reveal so much more of our world and the universe around us. I put a lot more trust in unbiased technology than I do in highly biased old books.

Our ability to observe and understand the true nature of the universe is improving with each objective exploration and unbiased discovery. Our collective knowledge is relatively young compared to the age of the universe, and very much incomplete. We should always remain open to the possibility of what we know today being reevaluated as grossly inaccurate. Knowledge needs to be continuously updated and adapted based on newly discovered information.

Is the Big Bang theory the final answer on creation? Of course not! It may be the best answer we can get right now from our vantage point inside this universe. Our human limitations may always serve as a hindrance to finding all of the answers. I don't have a limit to my imagination despite the limits of our abilities. I just can’t imagine the Big Bang is the entire story. The universe is a very big and mysterious place to live. I believe we know so very little about it compared to everything that could be known.

The Scientific Method

I trust in the scientific method more than faith, for the simple fact it seeks to let reality speak for itself concerning what should be considered knowledge. Religion demands an unquestioning faith in outlandish claims. Science builds up claims from observations and predictions for how things actually work. The scientific method supports a theory only when its predictions can be confirmed.

Science must challenge a theory when its predictions prove false, since the goal of science is to reveal the existing truths of reality. Questions are expected and add to discovery. In contrast, religion always challenges my questions and seeks to conceal itself in mystery. Religious dogma doesn’t work under the scrutiny of the scientific method. Science embraces criticism and deals with it directly. Science isn’t afraid to be updated with newly discovered truths, since scientific discovery demands we question everything.

The scientific method has been a part of natural science since the 17th century, but don’t let its youthful glow detract you from its real benefits. It consists of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment leading to the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. It doesn’t say “because I said so” when you ask it why. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon which could be right or wrong. If it’s wrong, a hypothesis can be changed and fixed. This is unlike the holy books which were apparently written before the invention of the eraser.

The scientific method works in stark contrast with religious assertions of truth insisting it’s right because the religion says so. A self-referential proof is only empty words from a parent lacking patience. Do it because I said so! The parental guidance in this case comes from religious beliefs chiseled in stone or scribbled on parchment by some self-appointed holy man. I could safely say they were all holy men because I haven’t heard much about women inventing religions back in the day.

The women of our ancestors were too busy creating little people of their own instead of fooling around with mythologies. Maybe men had creation envy, causing them to make up stories of father gods to create men before women and artificially elevate their importance. Only a man could dream up the kind of nonsense as the story of Eve being made from Adam’s rib. That particular story for the origin of women is more likely an old man’s sexist imagination. Some people think those stories accurately describe human history as a physical fact. All I can say to that is: really?!?

Our House In The Middle of Our Street

I can’t describe what’s under the exterior of my house with the rough concrete shape molded by the ground. Would you assume the builders must have crafted every nook and cranny for it to fit so perfectly on top of the rough ground below it? Of course it’d be silly to say they molded the concrete first and then put it on the ground. The concrete was wet and it just adapted to what was there before it hardened.

If the builders of my house are even alive anymore, they can’t describe exactly what the bottom side looks like. They only smoothed out the top side when they built it and the bottom filled in on its own. Deeper under the house is even more earth connected to the house in a way we can’t easily describe. It holds up the house, so certainly the builders had their hand in that too, right? They must have crafted the environment around it for our house to exist so perfectly right here in the middle of our street.

Yes, I intentionally referenced a Madness song there. It’s what I usually think of when I see a reference to "our house" since I’m a child of the 80s. The existence of physical connections between things doesn’t always mean the connections were intentionally made or designed. This silly connection to a Madness song is simply a happy accident. I can say with great confidence they didn’t write the song so it could be referenced here.

Think: Can you examine the carpet under your feet and accurately describe the builders of the house and know what they think of the current occupants?

The house I lived in while writing this bit was built in 1959, many years before I was born. The builders couldn’t have possibly dreamed of my occupancy in this house. They couldn’t have imagined I’d sit here with a laptop computer and wirelessly connect to the rest of the world.

The intelligent builders of my house didn’t have a direct connection to my writing these words and spreading them through the Internet. I use the house for this purpose beyond the design and intent of the builders. There’s only unintentional connections between us based on unrelated improvements to the basic structure they initially put here.

The house was built from natural materials already existing in our environment, just like our bodies and minds come from the atoms of exploded stars. The furnishings of the house and the connectivity to the outside world were improvements completely unrelated to the initial builders, just like organic life itself could be unrelated to the building blocks of the universe.

We’re very primitive in our understanding of the universe and how it works. There are many connections which appear to be more direct or intentional than they probably are. A builder of the universe may not have dreamed of the possibility of our existence. The simple fact we exist doesn’t mean we connect directly and intentionally to the first origin of the universe.

I’m here to say there are no easy answers to any of those types of questions. Our vantage point in this finite time and space greatly limits us. We’re far from knowing and understanding everything about this universe and anything existing beyond it or before it. Not having the answers from science or anywhere else isn’t a good excuse for clinging to primitive myths to fill the void of what we don’t know.

Modern humanity doesn’t possess the full knowledge of the universe as it exists, or how it was created. Don’t let those yelling people on the television fool you as they beg for your money to serve their god. We do know much more now than we ever have, but only a fool would tell you they know everything there is to know, and it’s all in this one book their ancestors wrote for us.

The list of fools can include some hardcore anti-theists claiming they have proof this is a naturally existing universe; the Big Bang theory as a possible origin for the universe doesn’t ultimately explain from where, what, or why this universe came to be. It's just a theory for how it all started. It was developed from a vantage point inside this universe well after the event occurred. It’s just like me sitting here in a house trying to imagine the builders from 1959. If I said voices told me the names and favorite colors of my house builders then you’d question my sanity.

It’s potentially impossible to explain the root cause and source of the universe from inside this creation, let alone know what a possible creator might think about us and what we do. We may never learn about the actual first origin of the universe simply because we weren’t there. We currently can't view the universe from any other perspective than right here at this moment in time.

Religious Creation

Our history is full of first origin or creation theories. These theories came from mythologies and religions before science advanced enough to conceive of one. We know humanity has been creating religious beliefs for as long as we’ve been smart enough to verbally pass down and eventually record our history.

Let’s consider the entirely false legends of King Arthur. Some people reading this are just now learning King Arthur is fiction. The stories aren’t even embellished from a real person, but you can find polls where lots of people think there really was a King Arthur. I hope they think he was just a regular king born into the family business, instead of a boy literally pulling a sword from a stone. I wouldn’t be surprised to find people believing that part of the story too, simply because they didn’t think too deeply about it. Our gullibility can be a big problem. We need to think more deeply about what we believe and the origins for those ideas.

Think: Why are holy texts from one specific time frame in the past? Why aren’t they inspired to be created or expanded upon today? Where’s the Newer or Newest Testament?

We now create fewer religions that people take seriously. You more easily see the fiction in them if you weren’t indoctrinated as a child with their stories. What do most people think of Scientology, or Joseph Smith finding the now missing golden plates in New York? The advances of humanity help us identify the new nonsensical fictions when they pop up. Why don’t people put the old religions through the same modern lens which leads them to reject Scientology and Mormonism?

We’re mostly left with the religions created when humans were even more in the dark than we are now. I think it’s because our ancestors got better with their religious creations and included fewer elements in the stories which could be disproved. They indoctrinated their children with the fairy tales and reinforced it all as religious communities, so the few people not believing it ended up looking like the oddballs. Many people like to believe these religions have answers to our questions about the universe. However, the people giving us these answers knew even less about the universe than we do now.

The popular religions surviving today have no supernatural places on Earth, like Mount Olympus which obviously doesn't have the gods literally living there. Anything which could physically disprove current religions is conveniently out of reach. Where are the heavens above us? It can’t be proven true or false by scientific methods and religions get to rely on faith alone to claim their truth.

I could make a claim this book you’re reading is the holy and inspired word of a true creator nobody else knows but me. Can you disprove a previously unknown god inspired this book to be written? Whatever critiques you have for that idea should be applicable to any other gods believed today. Would you bet your eternal life this book isn’t the Newest Testament?

Think: Why should anyone believe our primitive ancestors are the only ones who talked to our creator and wrote the real truth about creation in one of their ancient books?

Most religions believe everything was created by a supreme being. That idea is even more incomplete for me than the Big Bang theory. It doesn’t answer the question of where this supreme being came from and where that entity is right now. If it can easily be said God always existed without a creator, then it could just as easily be said the universe has always existed without a creator.

A creator would have to be even more complicated and powerful to create a universe with this level of complexity and power. The complicated nature of the universe is used as an argument why it couldn’t just exist on its own, yet the same argument can be made for why a supreme being couldn’t just exist on its own either.

The undesigned existence of this messy, unintelligent universe is much more likely than the undesigned existence of an intelligent and powerful being. Even if we assume such a being got bored and decided to create this universe, why would it create these unusual creatures on one little speck of a planet? The intelligent creator is massively wasteful of space for no imaginable reason to do so.

Creating the Creator

Religions are very much a product of geography and the teachings you receive from your family and the society found at your specific location. Family tradition is a common bond, but it isn’t a substitute for truth. Families should be willing to update their traditions when they’re wrong. I’m not selling my daughter off in trade for a bunch of goats and I’m not willing to marry my brother’s widow if he dies without a son. These are some traditions of my Christian ancestry.

I hope my own children take whatever traditions I’ve passed to them and throw away the bad ones while making new ones of their own. I hope they’re better than all generations before them. Why wouldn’t we all want that? Some people want their children to do exactly as they did just because they did it. It’s a limiting desire hampering progress across humanity.

Where your family originates from and what your ancestors believed is a strong determinant for what you believe right now. Most people follow this method of passively choosing their religions and beliefs. I haven’t met very many people researching the world’s religions and picking the best one for themselves regardless of what their family or society believes. We put more time and effort into researching major purchases in our lives, but we tend to just accept religion without the same amount of effort or scrutiny. Why don’t you just drive the exact same car as your parents instead of messing around with picking the right one for you?

Since each religion has a geographic area of origin, religions are spread from that origin to the rest of the world by their followers when they move. Religions are created by humans and spread from person to person and parent to child the same way languages and traditions are taught. Religions spread the same way as marketing and sales influence the adoption of a new product in our daily lives. People are converted to new beliefs in the same way people learn a new language or decide to eat a specific brand of popcorn.

Think: Would you know the same creator as you or your neighbor might believe in today if you were born on a small island isolated from the rest of the world?

The isolated island is a common thought experiment to demonstrate the geographic and social aspects of things like our religious beliefs. If you currently believe in a religion as it was taught to you by others, then how would you have discovered the same belief in isolation without people to teach you the belief? How did the people spreading those religious ideas really discover their supposed truths? Can you picture yourself as one of those originators of belief and really think anyone else should believe you if you said you talked to our creator?

If I tell you biblia is the Spanish word for this thing you’re reading then you’d have to take it on faith that I’m right if you don’t know Spanish. It’s easier to believe it if more people tell you the same thing. After you’re somewhat certain it’s a consistent message then you could pass that translation on to others as a fact. If people in another town start saying it’s libro, then what do you do? If half of the world is saying one word and half is saying the other, what is the truth and what do you choose to believe?

That’s where we are with religion and the various competing interpretations of beliefs about the universe. We’re left trying to figure out who’s right. We have so many people believing they’re right because it’s what they think they know, as a part of a long-standing groupthink. This isn’t doubleplusgood like George Orwell’s 1984.

Perhaps none of that groupthink is right and the real universal truth is something none of us know. Maybe nobody can even speak the right language or formulate the right thoughts to ever describe or comprehend the true origin and first cause for the universe. This is the most likely truth to me, and is a core notion in my personal view of agnosticism.

A person developed in isolation would have no understanding of religion or any possible creator for them other than their parents, if they knew them. There’s just the vast unknown of the universe and the extreme limits of that person's knowledge. People may humanize some aspect of the unknown and create a god in their own likeness to make them feel less alone. They may try to explain their existence by creating a creator. If they pass these ideas of a creator on to others who believe the stories, then they’ve created a shared belief in a specific creator concept which can eventually grow into an entire religion.

Religions exist as simply as that. They are creations of humans just like the thoughts in this book. Religion only has validity with the people sharing in that belief. It is argued that having more believers makes a religion more valid. That type of validity is the same as the Santa Claus belief shared by many children around the world. It doesn’t make Santa Claus any more real if millions, or even billions, of children believe in him. He’s just a shared mythology propped up by human activities to make the myth come to life. The belief perpetuates because many people are doing the work to make him seem real to the true believers.

Our Creator

It takes a great leap of faith to believe we were created by an intelligent creator without an origin. It’s easier for me to believe our primitive ancestors developed this idea out of ignorance. It’s much easier to believe humanity created the gods to try to explain the unknown and why we exist. We are now grasping at the Big Bang theory as the new scientific answer for our first cause. We feel there must be a beginning and some sort of reason. None of it is a complete explanation by itself.

Think: If you didn’t know how humans were born, would you believe magic caused you to exist if someone told you that? How long did you believe in the stork or any other birth myth told to children?

My belief concerning our first cause is that humans don’t possess the answer beyond our own personal creation. The complexity of the universe doesn’t automatically mean it was intelligently designed. Complexity is often cited as the reason the universe was designed instead of existing naturally. The logical conclusion of intelligent design is that an intelligent designer is also so complicated it couldn’t have come about through natural causes. If so, then there must be an intelligent designer for the intelligent designer. This intelligent design argument would continue forever with the claim there must be an intelligent designer for the intelligent designer of the intelligent designer, and so on to infinity.

An infinite chain of intelligent designers is like the phrase turtles all the way down, which describes a turtle supporting the planet on its back. What supports the turtle? Well, of course, it's another turtle. It's turtles all the way down. Read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time if you don’t know about the amazing turtles holding us up. That’s also a really good book for better understanding the universe if you want something more meaningful with true expertise about the universe.

Perhaps our finite minds are forever unable to grasp the complexity of the universe and we may never understand its entirety and origin. Our ultimate creator, or first cause, may be lost to us somewhere in an infinite unknown. All I do know with certainty is that I personally don’t know. I also believe with near certainty none of us know. I’m agnostic regarding a first cause. I place my faith in a belief that the first cause for our existence is currently unknown and possibly unknowable. My faith is based on everything I know about the capabilities of the human mind and our current body of knowledge.

Chain of Creation

We only know as an absolute fact that the creator of each of us is our parents. Their parents created them, whose parents created them, and so on until we pass beyond recorded history and we have no real knowledge of how the first human developed or why. I’ve done a little research into my ancestry to figure out who begot whom, but I can only go back so far with it. It’s highly unlikely someone could write a book listing all those begets back to a first couple. If we’re willing to accept we don’t really know our ultimate creator, either in being or concept, we’re free from having to put faith in a god or a lack of god as that origin. Agnosticism doesn’t force an answer other than admitting we don’t really know.

Think: Is a storm on the other side of the planet more important to us than the weather over our heads at this very moment?

The known part of the chain of creation starts with ourselves, traces back to our parents, and continues to our children. Our immediate place in that chain is much more important and worthy of attention and efforts compared to the question of how the chain of creation was initially started or might ultimately end. Our part in all of humanity at this very moment is much more important and vital compared to the search for the origin of the universe.

You know you’re living now, but can you say with 100% certainty your existence is eternal? All I know is I’m living now. There's no valid reason to think my existence started before my conception, or that it will continue after this body expires. Anything else is wishful thinking based on the hopes and dreams of my fellow humans. I don’t believe it’s useful to waste what little time we have now on too much wishful thinking. It saddens me to see people I know and love wasting any part of their lives on unproven and essentially useless beliefs. This is part of the reason why I feel the need to write out my beliefs in this book. Maybe it might better inform someone I care about.

Freedom of Existence

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint holding that opinions should be formed on the basis of logic, reason, and science instead of authority, tradition, or dogmas. Regarding religion, freethinkers believe there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena. This freedom of thought is vital to being free from the authority of people claiming to speak for a god.

Such authority may sound legitimate, but so might the authority of a pedophile coming up to a child saying their father sent them. The unsuspecting child might do what this person says because they think the pedophile has the authority of their father even though they don’t even know each other. If the authority of a god was truly legitimate, then I firmly believe we would never hear a single disgusting news story about pedophiles serving as religious leaders under that authority.

Human authorities don’t tolerate such behavior, so why would a legitimate god allow those kinds of people to speak for them and behave as they do? This is yet another clue for me that religions simply aren’t true and their holy leaders are just humans like anyone else.

I’m saddened some of my extended family still associates with the Catholic Church. I’ve seen too much news about their pedophile priests and the role their leadership played in covering it up. They rarely sought punishment for the offenders among them and just kept pushing the problems around to different communities. It serves as proof to me that god doesn’t do anything for its believers and is another clue that the Abrahamic god doesn’t exist. It’s obviously a poor master for its worshipers if it allows pedophilia and so many other horrors to exist despite everyone’s prayers.

Think: What authority does any other being have over us if we are independent individuals with our own existence?

I only know with certainty that my parents created me and they no longer have any authority over me as an independent adult. Their authority only persists if I choose to follow them. The only authority over our being is the authority we allow, such as allowing the authority of a good and just society. It’s in our best interests to support and promote the authority of a beneficial society so we can participate in a better humanity. Of course this should have reasonable limits because no authority is absolute or unquestionable even when we choose to let them govern our actions.

We should live our lives with the same freedom of thought and freedom of will that we have with our parents. This type of freethought and freedom of existence is the true nature of our human existence. We aren’t just servants existing only to worship a needy deity. We aren’t just children only existing to tend to our father god.

The religions of humanity, given the available evidence, are inventions of humanity. At their best, religions may be a faint echo or shadow of some unknowable truth about the true origins of this one finite universe in a possibly infinite existence. I see no harm, and only benefits, for just waiting until I die to find out if there is anything more to me than this human body. If there is, I’d bet my life it has almost nothing to do with the religions dreamed up by our primitive ancestors.

I don't mean the major religions when I say that religions may be a faint echo of truth. Taoism or some sort of nature worship are what might have some echoes and shadows of a universal truth. They also may just be the echoes of very human desires for an eternal existence which may not be true. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve desired what we don’t actually have.

Who knows? Just wait. Live your life in the here and now. There’s really no harm in it because the guarantees of eternity aren’t proven or likely if you critically examine the ancient claims. Make the most of this life and quit worrying about what we can’t possibly know. I only know our human lives are a precious gift from our parents and this gift shouldn’t be wasted or destroyed. This idea is made truer without gods or eternal souls, since our lives might be that much more precious and rare. If this short physical existence is all we have then it should be cherished for all it is, despite what some religions tell us about an imagined higher existence.