Root of All Belief

I am at root a physical thinker and learner, but when that is not possible, I think my next best learning language is visual. I can't listen to people drone on and expect to learn half of what is expected. I didn't have a physical representation of God, revelation, the spirit, priesthood, etc., to see how it all related, so how better to know what I believe that to map it out visually.

I planned this great little application (originally php, later javascript) that would allow me to add 'Tenets' and relate them to each other logically (IF -> THEN, AND, OR, NOT, etc.) to make a web of belief. It was a great idea, but really flawed at its root: I didn't have absolute knowledge of much at all in which to ground my beliefs; I really only had a belief with some certainty.

It turns out that I was not the first one to come up with the idea of probabilistic logic. When I read about it, I was amazed at how well it fit my problem. All I had to do was make my Tenets application into a probabilistic logic network. Then I could see how much I really believe.

By this time, I had already pretty much come to the conclusion that my beliefs were all rooted in the idea that God exists. If God exists, it would make sense that God would want to create wonders (earth, the universe, and mankind) and would want to talk to us through revelation. Mormon theology is deeply rooted in revelation; prophetic and personal. From there, we get all other manner of beliefs: priesthood, miracles, ordinances, church organization, etc. We can trace it all back to God. If God doesn't exist, then it is all moot. Thus my radical change from a believing Mormon to an atheist, agnostic, or whatever. It's not that I found a religion that explains my purpose better, it is that I don't believe in ANY religion. As Dawkins put it, I had already stopped believing in all the other gods (thought of them as nice, interesting, or weird myths) and just took it one step further to stop believing in the last god that I had held onto since my childhood.

Since I had ruled out the root of all belief, my religious views crumbled and I kind of found my Tenets application no longer necessary. But I was thinking that someday it might be nice to revisit and put scientific discovery in where God once was. How do I explain the universe now? Someday when I get around to it, I will dust off my javascript skillz and make something cool.

The Impossibility of Atheism

Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

--Isaac Asimov

Logically speaking, it is impossible to prove the non-existence of something. Or is it? Where is the logical flaw in:

1. If A then not B
2. A
3. Not B

Where A is some natural phenomenon, B is the existence of God.

All we have do is find something that is incongruous with the existence of God and poof! God formally no longer exists. Philosophically speaking, I am in way over my head here.  People have been working on this problem for thousands of years. So really all this does is show that my thoughts really aren't any higher than your thoughts.

The book "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" gives way better proofs than I could come up with. Well, it rebuts all the proofs for the existence of God that are very clever, showing that none of them hold water. But still, none of them prove that God does not exist. It just shows how hard it is to prove that God does exist (even though logically speaking, that is supposed to be the easier case to prove.)

In the end, I don't think it is necessary to prove one way or the other. God has failed to give sufficient proof of his/her/its existence and science has done a great job of providing evidence that God did not take part in X physical law. Or more correctly, science has provided evidence that God was not required to take part in X physical law. When I look at the human eye, I see a very flawed, yet quite wondrous organ. But when a intelligent design believer looks at the human eye, they see the hand of God. We see what we want to see, believe what reinforces what we already believe and leave the rest of it outside our boxes.

So I think I will join Isaac Asimov and say that for all intents and purposes I am an atheist. If God really wants people to believe, he/she/it will have to do a lot better job of providing evidence of existence. And don't tell me that God can't provide evidence of existence without taking away our agency. An all-powerful, all-knowing, omni-present God should certainly be able to provide a way. If not, they lack the power to convince me.