Hi guys,

Here is the belief essay that I mentioned. Give me any feedback that you think is useful. Don't worry about grammar or spelling (I've already got an editor working on it,thank you sweetie.) I would especially like any thoughts from the crew over at Skeptic Friends. Thanks to everybody in advance.
Liz

I Believe in the Permanency of Nothing and the Possibility of Anything : By Elizabeth Weiblen

If every piece of information in the universe were a grain of sand then the human race would be like children on a vast beach examining one grain of sand at a time. Every discovery and every invention is one grain that we put in the pail of knowledge that all human beings share. We put the grains in one by one and when we have filled the pail we will still barely have touched the beach. I think the most important thing we can know, is that we know virtually nothing. I am neither a materialist nor an idealist, as those choices have been defined to me. I guess I will define myself as a possibleist. Is the world definable strictly in terms of physical reality, a collection of tangible components and chemical reactions? This option is a definite possibility. Is there a spiritual dimension to the world, an element that we cannot quantify but nevertheless has a profound effect on our existence. This option is just as possible as the first.

I was raised Southern Baptist which is a branch of Christianity that is fundamentalist in its views. By fundamentalism I mean that Southern Baptists believe in a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible. A few examples of these beliefs are: The world was created in six days by God. God is an omnipotent being who exists in the form of three manifestations Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Son manifestation was given birth to by a virgin in order to live as a human being and eventually be sacrificed in order to bridge the divide between human beings and God and allow the spiritual aspects of human beings immortality. When I was a child and belief was easy to come by, I believed this fully and without question. As I grew, and my experience of the world broadened, my ability to believe without consideration narrowed. Now, I find myself standing on a philosophical tightrope suspended equidistance between rationality and spirituality. Standing there without either enough concrete information or enough personal enlightenment to have the faith to move in either direction. When you don’t have faith, what’s left are possibilities.

The road of materialism seems to require you to have faith that everything you come in contact with, and will be affected by, will be measurable on some scale that makes sense to human beings. I believe that this is entirely possible. I also believe the universe is infinite, or as close to infinite as to make no difference, and within it lies the possibility for an infinite number of manifestations. Some of these may be ones that human beings have already imagined or possibly encountered, like ghosts, angels, demons, gods and monsters, but the possibility also exists for entities so far out of our range that we would not be able to define them at all ( H.P. Lovecraft type thinking but hopefully with less insanity and world eating ). I also think that materialism as it has been defined is fluid in nature. Every new discovery expands the definition. When people first began to believe that the world was defined by the laws of science, they hadn’t even seen a germ yet. Atoms, radiation, dark matter… the list of discoveries goes on and on, and will keep going on indefinitely, who says that one day somebody in a lab won’t see a pattern in their data and turn around to say “ I know how this is going to sound but… I think I just proved the existence of gremlins.”

Now let’s have a look at idealism. This belief system seems to hinge on the idea that humans are possessed of a spirit or soul that cannot be defined in physical terms but is the most important aspect of ourselves. This is also entirely possible. I like the idea of spirituality. If there were some way to manufacture faith, I would do it immediately. I know many people with a true and abiding faith in Christianity. I am related to many of them. They are for the most part the happiest and most serene people I know. Unhappily, you can’t buy faith and you can’t make it. Either faith comes to you organically or it doesn’t. There may be a God and there may be an afterlife… and there may not be. I stand directly on the balance point of this issue. I have just enough of my spiritual upbringing left, that when I consider that there is the possibility that there may be a God, I also consider the possibility that I will go to Hell for thinking of him as a possibility and not a reality.

Since this essay is about what I believe, which also opens the door for what I don’t believe, I will give you the quick and dirty run down on my beliefs. I believe in Karma, the comic book version of it anyway, when you do good it invites good to come back to you and vice versa. If there is a God, I don’t believe he is a man who sits in the sky and micromanages the lives of human beings. I believe that we are not alone in the universe, and it is a bit arrogant of us to believe that somehow we were the only ones to hit intelligent life form jackpot. I believe that any day that goes by without something catastrophic happening, such as a meteor strike or plague, was a good day. I also believe that beliefs are like emotions, you can describe them to someone else, but you cannot make them experience them like you do.

I guess, in a way, what I believe in most is learning. What I really depend on, is the fact that I will know something tomorrow that I didn’t know today. So let my belief system be based on the importance of the accumulation of knowledge. There aren’t any actual churches devoted to it, but there are libraries and schools. There isn’t any system of morality based on the quest for knowledge, in fact many institutions devoted to morality seem to frown on too much knowledge. The quest for knowledge has never started any holy wars, although it has improved the weaponry quite a bit. It definitely has its own martyrs, the father of the Socratic Method, just to name one. The best part about having learning as your belief system is that you can practice it alone or in groups, and you never have to dress up to do it.

To sum it all up, there are no certainties in life, only possibilities. Physical laws are there to be broken, and spirituality is an invisible needle in a haystack that never ends. My beliefs about the nature of ultimate reality are that, so far as I can tell, there is no ultimate reality. Actually in all truth I don’t think there is even a proximate reality. There is only what we know now and what we will know tomorrow and what we may never know.