Struggling with atheism, freaking out

[moonbogg]

Sometimes my mind goes a little crazy. When I was a theist, it was easy to make sense of why anything exists. God did it. That was simple enough and provided an answer that I could make sense of. I no longer believe that way, so now I am stuck and feel like I am going to lose it at times.
The problem is simple. I don't see how anyting could or should exist at all. Nothing makes sense to me. Nothing seems like it is geniune or real (when I think about it). I don't care what the physicists say about a universe coming about from nothing through quantum inflation. Quantum fluctuations and the possibility of inflation is certainly not nothing. This almost seems like a bad joke. Here I am. I bounced out of nothing and now I am trying to figure out how thats possible. It shouldn't be. No matter how simple an explanation, and no matter how convoluted the answer may be, the default state should still be nothingness. Of course, when I die I will get my nothingness, but for now I feel like I am in a computer simulation with no hardware manufacturer and no software engineers to speak of.
Sticking a god in the equation and simply saying it is timeless etc, might ease the confusion for now, but what made god and why should any god exist? I know you don't have an answer, but I feel like existing in this reality as a sane person is no different than being insane. Nothing should be here, nothing makes sense in this regard and I am too stupid to figure it out so i'm screwed.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Relax. It takes some getting used to, but you are on the right track. The biggest problem I had with my skepticism was the feeling of betrayal by loved ones (how could they lie to me like that?). You eventually become comfortable with not feeling like every answer is "God did it", and you'll begin to appreciate life more.

 

[Lonyo]

Imagine a big line.
No knowledge is at one end, and knowing everything is at the other end. You are somewhere near the "know nothing" end.
Nothing |-----------| (you) |--------------------------------------------------| Know everything

Now, there's a massive gap between what you know, and everything that could be known.
How can you understand everything, when you don't really know anything? You can't, so stop trying to overthink things based on massively incomplete information.

If you believe in God, you basically feel like you don't need to know everything, because God is everything, and he will explain anything and everything you can think of.
If you don't believe in God, suddenly you don't know who or what knows everything. But it's not you, so you can't and shouldn't be trying to explain stuff which is way beyond your abilities and knowledge.

And there are lots of things which NO ONE knows, which is why we don't have the answer to everything.
The people trying to bridge the gap between current knowledge and knowing everything are scientists, and they are not even close to having a full picture, which is why there's no hope for "regular" people like you or I. So there's no point thinking about it, unless you want to make your life thinking about it, in which case try becoming a scientist, otherwise accept that you are horribly ignorant in the grand scheme of things, and simply can't work out some things.

(This isn't you specifically, but basically people on the whole).

 

[slayer202]

you don't understand how it happened, but it did

there ya go, solved

 

[Thebobo]

parody thread?

 

[PieIsAwesome]

Atheism is obviously too much for you, go back to Jesus.

 

[moonbogg]

Relax. It takes some getting used to, but you are on the right track. The biggest problem I had with my skepticism was the feeling of betrayal by loved ones (how could they lie to me like that?). You eventually become comfortable with not feeling like every answer is "God did it", and you'll begin to appreciate life more.

See, I have experienced and still do experience that sense of deep appreciation that can only come from the inescapable position of faithless humility. I like not having the answers, because when I had them they were all wrong. Deconverting from faith was like being born again, but in a genuine way. But this existential mystery has me baffled.

 

[lxskllr]

Don't worry about it. Some of it will have to wait for the scientists of the future, or the masturbation of philosophers. It means fuck all right now. Don't be a dick. That's all you need to know.

 

[Aikouka]

Stop thinking that you must be able to answer every question immediately and by yourself, and things become a lot easier. You aren't feigning ignorance by doing this, but accepting that you do not know, do not have the utilities to find out, and may not even understand the answer anyway.

Heck, when all those smart people in white coats tell me how something happened, I still don't understand it at times!

 

[Charles Kozierok]

If it makes you feel any better -- and it may not -- you don't actually know anything less now than you did then. You're just more aware of it.

Saying "God did it" doesn't actually explain anything. Because the next question is always "where did God come from?" and the answer to that is either "we don't know" or "God has always existed". And you can say the same thing about the universe: "we don't know" or "the universe has always existed".

Believing in simple answers that make no sense can be comforting.. it's not easy to face difficult truths. Give yourself credit for making that effort. Know that over time you'll learn the answers to more questions than you now know, but that some will never be answered. Accept that life can be good even if we don't understand it all, and even if we don't have some specific "purpose".

 

[Ns1]

obligatory "i don't know therefore aliens"

 

[tcG]

Whatever you do, follow where your reason leads. It's better to be an atheist than a believer who is totally stuck struggling to deny their atheist tendencies. True knowledge of God (if God exists) would surely come after doubt.

 

[Kadarin]

Just remember that "we don't know yet" is a perfectly valid and acceptable answer.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

...the default state should still be nothingness.

This is an assumption of yours that is not based on any facts whatsoever. In fact, it should be pretty obvious that it is nonsensical to suggest that "nothingness" could even be a "state" at all. "State" of what?

 

[tcG]

Just remember that "we don't know yet" is a perfectly valid and acceptable answer.

Yep, agnosticism is more reasonable than atheism, IMO.

Edit: Very good questions in your OP, moonbogg, at least IMO. The "why is there something rather than nothing" has mystified me ever since I started thinking.

 

[amdhunter]

Atheism is obviously too much for you, go back to Jesus.

:thumbsup:

 

[AnonymouseUser]

See, I have experienced and still do experience that sense of deep appreciation that can only come from the inescapable position of faithless humility. I like not having the answers, because when I had them they were all wrong. Deconverting from faith was like being born again, but in a genuine way. But this existential mystery has me baffled.

Even when I was still a brainwashed child I became overwhelmed with how small I was in the universe, so religion really doesn't address that either. Just learn to accept what you do know and be open to new ideas. We may not know everything, but we can always add to that limited knowledge so that one day someone may know.

 

[Jeff7]

Yeah, the whole "why is existence here?" thing has been around for awhile.
Or I've heard it put, "Why does the Universe go to all the bother of existing?"

In my mind, "why" often assumes that there is a purpose, and that something is there to give a thing that purpose. As far as "why does something do what it does?" when asking about the behavior of a thing or an action, I prefer Feynman's musings on it.

I see it as there not really being any "why" in the sense of some other entity having assigned it purpose. It's just what this type of stuff does. We've got our bubble of spacetime stuff, that presumably exists in some other place. We've got stuff like neutrons and protons that interact in various ways, and that's just how they are, by simple happenstance. They do what they do. Maybe elsewhere in this Universe they do different things. Maybe in other universes they do very different things. Maybe there, the different thing they do is to not exist in the first place. In those universes, there wouldn't be any people around to ask why they (the people or the particles) don't exist in their default state of not existing.

Of course, when I die I will get my nothingness, but for now I feel like I am in a computer simulation with no hardware manufacturer and no software engineers to speak of.

If you want to have fun with it, we could be in some computer simulation. Or maybe an advanced entity's imagination, which is essentially a simulation as well. If it's all done very well, we'd have no way of knowing it. Here's the flipside: Let's say this is a simulation, and it's so immense that the simulators themselves can't interact with us in any way we can detect or perceive, or else they simply aren't interested in doing so, then do they even matter? For any practical purpose, do they even exist? It's theorized that protons themselves have a half life, thought to be many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe. Half life is an exercise in probability though. Going on that, there's a chance that every proton in Earth will reach the end of its life and decay in December of this year. But it's so immensely mindblowingly improbable that you can say with a lot of confidence that it isn't going to happen.
Or what Stephen Hawking said about what's outside of our Universe: It looks very much like whatever's out there cannot affect us in any manner whatsoever, so it effectively doesn't matter, beyond perhaps our own curiosity, should we ever figure out a way of exiting our Universe's event horizon.

Sticking a god in the equation and simply saying it is timeless etc, might ease the confusion for now, but what made god and why should any god exist? I know you don't have an answer, but I feel like existing in this reality as a sane person is no different than being insane. Nothing should be here, nothing makes sense in this regard and I am too stupid to figure it out so i'm screwed.

That's always brought up. If someone says that the Universe had a beginning, it's always asked what came before that. The theist answer is often that there was a creator, and the hand-wave answer was then that that creator simply always existed, and that's good enough. Yet the idea that the Universe may have always existed in some manner, without a creator, that is viewed as impossibly ludicrous. I'm not sure how it makes sense to have a creator that is likely more complex than the Universe, and say "he always existed," but that it makes no sense to have a Universe that always existed.

And of course, terms like "always" and "existed" carry with them a reference to time, and causality. These things may well fall apart, or change significantly, as you would go backwards and approach a point where our laws of physics crap their pants and run home crying. Defining something "before" time existed could get a bit hairy, because you'd need some new terminology to reference that before-time, without referencing time.

 

[Mixolydian]

Even if you don't know the answer to life's mysteries, does it really matter? No. Just stop thinking about it. Not everything can be explained or even needs to be explained.

 

[tcG]

^ Whether or not it really matters is itself a mysterious, philosophical question. You can't escape it.

 

[tcG]

That's always brought up. If someone says that the Universe had a beginning, it's always asked what came before that. The theist answer is often that there was a creator, and the hand-wave answer was then that that creator simply always existed, and that's good enough. Yet the idea that the Universe may have always existed in some manner, without a creator, that is viewed as impossibly ludicrous. I'm not sure how it makes sense to have a creator that is likely more complex than the Universe, and say "he always existed," but that it makes no sense to have a Universe that always existed.

Here's the cosmological argument, if it helps. I think it's been pretty well established, by philosophy in Plato's time and by science since the Big Bang theory, that the universe is finite. So there's that.

1. Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
2. A causal loop cannot exist.
3. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
4. Therefore, a First Cause (or something that is not an effect) must exist.

As for why God has to be eternal, if you accept the cosmological argument, then "First Cause" must necessarily be eternal.

 

[Kadarin]

In my mind, "why" often assumes that there is a purpose, and that something is there to give a thing that purpose.

I hear that a lot, in that people believe that life and the universe as a whole must exist for a reason and that we have purpose, but I really can't wrap my head around such a need. Can the universe simply exist without purpose? What if we as thinking beings weren't intended to be here, but just evolved naturally because the environment allowed us to?

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

The main thing about atheism IMO is that you have to be comfortable with not knowing some stuff, and you have to be comfortable with admitting to yourself that there are some things that we don't (and may never) know.

I know that it's not much solace to just say 'relax', but that's pretty much what you need to figure out how to do; learn how to relax and be comfortable with not knowing exactly why or even how. It doesn't mean you're dumb, it doesn't mean you're screwed. It doesn't mean anything, because there may not even be an answer.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not the universe is laughing behind your back.


Just deal with it.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Something I learned EARLY on in my career.

Don't worry about ANYTHING that's out of your control.