Spiritual epiphany

This amazing bolt of insight hit me the other night that I felt like sharing.  I wasn't doing anything special.  It was late, I was done working for the night, so I was knitting on a hat and ignoring an old episode of "House" on my laptop.  I was a little spaced out (which is normal when I knit) and my mind wasn't even on spiritual matters, and then out of left field it struck me: 

Everyone in the world is equally wrong about god, the after life, and everything else that we try to explain in spiritual terms.  

It sounds dumb, but I actually find it reassuring.   To me this means that it's okay not to agree with how anyone has laid out religion or atheism because they are all wrong.  In fact I don't think that we are biologically capable of coming up with the right answer to any of life's big questions.  That doesn't mean we can't try, but it sure takes the stress out of coming up with the right answer.  Like most academics knowledge is of paramount importance to me, so it's weird to be comforted by the realization that in this life I'll never be capable of answering a question correctly.  

God stole my car keys

Yesterday, in a ridiculous moment of fuzzy-headedness brought on by to much heat and exertion and not enough food and water I "miss-placed" my car keys (they were never really lost, grrrrrr.)  I naturally began to panic when all my searching could not locate them, it did not help that I was at my field research site with no cell phone reception, and a 3.5 hour drive (plus a long embarrassing explanation to my colleagues) away from another set of keys.  

In a fit of near-tears-panic I found myself saying a little prayer in my head to locate the keys.  Even in my fuzzy headed state I thought what an odd thing to do.  Who exactly was I asking for help?  Did I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster had reached down from the sky and plucked the keys from my pocket?  Holding them hostage until I showed his meatballs the appropriate reverence? Of course not, but in the absence of any corporeal help it was, apparently, my first instinct to ask for assistance from some non-corporeal being.  

The logical part of my brain finally screamed at me loud enough to be heard over all the static, “retrace your steps, go through everything, they must be here! start with the most likely places…..” and quite quickly I literally ran right in to them (the keys having been laying right out in the open for nearly a hour while I frantically search all around them.)  And after I located the not-really-lost keys what was my immediate instinct?  To once again thank some non-corporal being.  

What did the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Shiva the destroyer, or Ra the sun god have to do with my not-really-lost keys?  Diddley.  But in my fuzzy headed state the need to rely on someone or something else was so strong I couldn’t contain it.  The impulse has to be more than simply the effect of our culture, for culture only names the non-corporeal being.  The impulse to give up control, to put a situation in someone else’s hands when feeling helpless, must be much deeper than that.  

Scientists, Atheists, and thoughts from childhood

After returning to school last fall I started reading a lot of science blogs.  The first, and probably still my all around favorite, was Living the Scientific Life.  I was drawn to a lot of other blogs about life as a scientist (especially blogs by women scientists), as well as blogs that discussed life science and evolution (which I tend think of as one and the same).  Without really intending to I also ended up reading many post about atheism (it sounds weird to call it an "ism" for some reason) and posts on the many problems with religion.  After reading so many of these posts, you can't help but wonder about what you "believe".  So this curiosity lead me listen to some old Dawkins lectures on the topics of religion and science, and watch some fantastic interview clips with David Attenborough discussing evolution and belief in the existence of god.  Their ideas are always so eloquent, insightful, and logical but I can never completely reconcile them with my own way of seeing the world. 

Today I read an intriguing post by GrrlScientist at the aforementioned Living the Scientific Life blog.  She discusses being raised to be a religious person , how this conflicted with her inquisitive nature and how this conflict lead her to become an atheist.  So that got me thinking about my childhood, and I wouldn't say everything clicked in to place but it has certainly helped me to make a little more sense of how I interpret the world and why.  

If my parents had a particular belief system in mind when they raised me I'm still not aware of it.  In fact if they raised me to be anything I would say it was to become a scientist.  Most people would say that's not surprising considering I was raised by an anthropologist and a biologist, but there was more to it than their own knowledge and interest in the natural world.  I think I was allowed to experience nature differently that many children are.  If I was curious I was encouraged, if I had questions they were answered and no answer was ever dumbed down (even if this meant teaching a very young child the details of how animals reproduce).  

One might expect such an upbringing to take away the mystery of life, but it did just the opposite.  For some inexplicable reason all these answers just made the world seem more mysterious and amazing, I was sure I would find something unexplainable if I just looked long and hard enough.  I never did, but I also never stopped looking.  Now I no longer seek the unexplainable with a belief it will remain unexplained, but instead seek the answers to the yet to be explained questions.

What more is a scientist than a child who was never taught not to ask questions? or at least never stopped questioning, even when told to.  And as a result of this childhood I am what exactly? certainly not religious, but not an atheist either.  I have a feeling that Professor Dawkins would tell me that to understand evolution, biology, and the origins of life on this planet and not proclaim oneself to be an atheist means that I am not following the scientific reasoning to it's logical conclusion.  Maybe that's true, perhaps there is a flaw in my primate brain that makes me perceive the natural world with too much awe causing me to believe there may be something beyond what I can see and know with the tools I have.  Perhaps it is a side effect of always being encouraged to question what I see and experience.  Maybe it's just the revolting nature of all the labels people assign themselves causing me to resist assimilation in to any belief or non-belief system.

It's strange to have enough scientific knowledge to explain most of the world I encounter, and yet be so incapable of explaining myself.