Help, I'm an Agnostic

"Help, I'm a Rock" sang Frank Zappa in the mid sixties. Exactly my time, I was a teenager then going through the Irish Catholic horrors of coming to terms with myself and my sexuality. Everything was forbidden. If you looked sideways at a woman you were hopping off to confession. Really, I'm not joking.

So what has this "song" got to do with anything? Well it sort of encapsulates my feelings today for then and now.

I'm an agnostic. Ah horror of horrors! Why doesn't he get off the fence and make up his mind? Well, I'll tell you why. I can't be a believer and I can't be an atheist. I have been both and here's what happened.

I was a full blown believer in God and Catholicism till I was about 18 or 19 years of age. I'll always remember the day when full of fear I pretended to go to mass, but instead headed off to the seafront and sat on the rocks (there's that rock theme again) looking out at the hill of Howth. What a restful place and as I sat there deciding to become fully atheist, the fear gradually lifted. Suddenly (I'm reminded of St Paul being clobbered by a bolt of lightning, although this was nothing like that, but there were similarities) I felt okay. The fear had gone. I wasn't going to hell. I wasn't going to be blasted out of it by a vengeful God sitting in his heavens with nothing else to do but watch me. "God," says God, "There's Fergal doubting Me! I'll soon put a stop to that!"

I went home and have not been to mass since (except for weddings, funerals and now Easter and Christmas as my partner drags me along - mind you, I don't protest too much).

So now I was a full-blown atheist. Not praying, not even thinking of God. Immersing myself in my music and reading. Reading then was all about science. Now I know how to explain the universe and how it got here without needing the intervention of a divine being. Boy, wouldn't Dawkins be proud of me. So explain it? Okay.

Long, long ago there was something rather than nothing. Why not? One is as likely as another. Some people may want to say God came first, but as Sherlock Holmes always said, the simplest solution to a problem usually turns out to be right. Occam's razor. So rather than postulating a being like God who must be incredibly complex, let's posit a hunk of substance, incredibly simple. Well, at least simpler than God. This hunk of something blows up into a sort of universe (nothing like our present universe, of course, but a blob of spacetime with not much going on, in fact far too simple to support or evolve life). This universe implodes and when it reaches a singularity state (squeezed to infinity) it rebounds on itself and blows up again, this time creating a slightly more complex bit of spacetime. And this process goes on and on through eternity till one day the latest cosmos in this batch of evolving universes produces ours. So complex with the parameters so finely tuned that eventually it gives birth to life and eventually us. And maybe even other intelligent aliens elsewhere.

So that's it. All safely explained and safe. Except it wasn't. Something is missing from this. It is so unsatisfactory. And eventually my atheism started to crumble and I didn't feel so sure about it anymore. This just couldn't be it.

Or could it? Was this not wishful thinking on my part? Selfish and not wanting to die into nothing (not that I'll know much about it if I do). Still, it wasn't satisfactory. So now I had to become that dreaded being called an Agnostic. Sitting on the fence. Well, for me it's the only honest way to be. While I admire a person who has faith, I certainly don't admire blind faith. And being an atheist for me is also blind faith. So I sit and wiggle my toes in agnostic land.

I don't want to be an agnostic. I would prefer to somehow know God. But unfortunately I don't. I've tried to communicate with him, but he never seems to answer. Or I haven't been able to see the answer he gives me.

Peter, the rock of the church, denied three times. I've denied many times. Sometimes, I still do. But today I've taken to praying a little. And that feels good.

But then another problem crops up and that is free will. Is there really free will? For example, I don't decide what interests I have. I had a fascination with science (especially particle physics and cosmology) when I was a teenager (I still have this interest), but if somebody told me then that I'd be devouring books on religious history from my forties onwards, develop an interest in and read the Bible (old and new testaments) accompanied by a massive biblical commentary, I'd have said rubbish. Now I'm sixty-one and looking back on my birthday trip with my sons to the Holy Land last year. Who'd have thought?

I also don't decide what beliefs I have. I didn't pick agnosticism, or Catholicism, or atheism. I didn't pick to be born in Ireland to a middle class family. I don't believe I went out and chose my wife. Out of lots of girls I met and some I dated, she was the one who decided to stay with me. Or did she?

So Help, I don't believe in free will.
Help I'm an Agnostic.
Help I'm a Rock.