Religion: what I think and have thunk


This is a first draft and may come to be revised in the future if I feel like it

I've always considered myself a logically oriented person. I've never really liked the more creative subjects, and have always considered maths and physics to be my best subjects in school. This, however, started shifting last year. We had religion as a subject for the first time in upper secondary, and I loved it. Religion has been part of the syllabus for as long as I've been in primary school, but it's always been "This group believes this", and never any reflection or insights into why people are religious. This led me to think of religious people as gullible, and for most of my upbringing I was a hardcore atheist. Looking back on this I cringe severely. Maybe I've grown as a person since then, but to think I used to share views with Ricky Gervais haunts me.

I still would not consider myself religious, but today I subscribe to a more "who knows" ideology. The people who subscribe to the hard empiricism and naive realism that says God isn't real just because we have yet to see proof of them seem to me a bit narrow-minded. What makes people think we can observe and notice everything around us? The view that we would notice God's existance if it was real seems to me like it overestimates humanity's perceptive abilities. If someone told a dolphin about a highly intelligent surface mammal that can trick metal into thinking for them, would the dolphin be able to tell humans from chimpanzees by observing us? Does the dolphin have the cognitive abilities to even begin to understand the question? If God is real, what makes you think you have the ability to even begin to understand their existance or its implications?