There are more thing in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

I know, I know, I’ve neglected you, audience. I’m sorry, but I’m just too much man to be tied down to a regular schedule! Here, let me make it up to you, I’m making a post now and everything. It was brought to my attention a few weeks ago that I hadn’t posted here since October. Having gotten the rest of university out of the way, I now feel perfectly poised to rectify that oversight by posting such an awesome blog that your heads’ll still be full of my words the next time I go on a 9-month break. I’m that good.

But, what to cover? As much as I love talking about music, and believe me, I could go on forever, it’s time to give that subject a rest (even though I’m sure that it’s had enough of a rest in the gap between this post and the previous one). Video games as art is another area I could cover, as it’s a topic close to whatever heart I have left, but again, that just doesn’t feel right. I could do a piece on politics, but let’s face it, I’d just make an ass of myself. My politics are based on abstract reasoning, which could mean that my conscience is fully developed, but also means that it isn’t conducive to intelligent debate on the subject. My political compass is somewhat akin to faith – I can feel what’s right in my bones, but I have a bugger of a time expressing my views (damnit, Jim, I’m a scientist, not a philosopher!), so discourse on my views is somewhat tricky for me.

But then it struck me. After reading my friend Mary’s most excellent blog, the idea of discussing faith occurred to me. Not just as a means of justifying my faith in itself, or seeing what your views are, but examining what good it actually does us as well.

So, to kick this party off, I have a horrible confession to make. Over the course of my degree, I went through a crisis of faith. Since the eve of my confirmation sometime in 1996, I’ve been a staunch atheist. I was lying there in bed, thinking about what was going to happen the next day, when suddenly I had an epiphany. Something along the lines of a religious experience, although areligious would probably be more accurate. I suddenly glimpsed the entire Universe for a moment, like I was in the Total Perspective Vortex (sorry for the reference), and I saw the entire vastness of all Creation – and it was empty. Completely and wholly vacant. There was no one watching over us, there was no mystical being, in this Universe or outside my perception, which was responsible for all of this. This image has stuck with me for the last twelve years and I can still see it in my mind now as clearly as when I first saw it. Instead of driving me mad, like the Vortex did in the books, seeing the Universe from the perspective of a cupcake drove me SANE. In fact, I think that’s the first time I can remember the sensation that’s so plagued me in recent years, like a wall in my mind, but I digress.

Anyway, I was secure in the knowledge that, having won my staring contest with the abyss, I knew the great secret of the Universe, and happily went through my empty little life feeling generally awesome about myself. At least, until I got to university. As you all probably know, I studied Biological Sciences for three years, if what I did can be called ‘studying’. It seems a funny subject to cause a crisis of faith, but then, didn’t Newton find reason to be a theist merely in a thumbprint? It wasn’t any great, eloquent argument for the existence of God that shook me, however, merely a problem of probability; for example, studying the intricate molecular detail of organisms in as much detail as I have, (if I were a PR man for the Catholic Church, I’d simply get them to put Topoisomerase II on a poster and watch the converts roll in) and getting even further into ‘pure science’– examining the delicate balance of charges and gravitational constants that keep us all together makes one appreciate the absolutely staggering odds required for all this to have come to pass.

However, my unfaith in God remains true. I haven’t even gone agnostic, but I learnt an important lesson: science can be just as much proof of the existence of God as any number of miracles- in fact, it could be argued that the everyday world is more of a miracle than an infinity of weeping statues or cured lepers (science can do that too, Jesus!). I’ve also gained a full appreciation of the phrase ‘stranger things can happen’, and if I develop a gambling problem later in life, I fully intend to sue the university of teaching me that no odds are too long.

So, there, that’s part one. Part two should be coming shortly, and I’ll be examining the ethics of religion, as well as my own imagined solution to the inherent contradictions between faiths. Hopefully no one will yell at me for writing this instead of working on my books.

Ta ta for now!