Much of my thinking is influenced by reading and I am currently reading a book about some people who changed American thought in the period after the Civil War. One thing I find interesting is that even the most scientific of these tried to defend a belief in God, meaning the Christian god and the Bible as scripture. The author goes through a list of the approach of various people, including Louis Agassiz, who made important contributions to science, especially in glacier studies and classification of fish including fish fossils, but also rejected Darwin's theories and tried to disprove them, unsuccessfully. The author says he simply rejected modern science to preserve his beliefs.
The part that caught my attention today was discussion of William James Pragmatism, in which he describes his understanding of thought and how belief works. He says we believe things that we are willing to act on, and we believe them because that belief provides value, which makes the beliefs "true". To me, that suggests that he does not believe in objective truth, in the existence of facts outside human thought, which seems rather silly, but he was certainly a more successful man than I am, so maybe he saw something I don't. The Law of Errors was something still working its way through science and culture during that time, so a belief, for example, of the "true" position of a star or "true" trajectory of a comet was something they had just learned to calculate based on measurement, which they had to admit contained errors.
One could wonder about the "value" of a belief in God, but I expect it is largely social. I have read many times that those who study belief in religion find that the beliefs come largely from family. There are people who convert from one religion to another. I know this from experience because I was a missionary for the Mormon church, which may not like my using that name, but no one objected when I was a Mormon missionary and everyone knows to whom I refer when I use the name, so it serves a purpose in communication, and I don't care if it offends so old white guy with whom I disagree on fundamental issues, the naming of his church being rather trivial in comparison.
So I believed in God because my family did. It made my parents happy, which was a major goal in childhood and into adulthood. It was reinforced by responses to affirmation of my belief by others in the church, even strangers I met when attending church with relatives. As the Mormon church was of prime importance to my father and most of those in the church, it is not surprising that I did believe. It seems more surprising that I stopped. When and how did belief in God cease to have value that reinforced the belief.
I can't answer that clearly. I do remember having and asking questions about scripture, such as how much water would it take to flood the Earth and cover all the land, as in the story of Noah and his ark. No one can answer that in a manor consistent with science. Also, how many species could actually fit on Noah's ark? While in college, the one run by the Mormon church, Brigham Young University, I looked up the number of mammal species known, and calculated that space based on estimates of the dimensions of Noah's ark, and found that per creature, there was about 2 square feet if there were two of each species. My calculation was very simple, and didn't make any attempt at following the instructions of seven pairs for certain kinds of animals or subtracting out the aquatic mammals, nor make any allowance in space for Noah and family because the point was that just the mammals wouldn't fit, and then there are birds, reptiles, and maybe a few amphibians, before getting into invertebrates. The whole story lacks credibility. Later I learned that The Epic of Gilgamesh has a great flood story with a lot of similarity to the Noah story, but with different gods.
Then there was science. I read a book by Apostle Mark E. Peterson, who I admired for his talks at General Conference and because we shared a name, but in this book, directed at youth of the church, he denounced belief in the Theory of Evolution without explaining the theory or showing any reason except his own conceit why we shouldn't believe it. I was crushed. Totally disillusioned. Never got over that. I always felt like an outsider in the Mormon Church for believing in evolution, though I never found a member who could explain it and give any reason to disbelieve in the theory other than that some General Authorities spoke against it.
Maybe I was just a teenage rebel against my parents. Maybe my father insisted on reason from his offspring, and that shot down any belief in God of Mormonism, which don't hold up under scrutiny, as far as I have seen. But I stopped believing in God, and then I stopped professing a belief.
I haven't worked out a system of belief, or created a new brand of philosophy. I may examine my beliefs as I read this book, and I may change my understanding and come to new beliefs. I doubt I will reconsider God or any god, because there is too little evidence to suggest a belief is based in objective reality, which I still consider true.
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