My Deconversion: Sort Of

I grew up a catholic. I early went to church, but throughout my youth I was pretty dogmatic in my views. As I reached adulthood I started to change and my belief in the bible itself was starting to wane. For the last six years or so I was more a deist than anything else. Prior to this shift I felt as if I was wearing sunglasses to keep out the light metaphorically. Being someone who adored science I always walked on egg shells with myself by ignoring that which contradicted my beliefs. As a started to allow contradictory evidence to enter my mind I started to lose my faith.

Contrary to popular assertion, my holding on as a deist was not as a security blanket as I wished dearly that I could make the full leap to atheism. My inability to fully embrace atheism was partly because I do not embrace the political ideology of atheism. This is not to say all atheists are liberal or any other generalization. As a practitioner of the scientific method I could not accept atheism until it could hold up to my great scrutiny. I accepted the science of it; however the moral questions still remained. Atheists are constantly lumped together the same way you would lump together Catholics or Protestants. The truth is that there are many types of atheist who reach their beliefs based on different rationales. Although many atheists assert that this is false, I personally know many atheists who only reason for disbelief is as a rejection of authority and rule of law. They are anarchist or libertarian in nature and see a supreme being as a threat to such beliefs.

It is logical to believe that there is absolute morality. I do not mean the morals of the bible. As the conjecture of the man hiding Jews from Nazis proves, though shall not lie does not hold up in extreme cases. Although many explain the seemingly transcendent morality as nearly a product of evolution just as the overwhelming tendency towards eyes evolving, I believe that the morality is absolute and would have evolved no matter that the original conditions were. I have come to the conclusion that nature and the universe has a tendency towards progress and complexity. Well this in direct opposition to my image of atheism. In order to let go of my deist beliefs I needed to figure out a way that in terms of philosophy, the universe could have the properties of consciousness without actually having a conscious creator.

Over the past few months I finally was able to put it all together. Just as atoms can come together to create cells which work together to create the consciousness of a person, so to can all the atoms of the universe come together to create a conscious universe. I am not saying that the universe is self aware, as even a living yeast cell is not self aware. The universe is living. Life itself was an inevitable result and the transcendent morality is part of it. And just as a fertilized cell is preprogrammed to create a baby, the original singularity is preprogrammed to eventually create life. Life only works properly if a set of rules are followed. Relative morality by its very nature would lead to an inconsistency that would not lead to a stable civilization. This is not to say that it is written in some magic book. Rather, morality evolved along with life. Just as a heart pumps the right way or wrong, behavior works in a similar fashion.

Being able to disconnect an absolute moral law from the theoretical "moral law giver" finally allowed me to complete my deconversion without facing the dilemma that a relativist world would create. Although morality evolved along with life, just as with a heart, morality has a right and wrong way of working. And now I am an atheist. You may then ask me how I know what is right and wrong. My answer would be that I don't. I can only form beliefs based on observations and life experience. As my life experiences change, I beliefs may change. My hope is that I am able to match my beliefs as closely to reality as possible. So I am an atheist that believes in absolute morality. Let the attacks from both sides of the issue begin.