this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Cos I've done drugs, and experienced heightened states of love, being, appreciation for nature and humanity, states that feel magical yet real, even if only temporarily.
The very fact those states of mind are achievable at all gives me a certain emotional grounding and inner certainty that reality has purpose, or at least meaning. As opposed to just being a happy accident of atoms and energy arranging themselves in this miraculous way to create life. That's just a logical explanation of how, not why.
We're almost all driven to look for meaning in life. Even if it's just to "find your own purpose", that journey presupposes you have one to begin with.
I guess I feel a belief in god without having much idea of what god is, or even what they want. But I don't believe at all that logic, science, reason etc. are things you have to choose instead of religious belief. They're things you have as well. You can't square the two - the Rubik's cube of logic doesn't twist that way.
OK, our reality might have a purpose or meaning given by a god - but then what about that god's purpose/meaning? Was it given by yet another one higher up? You can keep going up layers like this and finding meaning on each one, but eventually there has to be a final one, a reality that was not designed by anyone. But why does it exist?
Some people may say that there's no proof that we actually exist. And maybe we don't, but the fact that we can think and experience things means that even if our reality is somehow fake, there has to be one that isn't. Because if nothing existed, there would be nothing at all. Not a void, just nothing, not even the possibility of existence. So something, at some level, must exist. But why?
"Because God created us" is not good enough for me, because it doesn't answer anything. If we exist because a god created us, that still means that a god existed before us. Why does this god exists then?
We'll never find out. Any answer we find will only open things up for new questions. And just like a child that is just starting to experience things, we'll never run out of questions.
I think it's the book of Job, God says something like "you could not possibly fathom the purpose or meaning to the world, even if someone tells you". I think in much the same way a Turing Machine simply cannot process certain tasks or achieve particular ends, our brains are limited to a certain subset of understanding. Still mightily impressive what we can imagine/devise/understand IMO. In Islam, this is more readily accepted dogma: you can't even imagine or picture God, so even attempting it is doomed to failure (or delusion)