face to face

When people find out I’m an atheist, they sometimes ask me how I can find meaning in life. Indeed, when I began my journey away from Christianity, I often felt afraid of meaninglessness. Why are we here? What happens when we die? What’s our purpose? What is love, beauty, good, evil? What about this “God shaped hole” that we all have? For a while, I got into the habit of saying “I don’t know” to life’s big questions. During this time, some people would tell me that “I can’t keep living in limbo,” implying that uncertainty in life and death is unhealthy. However, my experience has been on the contrary. I can say, with confidence, that I have found peace, wonder, and comfort within a life of accepting the unknown. Photo by me. Studying physics has made me realise just how special it is to be human. The human brain, amazing as it is, cannot fully comprehend reality and the universe. Yet, we are able to come close, little by little. For me, the most amazing thing a...

First, a Bible excerpt - John 20:24-29 New International Version (NIV). Jesus Appears to Thomas 24  Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came.  25  So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” 26  A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!”  27  Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” 28  Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” 29  Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” ...

If I’m being honest, my loss of faith was motivated by emotions. The reasons I left Christianity are quite different to the reasons I’m still an atheist. I can think of two major experiences that most likely initiated my conversion. Photo by me. Firstly, I felt betrayed when I discovered my science knowledge from school was completely different to real science. During my childhood, scientists were generally presented to me as arrogant types who thought they knew everything about the universe. Many scientific theories, especially evolution by natural selection and the big bang theory, were flippantly dismissed as nonsense due to their perceived contradiction to the Bible. Based on what I’d been told, I believed that these theories had very little evidence. I thought scientists only backed these theories because they had no other explanation, or because they didn’t want to admit that the Bible was the truth. Moreover, there are a lot of Christian books that try to debunk scie...

If someone were to ask me whether science and religion can coexist, my answer would be: ‘it does.’ Religion has always explored the realm of life in which we don’t know the answers – the things that touch us in ways that we find it hard to describe scientifically. I’m talking about creativity, compassion, paternal love, intimacy, evil. I could list more. There’s something extremely human about religion. We’re constantly overwhelmed by our emotions and it’s not easy for us to think rationally. After all, our intelligence is limited. Science, on the other hand, is not a religion. It’s a nice process for us humans to get to the bottom of things about the universe. As discussed in my post about the scientific method, science can only approach ideas that can be falsified. God’s existence is not, and never will be, one of these ideas. So, by definition, religion always lies outside the scope of science. However, this doesn’t mean that they never cross paths. A famous example is...

I have always been interested in science. I loved learning about how the world could be experimented on and, most of all, understood. It was only in my first year of university, studying a Bachelor of Science, that the philosophy of science was properly presented to me. Here, two major concepts I learnt laid the foundation for my change in worldview. Speaking of views. Photo by me. The first was the idea of e mpiricism . Scientific knowledge is gained through human experience. While doing experiments in my physics courses, I learnt that everything that is measured has uncertainty. A good example of this is simply measuring the length of a pencil with a ruler. You can use the ruler and read off a number, but the number you read depends on many things. Even if you do your best to read the number carefully, your measurement still relies on the precision of your ruler. The smallest markings my ruler has are millimetres. This means that, using my ruler, I can never know whether the p...