I have considered myself an atheist since high school but I feel like I have been forming my own beliefs about how the universe works and I’m curious about if there are others who think like me.
I have started thinking about free will a lot and how I don’t believe we actually have it (depending on what you want to define free will as.) This has caused me to think about how in reality we are not much different than a rock. We have just as much agency in our decisions as a rock does when it is pushed down a river. I’ve thought about our perspectives and why we see life like we do. What if we are just appendages of some greater energy based being kind of like cells are a part of us. We have cells in our body that are a part of us and perform tasks, but we cannot really manipulate them freely. What if life is like that but the other way around. Energy cannot be created or destroyed and it powers everything. The neurons in your brain are powered by energy it gets from glucose. I feel like everything sort of works like a puppet to this greater energy and when we die maybe we just realize we are a part of it. It feels like I have almost stumbled on my own relgion, but I am willing to accept that it probably isnt really like this and I am not intellegent enough to truly understand how everything works. Its just what I like to believe
It sounds like you’re grappling with the question of “why are we here?”. It’s a tough question and one that things like religion and superstition often fill with a nice cozy feeling of purpose. Indeed, you have started to craft your own such ideas to fill that void:
It’s a quite comforting thought, to be part of some greater whole. It’s a very human thing to want to belong. We are social animals, even the most introverted among us will seek out some level of social attachment and validation. And religions are very good at providing this. One of the draws of religions is simply being part of a group and being able to identify with others of that group. So, ascribing your existence as being part of a larger entity can be very comforting.
Ultimately, you have to choose what you believe. But, do recognize that you are falling into the trap of a religion of your own choosing. Like any religion, it’s based on a made up story to fill in the gaps for questions like “why are we here?” Because, without the use of magical thinking, that question has no answer. It is a hard thing to look at life and recognize that the answer to that question may well be, “there is no reason”. That the human need for there to be a reason is only us assigning our own views to an inanimate universe. And ya, that’s kinda terrifying. Because it means that there is no greater being watching out for you. That there is no postmortem reward, punishment or anything to hold people accountable for the way they lived their life. If there are no gods, and no afterlife, then a person who lives a horrible life and is never held to account in this life basically “gets away with it”. And the person who lived a good life, but got shit on for it only did so for their own internal satisfaction. And these are the reasons people make up and turn to religions, to fill that hole in themselves and find a purpose. Even if that purpose is a lie. They would rather live a lie than face the possibility that they really are on their own.
Free will is certainly a hard issue. If we are completely deterministic, then should we even be held accountable for our actions? It can be comforting to decide that we are completely deterministic and that we aren’t actually accountable for our actions. Instead, they are entirely dictated by our genetics and circumstances. If we commit a horrible act, we were always destined to commit that horrible act, as the initial starting conditions of the universe made it inevitable that we would commit the act. And maybe there is some truth to this. We don’t actually know what consciousness is. At best, it seems to be some sort of emergent phenomena of complex enough biological systems. That said, we also have pretty good evidence that our universe does contain true randomness. At the quantum level, events seem to be probabilistic rather than deterministic, So, set the universe up 100 times with the same starting conditions and let it run, and you will get 100 different outcomes, many of them very distinct. It won’t just be “evil you with a beard” different, it will be “the milky way galaxy doesn’t exist” different. Of course, it could still be that you aren’t actually making a choice, that the possible quantum states collapse to an outcome and you experience that as you making a choice. But, the result is still the same, of the multiverse of possibilities which could have existed, the star stuff that is “you” ended up in the one where you did something. And maybe free will is just different parts of our brain creating conditions where it’s more likely for us to collapse to one type of outcome than another. I can’t control which slit an electron will pass through in a double slit experiment. I can make one of the slits larger and more likely for electrons to pass through.
Honestly, I’d suggest stepping away from the magical thinking parts and spend more time looking at what is driving you to these questions. Do you feel a lack of purpose in your life? Do you feel isolated or alone? If so, maybe the better thing is to spend time with other people and find a purpose and meaning for your life which satisfies you. After all, if you end up being right about being a skin tag on divine being, wouldn’t it want you to have something good to report back about, rather than just a bunch of navel gazing it could have done on it’s own?