A choice of gods

 

I am no heretic, I am a man confronted each day with doubts about everything I choose to stand for. Does faith end where evidence begins? Is it more of a symbiotic relationship? Whereby the latter reinforces the former. There's a meme going around poking fun at how miracles stopped happening after the invention of the camera, the message implied being complete trust or confidence without evidence is delusion. Religion uses our existence as evidence of the existence of a deity. We are not here by chance, we were created with a higher purpose to serve that we must submit to or be punished (there are ramifications to disobedience). 

I have recently finished reading a book by Clifford D Simak called 'A choice of gods'. It's a sci-fi novel detailing life after an event called the disappearance where over ninety percent of humans vanish from earth mysteriously. The few remaining humans on earth continue the evolutionary process divergently depending on their lifestyles. The native Americans live in harmony with nature, they take what it gives them and do not strip the earth. They have evolved to learn how to communicate with animals and plants through years of observation and harmonic existence. They are driven to never emulate the lifestyle of the white man who choked the earth into submission and stripped it. There is also a settlement of humans who sought to preserve all of humanity's accumulated knowledge and documentation, they inhabit an old manor and have also learned how to communicate telepathically and also teleport. They cohabit the world with robots that humans made in their great technological age to be of assistance to them.

This book tackled religion in a very interesting way. So the aforementioned robots are banded into two camps. One group consists of the last remaining Christian believers led by Hezekiah. The other consists of a group who have dedicated themselves to creating a hive mind led by Stanley. Throughout the book we see Hezekiah battle with feelings of inadequacy and an imposter syndrome. He questions whether it is hypocritical for him to hold a reverence to God despite not being his creation but still wants to devote time to serve Him. He questions whether merely practicing a religion makes him part of it. Stanley on the other hand views human beings as impartial to robots and their wellbeing. He believes that humans created them and their disappearance was only a step in the cycle of life, everything must be created. He is strongly against waiting around to serve someone who has no exert-able influence over their existence any more. He believes robots should serve themselves as that is the only way to make progress.

I feel the need to mention the transition from the religious to the scientific age. The religious age was driven by a belief that the forces of the world were controlled by a supreme being alone. No human could change what had been ordained by God. Disease, famine natural disasters etcetera, these were caused by a deity who in most cases had to be appeased to prevent them. God was seen as the absolute and anybody who questioned him was a blasphemous danger to society. Galileo Galilee, a scientist during the time of the inquisitions was forced to renounce his belief of heliocentrism (the earth revolving around the sun) because the then church did not like it. He had to deny his own findings to avoid being burned at the stake and died under house arrest. Heliocentrism has since been scientifically proven to be right... There are countless stories like this. Before we could rely on science we had nothing and we could not deal with our own impermanence in a world apathetic to our survival. We chose to have faith that there was someone somewhere rooting for us and that was the reason no matter how skewered the odds were we still found a way to make it. For most of earth's history things were the same, a mostly rustic and feudal way of living. Some say Religion was crafted to institutionalize feudal systems. After the onset of the scientific age (From 1500 onward) we have seen a rise in equality and quality of life and a decrease in oppression and disenfranchisement. That may be owed to the fact that scientific breakthroughs initially helped us mitigate our environments and finally we were able to control and subdue it to our favor.

"Faith was something else; through the years their faith had deepened and been strengthened by their work but the deepening of faith had not led way to truth." This is an excerpt from Hezekiah's internal monologue. The Bible has a similar passage in James 2:17-26, where the message is faith without action is dead. I ask myself if the action mentioned is evidence of faith or evidence that faith can only be backed if it leads to physical evidence of its existence (complex question). "Could it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not coexist." (another excerpt from Hezekiah) . As we progress in sentience and understanding we become accustomed to trusting absolutes instead of sentiments and whims. These sentiments and whims however are an evolutionary adaptation to enhance our survival which for a long time were the only reason we have a foothold on our planet. So now you see the paradox.

To reach our peak as a species and as a civilization, do we abandon all we know and let the earth mold and sharpen us or do we make sure that regardless of our shortcomings we make the earth as conducive and obedient to us?  Is it arrogance to see everything as property to be manipulated and used or is it industriousness? Should we dedicate our servitude inwards to us and our race or outward to conforming and embracing the earth and its apathetic and cyclic nature?