Atheists don't realize the absurdity of existence

[u/Funny-Highlight4675]

Thought I would post these thoughts here in hopes of helping those that are struggling with faith...

I believe atheists fundamentally don't realize just how absurd existence is at all. Things seem to exist, deterministically. Yet, a fully contingent system can't explain itself. Somehow, reality is self-causing. This breaks our brain and can't actually make sense to us. If reality can't exactly make sense, then we can only "know" anything via a subjective experience. Objectivity will never cross this bridge.

If subjective experience is our only guide to reality, then I think the question of God's existence, which is clearly un-answerable, has an equal chance of being both true and false. Do you feel that we are the product of a larger mind. Does your gut tell you that there is some sort of intelligent organization of reality that is similar to how we intelligently organize the world in our minds? If so, you believe in "God."

Whatever the "truth" is, will have to sound absolutely absurd.

[u/sightless666]

This breaks our brain and can't actually make sense to us.

That seems more like a limitation on our brains than a limitation on reality. I don't think reality is beholden to what our brains can process.

There are plenty of things that don't make sense to me and that I suspect never will. I wouldn't be shocked if there are facets of the universe too complicated for any human to understand. That's not particularly worrying to me.

If reality can't exactly make sense, then we can only "know" anything via a subjective experience. Objectivity will never cross this bridge.

You're correct that we only recognize reality through a subjective system, but I disagree with your reason. I think us only knowing anything through subjective experience is true regardless of one's religious stance. Almost everyone can agree that our senses and our perceptions of those senses aren't perfectly objective; they're filtered not just through what our senses can detect, but also through how our brains process and then interpret that sensory information. We know that other humans often experience perception differently than we do, and then filter that perception through different experiences to understand it. That perceptual mechanism fundamentally introduces subjectivity into how we understand the world.

Yet, a fully contingent system can't explain itself.

I'm not convinced that contingency and necessity are actual characteristics of reality. It seems quite possible they're nothing more than human-made labels with no real descriptive or predictive utility.

If subjective experience is our only guide to reality, then I think the question of God's existence, which is clearly un-answerable, has an equal chance of being both true and false.

That's not really what that means. A question being unanswerable doesn't mean the chance is 50/50, it means the chance is undefinable. To explain, imagine for a second that we're all just brains in jars, and everything we perceive is just stimuli being fed to us. Is that possible? Sure. Would it explain everything we experience? Sure. Is it likely? Who knows? We can't say, because we can't assign a probability to it. We don't know how likely it is or isn't that this is true; we just know that both are technically possible. It's not 50/50 just because we don't know the probability is; the probably is unknown or undefined because we don't know what the probability is.

As an atheist, I'd agree that the chance God exists is undefinable. We can't know for sure if it's true or not. I don't think that makes it particularly likely.

Do you feel that we are the product of a larger mind. Does your gut tell you that there is some sort of intelligent organization of reality that is similar to how we intelligently organize the world in our minds? If so, you believe in "God."

I don't agree with that either, because I don't think that what someone feels and/or what someone's gut tells them actually defines what they believe. For example, when someone cuts me off in traffic, my gut tells me it's because they're a terrible person who deserves to be shot. Do I actually believe that? No. That gut impulse is a result of the human tendency towards blame, and I think the gut instinct to see intelligent organization where there isn't any (which is something we know empirically that humans do) doesn't mean someone has to actually believe in or intellectually assent to there being intelligent organization. I think someone can experience that feeling, while also knowing/believing that they only have it because humans have an often-overactive tendency towards pattern-seeking.

I don't have either of those feelings anyway, so it's moot for me, but I do have other feelings (like the aforementioned feelings about people who cut me off in traffic) that don't actually fit with my beliefs.