Everything I know points me to agnosticism yet I entertain the idea of god because my family believes in it?

Question

Is that bad in your opinion? Where do you draw the line between trusting your parents(who always seem to be right about everything else) and going your own way?

My conundrum is that the only thing that clings me to the idea of god is my family and their beliefs. They've been around for a while and they know their stuff. I keep that window open that maybe I'm just young and haven't seen everything just yet.

Answer 1

That's what I went through a few years ago. Thankfully, I got through it and followed reason and logic. That's when I became an atheist, although I suppose I am more accurately described as an atheistic agnostic. That is, I don't believe in a god but I also realize that neither the existence nor the non-existence of a god can never be proven.
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Answer 2

I would like to criticise you for being lazy or spoilt but we are all open to the same criticism. I might say clearly that I belive in God but many of my actions do not reflect this belief. I give you credit for saying what your natural tendency is, just reacting to life as it comes without a predetermined response based on faith principles. I also compliment you on remaining open.

Unfortunatly life will test you. When all else fail you the need for God becomes very real, its a choice between dispair and hope. We do not like to enter the dark night with out a fight.

It sounds like your parent have done a good job, offering you faith but not enforcing it. You realise you have the freedom to believe or not believe, you have been given choice and you are checking out the possibilities and consequences. In the end I do not think there is a line between you and your parents, you are in line with them. When you meet youy life crises, you will see what you believe, where you feel at home and how you will find a way to move forward.

Answer 3

"Where do you draw the line between trusting your parents..." We always trust our parents--trust is the first and foremost quality of a healthy personality, but we also live in the "world" and that requires diligence and critical thinking. Through perseverance you will rediscover God; that is, you will actualize your God given free will to believe because______and you will fill in the blank.

Answer 4

Actually the belief or entertaining as you call it comes from God, he put in every mans soul the belief however he has also allowed people the ability to discover things that point other wise, It is a faith thing that is very difficult to explain. How can billions and billions of incidents take place at the right time and place and bring about what you see now. Our finite minds cannot imagine.
Good luck and God bless honesty now study the word and really ask God to help you with all sincerity to give you the ability to understand.

Answer 5

Don't confuse professing and believing. If you accept that you do not know, that gives you the power of honest investigation. You can profess for your parents' sake, but express your doubts to the pastor. That seems a reasonable starting place.

The odds are that there are a lot of agnostics that fear expressing their uncertainties, and live in doubt.

Answer 6

I don't see any reason to believe in agnosticism. I guess it's one step above atheism(that's totally illogical) but not much better. Agnosticism says you don't know whether there is a God. I would think it was fairly obvious that there is a God.
. The Intelligent Design argument, it seems to me, is irrefutable. It's a simple logical argument:
Premise #1: Wherever you find design, you need a designer.
Premise #2: The universe exhibits design
Conclusion: The universe needs a designer.
Either you deny Premise #1 or you deny Premise #2 or you deny that given Premise #1 & 2, the conclusion follows. You can’t deny Premise #1 or #2 and you can’t deny that given Premise #1 & 2, that particular conclusion follows.
The only way around that argument is to deny the second premise. Every atheist has to deny design. If you read Richard Dawkins two latest books('the blind watchmaker' and 'the god delusion') that's exactly what he does. He denies design. He says that there's no design in the universe, just the "appearance of design". But that's insane. You just can't logically and realistically deny that there's design all through the universe. It's all around you. You have to be blind not to see it. There are branches of science that basically just study the design in nature.........scientific disciplines such as nano-technology and bio-mimicry. These disciplines study the design in nature.......whales,bats,dolphins... have sonar.......and try to create machines that mimic that design. There’s even a weekly program on the science channel that looks at the design in nature trying to find leads for technology. In the labs around the world biologists are studying birds, insects, bats and even flying dinasoars for new ideas to improve planes for the future. Who gets the credit for this? Not God! “Natural selection has already done all the brute computation for us by solving problems evolutionary”, explained Oxford university research fellow Graham Taylor. WHAT? Natural selection can’t design anything. It can’t do computations. It’s not an engineer. It is not a person. It is not an intelligence. It’s just a process. “It’s absolutely good design if you copy nature” said Terry Weishaar, an aeronautics professor at Purdue University. EXCUSE ME! Yeah, Gods design, not yours. Doesn’t good design imply a good designer? Good design doesn’t come about by chance. Everywhere you look there's design. Where there's design there's got to be a designer. That's just common sense. Creation is not an unproven theory. It's a common sense fact that we come to by just using a little logic and reason.
You look at bats. They do not fly by sight. They can barely see in the day but they sleep in the day. They are nocturnal creatures. They do all their activities at night and at night they are blind. They fly by means of sonar. They send out sound waves through their nose as they are flying. If those sound waves bounce off something and come back at them, they pick them up and know that they are heading toward something and need to veer in a different direction. Somehow they know how fast they are flying and they know that sound travels at 761.2 MPH and as they fly they continue to send out sound waves so they continue to get updated information. Given enough info(and continued updated info) a mathematician could sit down with a pencil and paper and some calculus equations and figure out how far the bat was from the object and with the right info could even figure out if the object the bat is heading toward is stationary or moving toward the bat or away from it. But that would take time and if the bat took that much time he’d be flying into trees and telephone poles other things. We have developed computers that can do that in a second. That's what sonar is all about. The bat has a computer in his head that can figure that info out in a nanosecond. It knows what it is heading for without being able to physically see. It's flying by instruments(as pilots would say).
Dolphins and whales also have sonar. But the computer in the dolphins and whales heads are programmed differently than the computer in the bats head because sound travels at a different speed in water than in air. That makes all the difference in the world. The idea that the sonar equipment that is in the bats head just came about by random chance(read....luck) natural processes is beyond belief. But do you really believe that the sonar equipment could come about again, a second time, independently in the dolphin and whales head just by random chance. You do if you're an atheist. I say the idea that it could come about once by random chance is beyond belief.
Paly's argument of the 1700's still holds today. He said that if you are walking through a forest and you find a watch sitting upon a rock, you have 2 possible explanations: 1)It was designed and built by a watchmaker 2) It came about the same way the rock that it is sitting upon came about.....by random chance. Which explantion makes more sense?
I have a wristwatch. A wristwatch is basically a pretty simple machine as far as machine go. The wrist that I wear it on is a quadrillion times more complex than the watch itself. It seems pretty ridiculous to me to claim that the watch needs a watchmaker but the wrist that I wear it on doesn’t need a wristmaker.
Do you really believe that dumb mud could somehow bootstrap itself into intelligence over billions of years simply by random chance luck?

Answer 7

I think you are in a good place. God doesn't have any grandchildren. He wants you to have an experience with Him that is truly your own. A good place to start your quest is the Book of John. Don't read it through your parents' eyes, but your own heart. A great book to read is The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel. Check it out! The scriptures make it clear...those who seek Him will find Him.

Answer 8

It took me along time to figure out that my parents weren't right about everything, including religion.

"Because somebody else said so" (whoever it may be) is a lousy reason to believe anything.

I'm agnostic, btw.

Answer 9

agnostics entertain the idea of a god--where's your conundrum?

Answer 10

i don't think it's bad
u may find that u still do believe in God, but that he works in different ways than what ur parents think

or maybe u won't believe in God afterall..
either way - as long as u try to lead a good life, it doesn't really matter