A Short Exposé on Why I Am Neither Religious Nor An Atheist.

For The Love Of Darwin And Christ

A few of my friends, my sisters, and some of my mates are genuinely worried on my behalf because I do not subscribe to any particular religion and remain unconvinced by many traditional ideas of God. Perhaps they simply do not want me frying in some version of hell. If that is the case, I take their concern as a sign of love rather than judgment.

So this morning, I decided to sit down and make coherent sense of my thoughts, partly for myself and partly so those concerned on my behalf might better understand where I am coming from.

One thing I should make clear from the outset is that my skepticism toward religion does not automatically make me an atheist. In fact, one of the reasons I find myself stuck in this strange middle ground is that I have almost as many questions about atheism as I do about religion. The religious answer leaves me unconvinced, but neither does the atheist answer leave me satisfied.

So before explaining why I remain unconvinced by religion, it makes sense to begin with why I am not an atheist.

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Part I: Why I am not an atheist

Now, to be fair to atheism, it starts from what is probably the most logical place possible. In fact, I think atheists are often some of the most intellectually honest people you will come across, because for someone to genuinely consider themselves an atheist, they must have sat down and wrestled deeply with these existential questions rather than simply inheriting answers from those around them.

Instead of appealing to sacred books, revelations, prophets, visions, and all the other things religion tends to rely on, atheism largely defaults to empiricism, and empiricism in turn defaults to science. When asked questions like “How did the universe come to be?” or “How did man come to be?”, the answers usually point toward things like the Big Bang and evolution.

Fair enough.

If I had to choose between believing something because it can be investigated and believing it because someone who claimed to be the Son of God said so a few thousand years ago, I would choose the former every single time.

So it should be obvious that my disagreement is not with science itself.

My difficulty begins when science is presented not merely as a method of understanding reality, but as a complete explanation of reality.

Take evolution, for example. At its core, it seems to follow the same logic as Murphy’s Law: given enough time, anything that can happen will happen.

That idea gives rise to the famous typing monkeys experiment. Put an army of monkeys in front of typewriters and let them randomly hit keys. Given enough time, one of them will eventually produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The phrase that interests me, however, is not “it is possible.” It is “given enough time.” That caveat does most of the heavy lifting.

Because when you actually do the mathematics, the amount of time required for monkeys to randomly produce Hamlet is somewhere in the neighbourhood of one in ten thousand million million million million million million years. In other words, a billion billion years.

Now compare that to the age of the universe. The universe has only been around for about twelve billion years.

And this is where my difficulty begins.

Some religious scientists have argued that twelve billion years is not even enough time for a single enzyme to emerge by pure chance, talk less of a living cell, a solar system, or an entire universe capable of producing conscious creatures that can sit down and argue about their own existence, much like I am doing now.

At this point, I find myself asking a simple question: how much explanatory weight can chance reasonably carry before it collapses under its own burden?

Because chance seems to be doing a lot of work here.

Whenever something extraordinarily improbable appears, the answer is often that, given enough time, it eventually becomes possible. But time is not infinite. The universe is not infinitely old. Twelve billion years sounds like a long time until you start comparing it to the numbers being invoked.

This is why I cannot follow atheism all the way to its conclusion. Not because I reject science, and not because I reject evolution, but because I remain unconvinced that chance alone can account for everything we see.

In a strange way, chance begins to feel like atheism’s salvation. Its final refuge. The thing called upon whenever the odds become absurd enough.

And so I arrive at a conclusion:

Chance is not what explains the universe. If anything, chance is what the universe appears to be laboring mightily to overcome.

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Part II: Why I am not religious

Now, if Part I is correct and chance alone is not a sufficient explanation for existence, then the religious man immediately jumps from his seat, dusts off his robe, and comes running like a knight in shining armour.

“See?” he says. “I told you so. It had to be God.”

Well, I am willing to grant, at least for the sake of argument, that intelligence may be a better explanation for the universe than blind chance. But even if I grant that, a much bigger problem immediately appears.

It does not logically follow that because intelligence may be necessary to explain the universe, that intelligence must therefore be the God of Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism, or any of the ten thousand religious traditions that currently exist.

That is an enormous leap.

Somewhere between “chance cannot explain everything” and “therefore my religion is correct,” a lot of assumptions get smuggled in.

Because suddenly this intelligence has a favourite holy book. It has preferred prophets. It has preferred methods of worship. It has opinions about what you eat, how you dress, who you marry, and what happens to you after death. More often than not, it also seems to have a remarkable tendency to agree with the people speaking on its behalf.

My difficulty with religion begins here.

Human beings are deeply anthropomorphic creatures. We have an almost irresistible tendency to project ourselves onto things we do not understand. We see faces in clouds. We create zodiac signs like Taurus and Capricorn and use stars that do not even know of our existence to explain our personalities. We create gods like Thor to explain lightning and other natural occurences because we do not understand its mechanism.

So it should not surprise us that when confronted with the greatest mystery imaginable, existence itself, we are tempted to give it human characteristics too.

We do not merely say there is intelligence behind the universe. We want that intelligence to indulge us.

We want it to care that we exist. We want it to reassure us that our lives matter. We want it to be just when the world feels unfair, merciful when we fail, loving when we feel alone, and protective when life becomes frightening. We want it to care for us the way a father cares for his children.

And because we desire those things so deeply, we often begin attributing them to whatever intelligence we believe created the universe. Before long, this intelligence starts looking less like an objective explanation of reality and more like a reflection of our deepest hopes, fears, desires, and egoic inclinations.

In other words, we do not just create “A God in our own image.” We create a God that flatters our image.

This is why religious disputes often strike me as strange.

Religious Man A says his God is the one true God. He sent His Son, who is somehow also God, to save humanity, left His Holy Spirit behind, and revealed the truth through a holy book. Therefore, he is right and everyone else is wrong.

Religious Man B hears this and nearly falls off his chair.

“Wait. Are you saying God has a son? Does that mean He has a wife too? And how is the son also God? Is the very definition of God not supposed to be singular? And now there is a Holy Spirit involved as well?”

“Look, In my religion, God is one. No son and No divine relatives. Mine is Simple, Logical and elegant. Therefore, your religion is wrong and mine is right.”

Religious Man A then looks at Religious Man B with the exact same level of concern and concludes that he is the confused one.

And therein lies the problem. Both men are certain. Both think the other is obviously mistaken. Neither realizes that he sounds exactly like the other.

At some point it stops being a search for the truth and starts looking like a defence of identity.

And this brings me to the question at the heart of my problem with religion.

If intelligence is responsible for the universe, which intelligence are we talking about?

Is it the Christian God?

The Muslim God?

The Hindu gods?

The Taoist understanding of reality?

The Buddhist view?

Or one of the thousands of other gods humanity has worshipped throughout history?

And perhaps the most interesting question of all: Why are there so many of them in the first place?

is the question that ultimately pushed me away from organized religion, which leads to part III

Part III: The geography problem

Why are there so many people who are absolutely certain about completely different Gods?

The more I thought about it, the more I noticed something interesting. What most religious people do not like to admit is that religion appears to be far more cultural than supernatural.

Food for thought.

Look around the world with honest eyes. The Arab world is overwhelmingly Muslim. Europe is historically Christian. Asia runs on Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and a hundred other isms. The parts of Africa and Latin America that are Christian today are largely the ones that were once colonized by Europeans.

This is a pattern so consistent it would be irresponsible to ignore. Geography determines language. Geography determines cuisine. And whether people want to admit it or not, geography determines who you call God.

Where you are born is one of the strongest determinants of what you believe about who created the universe. Not divine encounter. Latitude and longitude chikina.

Now hold that thought and apply it to the logic of divine punishment. If we are even hypothetically granting that an intelligence exists that created the universe, then at the very minimum, this intelligence must be fair. If there is a concept of punishment, there must be a concept of justice. You cannot have one without the other.

So my question then becomes: why would a just God allow the question of eternal damnation to be decided by something as arbitrary and human as geography?

If the Christian God is the one true God, then every Muslim, every Buddhist, every practitioner of the remaining ten thousand religions on this planet goes to hell. If Islam turns out to be right, the same logic follows in the opposite direction. Somebody is burning either way, and the deciding factor of who burns is largely where their mother happened to give birth to them.

Now someone will say: but there is proselytization. People carry the message across borders. The gospel reaches Saudi Arabia. Islam reaches Europe. So geography is not destiny.

That sounds reasonable until you look at what actually happens. Messages travel. But five minutes of proselytization is not standing a serious chance against fifteen years of inherited belief, identity, family, and worldview. Saudi Arabia is still overwhelmingly Muslim. Poland is still overwhelmingly Catholic. Japan is still predominantly non-theist. The missionaries showed up yet the map barely moved.

And more importantly, the argument accidentally proves my point. If the system for saving souls depends on whether a missionary happened to reach your village, your city, your exact moment in history, then salvation is still a lottery. The ticket arrives through human logistics instead of geography, but the arbitrariness is identical.

But let us stick to geography, since its influence is clearly the largest. Before the missionary arrives, before anyone starts arguing over whose holy book is correct, geography has already made its opening move.

Take someone born in Saudi Arabia. Ninety-five percent Muslim population. Parents who are deeply, sincerely Islamic. Raised for fifteen years inside that worldview. Now, according to the Christian requirement for salvation, this person is expected to independently arrive at the conclusion that something called the Holy Spirit exists, accept that Jesus is the Son of God, and structure their entire eternal fate around that belief.

And if they do not arrive at that conclusion, they burn.

What follows is a kind of theological lottery. Some people happen to be born into the “correct” religion. Others happen to be born into the “wrong” one.

And the consequences are supposedly eternal.

So if God exists, and if choosing the correct religion is the most important decision a human being can make, why would access to that truth be distributed so unevenly?

Why would something so important depend so heavily on where a person happened to be born?

Because punishing someone eternally for the religion they inherited before they were even capable of questioning it does not look like justice.

Which brings me to my actual point.

Religion is not the revelation of which intelligence created the universe. Religion is what happens when different groups of humans, in different corners of the world, across different centuries, all try to make sense of the same terrifying unknown and all arrive at different answers. Then, instead of sitting with the discomfort of not knowing, they plant a flag, call their answer sacred, and go to war, literal and philosophical, over whose flag is taller.

Part IV: Where I stand

So to my concerned friends, sisters, mates, and possibly parents if they ever stumble across my Substack, I do not know whether God exists. I do not know whether the universe is ultimately the product of intelligence, chance, necessity, or something else entirely.

I do not reject the possibility of an intelligence behind existence, but I have not found, in science or in religion, anything that justifies the confidence with which either side insists it has the answer.

So I remain here, unconvinced by the certainty of believers and equally unconvinced by the certainty of those who mock them. Not belief, not disbelief, uncertainty, honestly acknowledged.

I simply do not know. And I doubt it is possible for anyone to. Anyone who claims otherwise is either unwilling to face the reality in front of them, or so deep in their own rut they can no longer see beyond it. And while that may be a reasonable way to avoid nihilism, it is not wisdom.

So if there is anything I hold onto, it is this: Anyone who claims to know should be doubted. Not out of arrogance, but out of caution. History has never been short of people who were absolutely certain, only to discover later that certainty was the very thing that blinded them.

Alas, the greatest danger for any man is to become so certain in his own myth that he begins to mistake enchantment for wisdom.

~ Abimbola

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Hi, I’m Abimbola.

This is my little corner of the internet where I document my two cents on life and whatever existential rabbit hole I happen to be stuck in at the time.

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