{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "id": "texto-el-dios-en-que-yo-creo",
  "language": "en",
  "canonical": "https://paynalton.tech/en/works/el-dios-en-que-yo-creo/",
  "title": "The god in which I believe",
  "summary": "A personal search about faith, knowledge and existence.",
  "author": "Paynalton",
  "format": "essay",
  "partial": true,
  "topics": [
    {
      "title": "Philosophical reflections",
      "url": "https://paynalton.tech/en/topics/lectura-categoria-reflexiones-filosoficas/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Philosophical reflection",
      "url": "https://paynalton.tech/en/topics/lectura-reflexion-filosofica/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Philosophy of religion",
      "url": "https://paynalton.tech/en/topics/lectura-filosofia-de-la-religion/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Religion",
      "url": "https://paynalton.tech/en/topics/lectura-religion/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Knowledge",
      "url": "https://paynalton.tech/en/topics/lectura-conocimiento/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Existence",
      "url": "https://paynalton.tech/en/topics/lectura-existencia/"
    }
  ],
  "body": "## Introduction\n\nI remember that as a child I was raised within the Catholic faith. Although my parents weren't very devout, they always tried to instill in me their beliefs, which they themselves had acquired from the grandparents I never knew. I really believed in all of it and was happy living under that cosmology. \n\nTo fulfill one of the requirements that religion demanded, I was sent for a time each week to the temple to receive instruction from some nuns about faith and religion. In that place, they taught the children prayers, songs, the meaning of the symbols used in ceremonies and some lessons on morality.\n\nIt was during one of these lessons that everything began. One of the nuns was speaking about temptations of evil in the modern world, the dangers of falling into damnation and being dragged away from the glory of God by our own desires. I remember clearly that the nun began to give examples of the temptations that the devil puts in our path and how some of us were falling into them. She said clearly: \"Who likes to see Shera?\" and I raised my hand, \"Shera means demon in ancient language.\"\n\nAt that moment my credulity broke. Within the childish mind of a seven-year-old who enjoyed watching Shera on television, a heroine from a fantasy world, nothing could be more false than to assure that she could be the demon. In addition to being a champion of good and protecting her people, Shera was the sister of He-Man, another of my childhood heroes.\n\nFrom that moment on I began to ask myself: What else have they lied to me about? And began an exhaustive search for the truth. Looking in books, documentaries, reasoning, talking, discussing on the internet with a single objective: The Truth. Perhaps religion wasn't lying to me, perhaps it was just an uneducated nun, a priest who lies out of pity or a bishop who never wanted answers.\n\nFor this reason I began to search within my own religion to end up with more doubts than I had at the beginning. Convinced that I would find nothing there, I searched in other religions without better results. Finally I decided to seek answers in great sages of humanity, whose guidance was very appropriate but did not resolve my doubts.\n\nTwenty years have already passed since I began that search. In this time, the truth has always resisted my attempts at seduction and has distanced itself smiling, waiting for me to follow it along dangerous and unknown paths. I know that I still have much to learn and that human life is not enough to understand everything. Nevertheless, I continue forward, waiting for death not to surprise me in a vegetative state before life, but to climb back to my destiny and guide it in search of my dreams.\n\nAfter this time, I can only quote Descartes: \"I doubt the very doubt\" while writing these lines about the conclusions these 20 years of experiences have left me with. What follows is not the truth, just an interpretation, since, as I will explain later, humans are incapable of knowing the truth.\n\nThe fundamental reason for writing all of this is to try to explain the way I see the world to others. It is not about convincing anyone to think the same as me, but rather about showing in the simplest way the cosmology I have formed over the years, despite the fact that time will pass and many of my opinions will probably change as I acquire new knowledge or hear diverse opinions.\n\nAnd finally, I have come to realize that many things cannot be explained in a single conversation, since they consist of many parts, small reasonings that come together and form a whole, ultimately leading to the idea that, perhaps, there is a god behind all of this, although this god would be very different from the various descriptions I have heard so far.\n\nIn the following chapters, I will present each of the reasonings that lead to this idea. Along the way, traditional ways of seeing the universe around us are questioned. I am not a great philosopher or thinker, so some of these reasonings are built upon doubt; that is, planting doubt first about what is, then stating what it could be, and building upon it as a fact.\n\nThis is not the correct way to build knowledge, however, it is the fastest way to do so, and I hope there is no problem if, after finding evidence that confirms a hypothesis, one does not fear declaring one of these reasonings as incorrect and losing everything built upon it.\n\nFinally, knowledge built from nothing is worthless. If at some point evidence is found that proves the validity of that reasoning, then the knowledge created will have some value. If, on the contrary, the evidence refutes it, there is no need to fear losing everything related to it, since in the end, we are not losing anything, and we are gaining a new real knowledge, an open field to rebuild, this time with something real on which to build.\n\nI hope that whoever reads this will have the patience to understand, accept, or challenge what is presented here, as well as to communicate their own conclusions to others, since only in this way can true knowledge be generated that benefits all of humanity.\n\n\\\n1.-Various Possibilities.\n--------------------------\n\nA very popular song when I was a child said: \"There are more religions than happy children.\" I don't know how true this is, but there are indeed many religions.\n\nFirst, let's differentiate religion from faith:\n\nHumans have many unknowns about the universe; there are so many secrets to discover that no single human being can know everything, nor would they have enough life to even attempt to learn a small part of it.\n\nBesides that, humans are quite fearful of their surroundings, perhaps due to their heritage as prey for various predators in ancient times. The truth is that the unknown always causes us a certain fear, a fear that some face with courage and others do not, but this fear is always present as long as the gap in knowledge remains.\n\nFaced with the vast amount of unknowns, the most logical thing would be for humans to be a trembling creature hiding in some hole, afraid to step out into the unknown. However, this is not the case, for humans have a very important tool: Faith.\n\nWhen facing any problem without a solution, humans begin to imagine and create assumptions that serve as a resolution to that problem. If this process of imagination matures and the individual truly considers it real, accepting it as knowledge, then we can say that everything imagined becomes Faith.\n\nTo understand it better, let's say that our real knowledge is a door full of holes that let the cold in, and that faith is a clay that we shape and adjust to cover those holes.\n\nGiven our limited amount of knowledge, finding an answer, whether real or false, leads us to new questions, which we try to solve again. If we continue imagining and using as a basis for solving new problems the assumptions we generated before, then gradually we will build an entire cosmology, which will grow until we become a being who knows everything about the universe and, therefore, has no fear of anything.\n\nIn this way, we can say that every human being knows little and believes in much, since their real knowledge extends only a few meters around them, while the rest of all their knowledge are just beliefs they have developed or acquired.\n\nBecause humans are capable of communicating complex ideas with other humans, it is possible that they transmit their answers, their faith, to others. This makes it so if an explanation is more logical or convenient than others, it spreads among all humans, who will begin to share the same faith with some personal variations.\n\nMost knowledge is not built by people themselves, but is acquired through communication with others. That is why if a new faith arises and it is communicated to others, it will gradually standardize among its believers until forming a dogma.\n\nIn my opinion, dogma would be a shared belief. Let's say, one person believes that a divine being created the universe, ten other people believe the same thing, but five of them believe it was a god named \"chencho\" and the rest believe it was a goddess named \"chencha.\" We then have the same belief with two variations. We would speak of two distinct beliefs with five believers each. The adherents of both beliefs then construct an entire cosmology based on their belief, that is, they construct a dogma in which all of them believe without variations, and which is capable of explaining the entire universe.\n\nTo conclude this part, we will say that every human being is a believer, there are those who fully believe that there exists a god controlling the universe, and there are those who believe that such a thing does not exist. In the end, it's all belief since none of this is real knowledge.\n\n\\\n2.- Needs.\n--------------------\n\n \n\nLet's start with something very basic: NEEDS.\n\nThe human being is a highly complex and interesting organism. With an impressive cultural diversity and even a greater diversity of individuals. Each person is different from others and very similar to the rest.\n\nHuman habits and customs are extremely varied and can lead to strange behaviors at times. However, despite all this diversity in behavior, there are common points.\n\nAll human beings are living beings, and like all living beings, they have needs.\n\nTo define the concept of need, imagine a river. Water flows through this river from a place that does not interest us to a place we also do not care about.\n\nThis river has various characteristics that define it as such. That is, every river has a watershed through which water flows in some direction, the water as it flows has a peculiar sound. Likewise, the movement of the water is always in one direction. In addition, its elongated shape is characteristic of every river.\n\nIn addition to that, we have other characteristics that can differentiate this river from others. We can speak of the curves formed by its watershed, the depth of the same, the characteristics of the water that flows through it, the speed of its waters, its width, its extent, etc.\n\nThe first of these characteristics can be seen as a reflection of a need, that is, if the river has no liquid flowing through it, then it is not a river. Therefore, the river needs water in order to exist. It also needs the water to flow in one direction; if it does not, it is not a river, but rather a pond or a long swamp.\n\nIn other words, \"need\" is that without which an object in our universe cannot exist. It could be another object (the water), or a system (that it flows in one direction).\n\nIn the case of human beings, we can cite the need to breathe, to eat, to communicate, the need for certain conditions of pressure and temperature.\n\nIf we consider the human individual as a single organism, we could say that all basic needs should be met for the individual to continue existing. Let's say a person stops breathing. Although nothing happens in the first few moments, in a few minutes the lack of air will cause damage to its vital systems, which will collapse and lead to death. Once dead, all the components that make up the individual will begin to separate, either through degradation or through the attack of opportunistic organisms. Eventually the individual will cease to exist and break down into various static components that may eventually become part of other organisms at some point.\n\nWe can then say that all living organisms die when, for one reason or another, one of their needs is not met, leading to the end of their existence. It remains a separate discussion whether the individual is no longer considered as such at the moment of death or when nothing recognizable of it remains. What is important is that it will eventually disappear if any of its fundamental needs is not met.\n\nBut what about static and lifeless elements? If we apply the same analogy to the non-living, we will find a great similarity.\n\nLet's take for example a simple rock. This rock has certain needs that must be met. Perhaps they are not as varied and interesting as the needs of a living being, but things like temperature, pressure, and even humidity can lead to the disintegration of the rock if not met. As simple as heating the rock until it melts or suddenly increasing the pressure on it (a good hammer strike) would cause the rock to break apart, the rock as such disappears and gives way to smaller and different elements than its predecessor.\n\nLet's go even further in our reasoning and move to the smallest particle we can imagine in the universe. This particle would also have fundamental needs, the existence of dimensions can be a good example. Without the dimensions that converge to give shape and volume to the particle, it simply does not exist. If somehow we manage to get one dimension to stop influencing that particle, it would cease to be such in our universe and be reflected only in the dimensions that remain. If we finally remove all the dimensions that influence it, the particle ceases to exist completely.\n\nLet's go back to the river, and this time let's call it the river \"Chencho.\" We mentioned that this river has characteristics that distinguish it from other rivers. We can modify those other characteristics or even eliminate them entirely. By doing so, the river would no longer cease to be a river, would it? Yet would it still be Chencho?\n\nIn another line of reasoning, we'll discuss the way in which the world is perceived. A person who lives on the banks of the river goes to a distant land. This person carries with them an impression of \"Chen,cho.\" When this person returns, then \"Chencho\" has changed, its waters are different, perhaps it has decreased a bit, and its watershed has a different shape.\n\nThen \"Chencho\" has ceased to exist to become something else.\n\nThe discussion regarding the falsity of these statements is left to those more knowledgeable on the subject, and if someone refutes them, they should do so as soon as possible, since many things are based on this analogy. Although I well know that understanding through objects will be debated in later chapters.\n"
}