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Recently, I opened up to my parents about a recurring dilemma that I’ve been experiencing. Far from their slightest idea, it’s about my “religious belief”, although ironic, as I started not believing in religion.

My family is a devout Roman Catholic. My brother serves every Sunday as an altar boy. My sister reads the verse. And as of writing, my parents would be the Hermano-Hermana in our church. Despite all these, I call myself an Agnostic.

I have long been a passive follower of the practices of my religion. For example, I do not get the point of confessing my sins to a fellow sinner, or literally believing what the bible says. As someone who has been passionate about science, I can’t believe that the ocean separated in half, that Jesus walked on water, that Jesus went back from the dead, that God made the world in seven days, and so many others.

Perhaps, my experiences as a science enthusiast gave me the first instinct to rationalize, rather than to further complicate an abstract theory. Needless to say, my father tried to convince me that Roman Catholicism is real, and that it could be the radical ideals instilled in me by my university that is temporarily blinding me from my life-long belief.

To start with, I don’t have a religion. However, I believe in a higher being – not necessarily the man who died on the cross and the man who walked on water – but a higher being who or which, started all the complex dimensions in the universe. I know the Big Bang theory, and how the Solar Nebula hypothesis could have consequently followed. I understand how the Earth and the moon formed, how the ocean and the atmosphere formed, how the first life on Earth began and how it evolved to the present majority of species -humans, us – by the Evolution Theory. And I view all of these in the perspective of science, logic, and reasoning. In 7.6 billion years, the Sun will reach its maximum size to become a Red Giant, that it will extend up to 20% of the Earth’s orbit, swallowing the Earth in the process.

All these left me to ask, what then is the purpose of existence and of life, if in 7.6 billion years, everything that happened would succumb to oblivion? Is there still God, after all life on Earth disappears? What if, like and together with all the primitive species that inhabited the Earth, we are meant for extinction? Trilobites, one of the earliest life forms on Earth, existed for 300 million years. Humans have only existed for 200,000 years. The human species is only a speck in the long history of the Earth, yet we have already claimed a lot. We claim to be in the form of the highest of all beings and the supreme owners of the planet. However, no one noticed how similar the human species are to animals.

Humans built civilizations, created their own set of laws and values, and even hegemonized it. The human species built institutions like governments, corporations, schools, banks, religion, etc. and along the way, compete among themselves. Humans are hungry for power and dominance. There is social cannibalism among humans. They started slavery, colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism. All these may not directly kill the prey, but they commonly degrade their existence. Perhaps, this is the evolved human version of lions feeding over their cubs. Moreover, similar to other animals, humans also feed on other animals different from their own species. Humans kill sharks, cows, pigs, chicken, fishes, and many other “lower” forms of life for food.

True to their nature, humans compete for survival, simply one of the key points stated in the Evolution of Life. After all, no natural law states that killing is bad, or good, for that matter. Nature is amoral in its very form, and the human species is nothing but a part and a manifestation of the innate processes of Earth. The only possible reason why humans would diverge from this idea is that humans are the most evolved species on Earth, thus giving them a complex brain structure that never existed in earlier life forms. The institutions that humans built are products of their brain, not of nature. And despite having such evolved physiology, I think that humans are still very naive beings to only know so much. Jesus was a human being. Prayers work because they are a form of meditation, like yoga, which enhances the quality of mind, further leading to stress reduction, improved health, slowed aging, etc.

Now, many other religious beliefs can be rationalized through other framework of analyses, with the broad range of science being one of them. I believe that the universe happened for a profound reason, and that all of these have inherent meaning, but we, as humans, can only make conclusions based on a limited range of facts and beliefs. I do not discriminate religions and other belief systems, because humans naturally find a way to make sense of their existence, and both religion and science are ways to understand life as it is. Life is an everyday discovery of our own purpose, and it is a personal decision to be influenced by others’ ideals, or to be individualistic about it.

As for me, I choose to believe that the nature of God is unknowable. God may be an idea, a theory, a phenomenon, an intangible matter, or it could be the purpose itself. I wouldn’t exactly know for sure. I could be one of the far products of a simultaneous explosion of a dense matter, and fortunately became a part of the complex human species to be able to think and to rationalize my existence.

Perhaps, what would keep me going is the faith that my very own existence and how it plays with the nature of existence as a whole has a purpose. I have faith in my purpose. Life is short and new species will evolve after my species, but I think life is the greatest chance that I have to involve myself in a continuous process of evolution as the natural course of events on Earth, or even in universe, perhaps. My life might or might not have an inherent meaning aside from being a necessary evolutionary phase, but if it is within my ability to be part of any positive causality in the future, I will take part in it.

As Friedrich Nitzsche said in his book, Human, All Too Human, “And so onwards…along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence…however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through – false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes – into your goal, with nothing left over.”