That life energy problem!

I've been a atheist or at least agnostic (fence sitter) for most of my life, at least for the parts where I have given it any consideration at all or where I have not been in excruciating agony and thinking that I might be about to cash in and find out whether I was right or wrong to have doubt or lack of faith.

And for most of this time I stated the same old memes as many others about science and proof and all the bad things in the world and there being so many different types of god or creator.

But...

It is not so much that I have suddenly found faith it's just that a number of things strike me when I think about them. The kind of things that I guess most people have thought about one way or another at some point or another throughout time!

For instance, I was thinking about the scientific principal called the Law of the Conservation of Energy which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed it can only be transferred from one form to another. Which is pretty mind blowing in itself if ever anybody cares to think about the implications of it (and millions have but many more millions have not I suspect).

Then if you start thinking about any organism, or in fact... anything at all. They are all made up of elements, molecules and then atoms. Everything is... so if we were able to look at everything at the atomic level there would be a far less defined shape to stuff! And all of this is energy whizzing around from one state to another!

Plus, there is another little thing that most people don't spend much time thinking about and that is that whilst gravity seems to have everything pretty grounded and it takes huge huge energy from massive rockets to get anything into space, at the very same time, there are atoms that simply don't wait for a rocket they follow a path called atmospheric escape which has several processes but in short, bits of the Earths atmosphere float off into space every minute and in a billion years or so there will be no life on earth as there will be no water and no oxygen, that's a fact but none of will be around that long so I guess its conjecture.

Anyway. When I put these things together it isn't that I have an 'aha' moment and convert to Catholicism I simply have a more open mind to their being something more than just an accident of science. Nature is after all a magical thing and while everybody is worrying about one thing or another in regard of climate change one thing is certain, nature will sort it out! Indeed nature will sort it out in such a manner as to either return the planet to a previous state or transition it to a new state. One way or another that might well mean that all current life on Earth is extinguished and a new form is built, or simply the same life but as a refresh or reboot all reusing that energy that is already here!

If I go back to the basic bit about us being a collection of atoms and consuming other atoms to generate different molecules etc etc there is still this one thing that gets lost in the basic scientific physics or biology lessons. The spark that is life within each of us. Once again, this is simply energy flowing from place to place but in this organised manner.

So it might not be such a ridiculous jump to imagine the body being a vehicle and the energy that is a life being something that inhabits that vehicle. Maybe it is symbiotic or maybe it is parasitic. But that energy exists within all of us. Which raises the question (for me) when a person dies, is it the life energy collapsing and releasing the atoms that have been amassed over a lifetime to decompose back to base elements and be reabsorbed into other forms or has the ability of the body failed and the energy that is life is released in some form to go somewhere else.

And then when you get to that point you start thinking well maybe the Buddhists have a point about one life simply transferring from one form to another. But it seems improbable that the life force has any recollection that it was a in another form just a short time ago, for instance as a person dies in a car accident and a spark is generated between an egg and a sperm to create a new life in a cow, for example, that the energy from one has transferred into the other but have the memories? If the answer is maybe then suddenly all those slightly crazy people that claim to have been multiple people through time and have been reborn don't seem quite so crazy any more except they have somehow been doubly lucky to have been transferred multiple times from human to human form without ever being one of the billions of other life forms on the planet say a carp or a rose or a daisy or mayfly etc and they have managed to keep hold of memories... but maybe!

Then...

There are those billions of atoms that float off into space (which we know practically nothing about other than we know that we only know what occupies about 5% of it and the rest is something but we don't yet know what, but what we do know is it must be something because we can see interactions between what we do understand and what we don't!)

Anyway, maybe those atoms contain a life force, maybe they float off to a predetermined place and maybe time is an artificial construct for them.

So did something create all this and is there a place where all the life force energy goes when it transfers? Probably, but it seems unlikely that memories travel with the life force so the perception of uncle Fred looking down smiling is an unlikely construct made to make us feel better and used by religion to help keep hold of us.

I do not now nor ever have had a problem with people of faith, I hope it helps them, I have seen faith help more people than I have seen it harm but I guess I am still agnostic at the end of the day as I can't see how it works, then, that's why it is faith I guess! You take it on faith because there can be no ultimate proof.

But I do not think it does any harm to think of that spark that is life as energy and that it transfers from one thing to another and it does no harm to think that it retains the memories of its existence through time and it does no harm to think that at some point that energy escapes the planets hold and takes its memories to another place and still no harm to think that that place is contained in the 95% of space of which we have no understanding or comprehension. So, to those that do follow this oath, that's ok, you are doing no harm, but enjoy life while you occupy this form as you might not be able to appreciate it quite so much on the next ride!