Shopping Carts and Metaphysics

I consider myself an agnostic. I wasn't raised in a religious faith, so the idea of believing in God, or gods, is foreign to my experience. Intuitively, I think that the notion of a god or of any idea of soul or consciousness that is external to the human body violates Occam's Razor, which is that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.

To me, it seems simpler to assume that human consciousness is the result of interactions between various parts of the brain and body. But I am aware that both my temperament and my background may be influencing me unduly: I tend to be pessimistic and not particularly mystically or spiritually inclined, and I have a background in computer science, in which everything can be reduced to ones and zeroes (or voltages, if you want to go further). These traits tend to skew me towards atheism and a mechanistic view of the world.

But I am an agnostic, not an atheist, for several reasons:

• Many of the atheists that I ran into in the tech world were insufferable about it. "Oh, you believe in a Sky Fairy! How quaint!" These people annoyed me. I don't run into people like this much anymore, thank goodness.
• My father pointed out that the idea of existence is a very complex problem that is too large for our tiny human brains to understand. As he put it, this was like an ant trying to understand calculus.
• Related to this: the final reason that I decided that I was an agnostic was that, many years ago, when I was deeply contemplating the meaning of life, I was at the grocery store. Back then, they had shopping carts that were joined together with chains. To unlock a shopping cart, you had to insert a quarter into a slot; this caused it to be unlocked from its neighbour. Because I have trouble with mechanical devices and contrivances of all kinds, I was having difficulty figuring out how to unlock a cart. It then occurred to me that, if I can't figure out how to retrieve a shopping cart, I possibly might not be smart enough to know whether God exists.

I have more or less left it at that since then, though I will probably have to face this more as I continue to grow older and the inevitability of mortality looms larger. But I often wonder: why does anything exist at all? And if time is infinite, why hasn't it all happened already? Why are we able to be here in this moment? I guess we need to not think about stuff like this too often if we want to function effectively in the world. So I will go back to thinking of something else now.

June 2026

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