There may seem to be many religions and gods, but your fellow agnostic, Confucius, said that we should always begin at the classification of things (格物).
If you look carefully at all the religious systems of the world, you can actually divide them into two classes:
1. Creator religion: eternal creator (god or gods) who created the universe but not part of it;
2. System religion: an eternal system of rules exists from which the current universe is built upon.
So it is a chicken and egg problem - is there is some intelligent personality (a god or some gods) who create the system, or the system is always there, and the god or gods and the universe arise out of the system.
Common sense tells me that things are always made by some intelligent personality. I am sure many heard of the watch implies a watchmaker analogy. Critics of this analogy like to point that the watchmaker would likewise need another maker, and so on ad infinitum. Well, mathematics tell me that the largest number n, will always have a larger number, n + 1. But we define "infinity" to resolve the issue. Likewise, if a maker always have another maker, then it will stop at the infinite maker, which is God.
If we agree that there is some intelligent personality creating the universe, then our next job is to identify this intelligent personality. Among all the religions that claim to have some intelligent personality that create the universe, which is the most probable?
First, let us eliminate false creators. An example is Pan Ku (盤古, 盘古), the creator in Chinese mythology. He was formed from an egg which was formed from a formless chaos. In another word, he was created within a pre-existing system. Thus it is not a true creator religion, but a system religion. Likewise are the creation accounts of many polytheist religions, which seem to accept a system from which our world, gods and people, exists.
Common sense tells me that things are always made by some intelligent personality. I am sure many heard of the watch implies a watchmaker analogy. Critics of this analogy like to point that the watchmaker would likewise need another maker, and so on ad infinitum. Well, mathematics tell me that the largest number n, will always have a larger number, n + 1. But we define "infinity" to resolve the issue. Likewise, if a maker always have another maker, then it will stop at the infinite maker, which is God.
If we agree that there is some intelligent personality creating the universe, then our next job is to identify this intelligent personality. Among all the religions that claim to have some intelligent personality that create the universe, which is the most probable?
First, let us eliminate false creators. An example is Pan Ku (盤古, 盘古), the creator in Chinese mythology. He was formed from an egg which was formed from a formless chaos. In another word, he was created within a pre-existing system. Thus it is not a true creator religion, but a system religion. Likewise are the creation accounts of many polytheist religions, which seem to accept a system from which our world, gods and people, exists.
The only true creator religions that I know of are the monotheistic religions. The most likely candidates for creator God are the God of Abraham and the God of Sikhism. Thus the Agnostic can start by studying all the monotheistic religions. This should narrow down the scope.
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