I like asking people what they’ve changed their mind about recently. It’s a question that cuts through small talk.
For me, I’ve started believing in God.
I used to be confidently atheist and my favorite way to think about it is using Ricky Gervais’s example about how Christians don’t believe in 2,999 other gods while atheists don’t believe in just one more. Or his vampire analogy on addressing “what if god exist”: just as we don’t hang garlic outside our doors just because Dracula might be real.
The scientific worldview seemed complete. Atoms can’t actually touch each other due to electromagnetic repulsion, so how could spirits pass through walls? Everything had explanations rooted in physics and chemistry.
What puzzled me was how many brilliant scientists believed in God. These weren’t people who ignored evidence. They understood falsifiability. Yet somehow they found room for faith alongside rigorous thinking.
That got me thinking about half-lives of facts. Facts decay over time. The Earth was flat until it wasn’t. Continents were fixed until plate tectonics. The universe was static until Hubble showed it expanding. Each generation looks back at previous certainties, never wondering what current beliefs might seem equally wrong later.
So I started with a thought experiment and assumed God exists. What would that look like?
Here’s what struck me as odd. Across religions, gods take on the form of human or animal. If God created humans and animals, then by definition God can’t be them. But if God is omnipotent, then form becomes a choice rather than a constraint. God could appear as anything.
Why not a dinosaur god? Something that ruled Earth for 165 million years before making room for mammals, then humans, then whatever comes next. The image appeals to me 🦕.
Maybe the question isn’t about God’s existence, but about the limitations of certainty. Science excels at describing how things work, but “how” and “why” are different questions.
It’s obvious that this is not a proof. But it has changed my mind about being certain that materialistic explanations exhaust reality.
It’s interesting when we practice holding strong beliefs loosely. So … what have you changed your mind about recently?