Ten existential questions for empirical naturalists

They’re not that hard, once you look at the evidence

Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash

I began my life as a Catholic, as the Monty Python song famously says:

I’m a Roman Catholic

And have been since before I was born

And the one thing they say about Catholics is:

They’ll take you as soon as you’re warm

You don’t have to be a six-footer

You don’t have to have a great brain

You don’t have to have any clothes on, you’re

A Catholic the moment Dad came

So there I was, raised by my family in Catholic Rome, Italy. When I hit my teenage years and began to study philosophy in high school, I was quickly able to put words to my increasing intuitive discomfort with Catholicism in particular and Christianity more generally. So for a long time I adopted a combination of secular humanism and scientific skepticism as my go-to “philosophy as a way of life” (PWoL), though I really wasn’t aware of that particular terminology at the time.

This went on without a hitch for a bit over two decades because — as I discovered later on — there hadn’t really been any major challenges for me to face, yet, in life. Then 2004 came and…