Given the majority sentiment that there can be no evidence in favor of a god, I began wondering why many of my readers are atheists. If one is an atheist because of a lack of evidence for god, that presumes that there could have been evidence in favor of god. Even if you reject gods because—as Grayling argues, and I agree—they’re so obviously man made, well, that too is empirical evidence against a god hypothesis.
I conclude that many readers are atheists because they simply feel that it’s logically impossible for there to be a god, or because the very concept of god is incoherent. Maybe I’m mistaken, though, so I throw this question out to readers, soliciting their views. I do this in all seriousness, as I’m trying to understand. I’d be delighted if you’d answer this question in the comments:
Why are you an atheist? Does it have anything to do with a lack of evidence for god, or are there other factors involved?
It’s only fair for me to answer as well, and it’s completely due to a lack of evidence. The scenario, in which I suddenly realized at age 17 that there was nothing supporting the existence of god, is described in a 2008 Chicago Tribune piece by Jeremy Manier, and reprinted at the Dawkins website.
Or maybe this is the reason:
(Cartoon from SMBC, h/t to Carl)
Note: The title of this post is taken from Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk’s excellent book 50 Voices of Disbelief, in which some of my readers have already published their reasons.
I’m sure I’ve listed these before, but…
1) In high school, freshman biology class I became fascinated with the way that everything made sense in terms of evolution. My teacher wasn’t especially good, it just seemed intuitive as soon as I took a semi-serious look at it (I was in 9th grade after all). So that was the end of a god being involved in the creation of life.
2) Still, I was raised catholic and it’s not an overnight job to let go of God. Probably another 6 months or so, I still thought that God could be involved as a supervisor and would look out for you. This made less and less sense as I studied world history and learned about people who couldn’t possibly have been involved with the Christian God.
3) By the time I was a senior in HS, I was reading Bertrand Russell, including Why I Am Not A Christian. I was in the camp of “we don’t really know,” but I don’t think I thought much about evidence for God, just that there was a lot of evidence against the god everyone around me was talking about (well, not everyone; I had a GF in HS who was atheist by upbringing).
3) College: Serious science student, God seemed more and more ridiculous.
4) World and personal events discredit religion and make it really impossible for there to be ANY kind of God. Took a look at the Bible, found it ludicrous in its myriad contradictions, inconsistencies, atrocities, etc. Listened to Apologetics try to weasel around the fact that their god looks like a monster. The supposed “evidence” for God is so flimsy, it insults my intelligence more than the basic claims about him/her/it.
5) But I guess I remain open to evidence of some sort of being. It’s really hard to imagine what kind of being this would be. We’ve already seen that this being is not necessary for the operation of the natural world. And it’s awfully hard to imagine a sentient being that cares about humans given the results of major disasters on whatever scale.
Raised UU without much interaction with True Believers. I actually thought that everyone else thought that God was just a cool story like the Santa or the Greek pantheon (I loved the Greek Gods when I was a kid), only God was more popular because he was supposed to be more powerful and had more celebrations.
When I started reading newspapers I finally began to understand how wrong I was, but by that time I was on the math and science teams at school and way too far gone to even entertain the idea of the supernatural. I mean just watch Scooby Doo and you know that every mystery ends with a guy trying to game people.
Today I disbelieve for many reasons: the problem of evil, incoherency, lack of evidence, and hell, just plain spite – God doesn’t like sex or disobedience, thus he is evil. I can’t help but read bible stories as if Satan was a rebel against an evil tyrant at this point, and, lord help me, I love an underdog.
P.S. I’m from Arkansas and everyone swears using god language all the time. I’ve thought about switching to godless curses, but it just comes natural to my lips. Besides it just sounds hilarious to me.
I’d totally love to find some godless curses to use. I hate (in an amusing sort of way) letting a “God damn it” slip from my lips. Other more body-function related curses work well (e.g. Piss Off!) but it sure would be sweet to see a full list of non-religion related curse phrases.
Shazbott!
Verdammt Lumpen!
Used to bother me, too, but I’m just not imaginative enough to come up with substitutes in the heat of the moment that don’t sound contrived. Cusswords are what they are. And in a way, it makes a certain sense that atheists would use god-words in anger when provoked. Who better to “blaspheme?”
I am an atheist because the concept of god is incoherent. It took me a long time to come to that conclusion. Raised in the home of a missionary, sent to a Christian boarding school, indoctrinated from an early age, I always had doubts, but never really managed to shake off the early childhood indoctrination. What brought faith completely to an end for me was twofold. First, the fact that there is no solution to the problem of evil, try as one might, a task which became completely impossible for me after having read Darwin’s Origin. The second problem lay with Christian morality. There is no basis for it. After arguing the case for recognition and acceptance of gay Christians and for assisted dying, it was clear that there is simply no basis for settling these questions — or any other moral issue — from within faith traditions.
In other words, belief systems which claim to answer the question “Why are we here?” cannot answer the questions “Why do we suffer?” or “What should we do?” Such a belief system is incoherent. Gods are not an answer; they are the problem, because they force us to look outside of humanity for the solution. The answer must be a human one. There is no reason to suppose there is any other.
“Gods are not an answer; they are the problem, because they force us to look outside of humanity for the solution.”
Well said.
As an aside, I was one of those positive atheists everyone is always denying they are, long before PZ and SZ adapted Hume to declare that “positive evidence for a creator is impossible.” I thought it was really, really unlikely, but I’d rather go to hell anyway than worship God.
I know it’s not a logical reason to disbelieve btw, but humans aren’t logical, and I’m cool with that. I prefer to emphasize the emotional disgust I have at faith and tyranny more often honestly.
Stop saying faith is illogical and start saying it’s stupid and wrong. That’s the only way to win an argument with an intentional dunce.
I rather like that!
My rejection of religion comes in three parts:
1). “That which is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence,” (Christopher Hitchens most often gets credit for this expression). I would go further, however. “That which is asserted without evidence MUST be dismissed without evidence.”
2). Every new god who “reveals” himself/herself is different from all other gods, further minimizing the possibility any god is real and bolstering the case that something in the human mind is particularly amenable to superstitious nonsense
3). Beliefs common to religion typically reinforce beneficial behaviors, suggesting superstition was selected. For example, the common belief that deities grant the faithful support & protection and/or heightened capabilities bolsters confidence, which research (Wrangham etc.) shows improves performance. The hope in a positive, supernaturally-directed outcome that is common to many faiths helps keep depression in check and encourages continued exertion. Many faiths forbid non-reproductive sexual practices. And religion favors a degree of group cohesion (willingness to sacrifice, murder and steal from competing groups, hierarchical obedience etc.) essential for strong groups.
I’m not an atheist; I don’t have any term to describe what I am, which is, I guess, an absence of any belief in the supernatural. (I do, however — and it’s a knee-jerk thing — pray once in a desperate while to the football gods, but that’s probably a different matter entirely. We’re not discussing the human instinct for domestic pantheism, in which I am a believer.)
Here’s why I don’t believe in that one “god”: when I was around 11, growing up in a godless home, I decided to test the hypothesis that there was a “god.” I set tasks for “god” and for me: I’d pray for a full week (the whole physical bit I derived from illustrations — on my knees, hands composed, side of the bed before I went to sleep [or, most likely, before I got into bed and kept the light on surreptitiously so I could read, a comical battle I had with my mom virtually every night.]
Meanwhile, I contrived “god”‘s task: I put a key on one side of a drawer in my dresser and informed “god” that if “he” wanted me to believe in “him”, “he just had to slide the key to the other side of the drawer. So simple, so easy.
“He” didn’t do it. And that was the last time I considered believing.
We need to know – which football gods???! If the words Man Utd bubble forth from your lips, depart foul fiend!
😉
There are two separate questions here: Why did you become an atheist, and why are you an atheist now?
I think both of my answers ultimately are empirically based, but only the first hinges on what I would call “evidence” per se.
So yeah, I became an atheist because there were just too many manifest contradictions in pretty much any theistic viewpoint I’ve ever heard of. That still leaves the door open for deism and probably even a sort of pantheism (a door which will be closed when I give me second answer), and maybe even the possibility of an afterlife of sorts (though obviously not one which could ever interact with this world, as the utter lack of credible evidence attests). The Evidential Problem of Evil weighs heavily on any attempt to believe in a good god, and evil or capricious gods ought to be easy to detect.
But that’s not really why I’m an atheist now. Being raised Mormon, i.e. having been exposed to the god hypothesis as if it were legitimate for as long as I can remember, that made it difficult to notice what I do now: That the whole idea is just so prima facie implausible, that pondering the evidence seems redundant. The wild success of methodological naturalism IMO makes a rejection of philosophical naturalism seem rather stubborn and impish — and from a perspective of philosophical naturalism, the god hypothesis is just kinda, well, stupid/i>.
If you were an adult human who had never heard of god(s) or religion or the supernatural, and then you heard about it for the first time, you’d think the person telling you was on crack. It’s a ludicrous notion, so plainly fabricated, so clearly implausible, so obviously just a wild and rather poorly thought-out ghost story…
I think this is what PZ et al mean when they say that no evidence could convince them. I stop short of that, only saying that I cannot imagine any evidence that would convince me, because for every single possible piece of evidence I can think of, there is a more plausible nontheistic naturalistic explanation. It’s just conceivable that this could be a failure of imagination on my part, and so that’s why I stop short of PZ’s position. But I am with PZ in that I consider neither the lack of evidence nor the evidence of lack to be the main factors here. The hypothesis is just so inane to begin with, that an examination of the evidence (which, sure enough, yields the same answer) seems unnecessary. I don’t need to enumerate the evidential arguments against “the dragon in my garage”-type stories, because they are bald falsehoods right on their face. It’s a dumb, implausible idea, and I can more or less assume out of hand that any apparent “evidence” in favor of it has some better explanation.
If you don’t mind a digression, I recently was called out by some Mormons over at OnFaith for being ‘ignorant’ by talking about how the Book of Mormon was fabricated history, and it lead me to wonder just how much the whole Jews coming to America story and the Book of Mormon factors into LDS life. Is it treated like the vast stretch of Bible stories that you never hear mentioned in Church, or do these people just not want to own up to the fact that Joseph Smith fabricated the thing?
This basically a re-edited version from an article on my blog http://www.metalvortex.com/blog/2010/09/26/480.html
When I was a child I was dimly aware of religions but I did not understand the differences between them. But I didn’t really think too much about it. Religion was never a fundamental part of my childhood and I accepted what I was told; that they all “led to the same god”. And I was busy having an enjoyable childhood and religion didn’t come into it.
But as I grew older, perhaps when I was about 13 years old, I was exposed to the basic ideologies of certain religions in school. That got me thinking. There seemed to be some fundamental differences between these religions; how could they all lead to the “same god”? No one at school asked questions; what was it that I did not understand? So I undertook my first steps into critical thinking. I started to look at what these religions were saying and I found that they were NOT saying the same thing; in fact, they were at odds with each other. Well, you can imagine, the more I looked the more I found that religion was nothing more than an invention of the human mind.
I was lucky; my parents did not force any religious doctrines on me. I was given access to science books, and my parents subscribed to science magazines which I eagerly read, excited at how humanity had progressed, increasing the knowledge and understanding of the world. So I was given the opportunity to ask questions and not accept everything on blind faith.
It was at this time that I also stopped believing that we were being visited by aliens; it sounds silly to have believed in that alien nonsense now but at the time I was heavily influenced by various scifi/UFO magazines and books. At first it seemed so rational but only because I believed everything I was told. But then I started asking questions and the “evidence” no longer seemed rational. Previously I had not questioned anything and believed most of the nonsense told to me such as Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods”. But now I was questioning. The BBC’s excellent Horizon science episode “The Case of the Ancient Astronauts” was a real eye-opener. I saw, for the first time, how people lied, distorted the truth and made fraudulent claims, and that liars such as Daniken could get away with it; all because of people’s unquestioning acceptance of claims.
So at around 13 years of age I found that I could not accept existences of mythical creatures be they gods, aliens, or unicorns without evidence. Evolution, based solidly on evidence, provided a convincing mechanism for development of life on earth. And scientific descriptions for the formation of the solar system, the stars, the galaxies and the Universe are compelling in their evidence. A god was nowhere to be found or even needed. In fact, a god in the universe that we had explored did not make sense.
With that I declared myself an atheist; I do not totally and utterly discount the existence of a “god” but argue that the nature of the universe does not seem to require a god and, if anything, the gods of our ancestors are being pushed further and further away such that the probability of there being gods decreases all the time.
From a practicable perspective all that this declaration meant was that I did not pray or undertake in any religious practices (not that I did before of course) but now I thought about the things that I did or didn’t do, and I also found it easier to question and explore. Perhaps it was just the general awakening of critical thinking in my life at that time, part of the development that we all go through as we grow up. Life carried on, and being an atheist at school did not matter but I did begin to question everything and think critically. I had not realised how much nonsense there was in the world until I started looking with an open but questioning mind.
The other thing of note was that our school had a visit by none other than Cliff Richard, and great fanfare was made of this event. I was perhaps 17 years old at the time. What did this man say? Well he had the arrogance to tell us that, unless we believed in and accepted Jesus Christ, then God would bar us from Heaven. Yes, such arrogance but perfectly in line with his religious beliefs. At least he was telling it like it is with none of the “all religions lead to the same god” nonsense. Here was a major proponent of Christianity saying that despite all the good that a person does in life, that person would never be let into Heaven unless they took Jesus Christ as their saviour. That was another point in my life where I actively started researching, to determine what religions were saying and found the barbarity and injustices expounded by the god of the Jews, Christians and Muslims. Other religions also came under scrutiny and were all found wanting.
I guess it was at college that I really had discussions with others on atheism, religions and the existence of gods. The discussions, whilst not heated, were quite lively. But these discussions were with friends, and I appeared to be the only atheist around. I was not looking around for fellow atheists or going to debates; my discussions were informal occasional chats with friends at places like pubs or fast food outlets. So, although I was discussing such topics, it was not a central part of my life.
After graduating and getting a job in engineering, life was pretty quiet on religious discussions except for the unfortunate Jehovah’s Witnesses who wound up on my door step. But then the Internet happened. I suddenly had access to material at the tips of my fingertips. I found quick and ready access to critical thinking and raging arguments on USENET. The web is what made the Internet go mainstream. And this led to blogs, and now we have Facebook and Twitter. And I found excellent resources on evolution, critical thinking, sceptics, and the fight against nonsense. It was this opportunity for people to express themselves that encouraged me to start my own blog which gradually began to discuss nonsense.
So that’s my story. Incomplete but with the major set pieces described.
I am not exactly an atheist – I am a Disbeliever.
Before I was three, I knew that inerrancy does not exist, not in word nor deed nor book.
I went to Sunday school, choir practice, youth group and confirmation class (Episcopal) because no invitation was needed and got along fine except with people who were sure of Knowledge.
I eventually realized that Belief is the root of evil: belief in god, no god, communism, capitalism, nature, nurture, whatever. When there can be no doubt there is no right.
I was raised evangelical, but ‘fell away’ after I couldn’t make sense of religion in general.
I work in infectious disease, and find the enormous amount of suffering in the world to be inconsistant with the warm and fuzzy personal god I was raised up to believe in. But I feel gulty that this is one of my reasons for being an atheist, is there something horribly wrong with this line of thought?
Absolutely not!
It’s a subset of the “Problem of Evil” which no theologian has ever been able to wriggle out of. The Probelm of Evil has convinced many that (at least the western idea of) God is bogus.
Why are you an atheist?
My parents were religious, CofE, my mother being taught by nuns at one stage, & I suspect as for many teenage girls it held attractions. My father had been a choirboy before the war. I think they were like many of their generation – reasonably liberal (well my father was, my mother being more conservative). I became a cathedral chorister when I was 10 so I lived with daily singing of religious services 6 days a week for most of the year. When I was about 12 or 13 they were holding confirmation classes & I did not put my name down. I was told I could just go along & didn’t HAVE to be confirmed – but of course I was. It never meant anything to me – god/religion. I liked the singing & the music, & think that I learnt from that, but the god stuff was never meaningful to me. My parents were not fundamentalists – regular chruch goers. My religious upbringing was much like that Richard Dawkins describes in the God Delusion. I learnt about the Bible in RE lessons in school that were reasonably modern & critical in terms of textual analysis. I heard lots of it everyday – I always enjoyed (as a snotty-nosed boy) the violent bits of the psalms that rarely get quoted & never sung. I was always interested in Germanic & Celtic mythology so it was clear that the biblical god was not unique. The biblical god was obviously a mish-mash of confused ideas from various people (vide the story of Onan!). The bible was never considered a final word on anything either at home or at school.
Does it have anything to do with a lack of evidence for god, or are there other factors involved?
I never felt that there was ANY evidence for an afterlife. Ecclesiastes showed me that even ancient people were capable of thinking that there might be emptiness & purposelessness in life, but that you just got on with it, suffering and all. I ALWAYS accepted evolution & recall vaguely discussing whether animals had souls & if not when a ‘soul’ might have entered humans in prehistory – it was just too silly & illogical. I retained a loose association with church things for a few years but it was merely social. I am now something of a nihilist I suppose.
I can honestly say I have never believed in a god, deistic or theistic.
Yes – “evidence for what?” is a good phrase.
Happy Dynamic Living!
Happ
This almost sounds like a trick question. What “other factors” do you have in mind?
People all around me talk about gods. I look into it and find out that there are no gods. When I announce my discovery, people call me an atheist. If the topic had never come up, we all would have been happier.
Truly! We feel no need to explain our A-leprechaunism or our A-Thorism or our A-Mithrasism!
Just shows how pervasive and assumed the western J/C/I monotheos is in our culture: To not believe that particular fairy tale requires an explanation! Holy crap!
There’s a long version, and a short version. The long version involves “discovering” fundamentalism, getting into the debates, finding myself siding with atheists more often than fellow believers, reading “The God Delusion”, and so on.
The short version, however, is simple. When I was about 21, I was forced to confront the question “why do you believe in God?”. Of course I had a lot of answers, but they were all cliche and unoriginal. I had no personal answer. I had no original understanding. In that few minutes, my faith disappeared into thin air.
Understanding scientific explanations of the natural world, and recognizing that, despite what most people think, science and religion are naturally opposed, only strengthened my atheism.
So there you go. That’s the short version.
I think I came to the conclusion that for the world to exist as it is , any God that existed would be only worthy of contempt not worship. After that I stopped wondering about the evidence. I guess this makes me closer to the apathetic agnostic variety.
it’s logically impossible for there to be a god,
Hmm. We sometimes ask believers that how would a universe that is created differ from a universe that always existed with no supernatural cause with the implied that if you cant come up with an answer then nothing would ever convince you.
Conversely it seems that for some atheists, our or the universes existence is proof that God is logically impossible.
I am an atheist because the bible is just nonsense, and no diferent from any set of myths. I really found this out when my church was ripping itself apart due to one member claiming to have a direct message from God, and wanting to go to the “horse’s mouth” for what God really says. I was losing my faith and prayed and prayed not to. And I got bupkis. Lots of reasons to not believe.
I was raised in a household with no religious feeling or activities at all, so I didn’t really get exposed to it until my adolescence, when my parents married people who were very involved in religious traditions. I explored it a little then, but it didn’t really seem to be positively *about* anything, and the Abrahamic religions seem to have mixed feelings about women. I guess I didn’t see an upside.
In retrospect, religious questions are simply not of tremendous interest to me on a day-to-day basis. I find comparative religion and history interesting, though, like art history.
For this reason, we got our son the Kid’s Book of World Religions and we’ve gone over it with him several times, explaining what people believe. We also explained to him that it’s generally not OK to tell people there is no God (in the US.)
It’s a good book. I think it’s intended for believers but it does a fair job of laying out the basics of many major world religions (pretty much every one you can think of except druidism, wicca, modern “paganism”)
Wow, html fail: Amazon slipped that one in on me!
I was raised by atheist parents who encouraged me to make up my own mind about religion. I always loved mythology and read it extensively as a child. I had a book of Old Testament illustrated stories as a child, which I classified with the myths of other cultures. I loved fantasy, fairy tales, science fiction, but I also loved science and history. I could tell them apart. It never occurred to me that anyone would care to propose evidence for fairy stories. Evidence is for science. Fairy stories are imaginary; you have to suspend disbelief to enjoy them, and ignore the holes and illogic. And so with myths. Suspending disbelief is an effort. Not something I could do indefinitely. What would be the purpose of that?
The problem of evil started my questioning but what accelerated my doubts was the level of idiocy exhibited my true believing fellow Evangelicals after President Obama was elected (e.g. his Muslim religion, birther conspiracies). A key doctrine for an Evangelical is the gift of the Holy Spirit as a wise counselor in-dwelt in those who give themselves to Christ. The emotional immaturity and petty ignorance of these privileged believers made me think that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was either a superstition or this “person” of the trinity was shizo-affective conspiracy theorist. My belief in belief was soon lost.
For further comment on this question, I can highly recommend to all two Ricky Gervais movies:
Ghost Town
The Invention of Lying
Both show the absurdity of religion well, especially TIOL. They are very funny. Ricky Gervais rocks.
As a kid I grew up in a catholic environment (school, neighbors, Boy Scouts, friends) while my mother was an atheist and my father became one when I was about 12 years old. It was very helpful to have parents (partially) atheistic. But I was sent to a catholic school – apparently that was the right thing to do for ‘good’ people. I certainly have a lot of good memories of that time, but also many bad ones. And many of those bad memories are related to religion and faith. I still feel a physical repugnance when thinking of those boring religion classes frequently larded with sadistic horror stories… The story of Abraham eager to slaughter his son Isaac was for me an especially shocking example of moral degradation. Then at an age of 15 and 16 we were introduced to the catholic ideas about sexuality and procreation. That was really depressing! At that age I was an atheist, nonetheless it took me years to rid myself of the squalor of those misogynistic and perverse vision on love, women, sexuality. And at that age I was also disgusted by the anti-intellectual stance of religion: faith instead of inquiry and curiosity, boring cliches instead of a worldview based on exiting facts and scientific theories, the vicarious shame felt when having to witness all that submissiveness and sanctified stupidity. Antidotes to all these soiling attempts to catholic were books, films, studying biology, loves and friendships.
I recommend Nicholas Humphreys lecture: “What Shall We Tell the Children?”
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/humphrey/amnesty.html
Those religion classes…..It happens that I am very nearsighted, and luckily I discovered that when I took out my contacts and everything was out of sight, it became out of hearing too. The words hardly penetrated my brain and I could think undisturbed.
I’ve never been bored enough to do that anywhere else.
My intellectual reasons for not believing in God is the lack of evidence, and specifically the realization that the existence of multiple, conflicting religions implies that no one anywhere has any real knowledge of God.
My emotional reason for not believing in God is that I’m a now grownup. It struck me in my early teens that believing in the supernatural is not what grownups do. Or, at least, it’s not what people who act like grownups do.
As a child in Sweden in the 1980s I was exposed to moderate Xianity on the radio, in school around Xmas and at the occasional wedding and baptism. As far as my bit-rotted memory can recall, I used to skip the religious bits of hymns when we were marched to church for the last day of school. I think I thought of Jesus, God and pals as fictional characters from an early age. It seems reasonable that I would have asked my mother about that stuff at some point, and she perhaps explained it as a fiction among others.
More recently I’ve gone from “bah, that’s just silly” to “there is no evidence for the existence of any god and the concept is silly” and then to “the very concept of a god is ill-defined (and silly)”.
Two things: when I was five, we had a comic book on Adam and Eve and how it was bad to eat from the tree of knowledge. I couldn’t figure out why knowledge was a bad thing. (Of course I didn’t know *what* knowledge… but still it bothered me.) Then, at 17, I thought: “you know, there’s no evidence for life after death. So all this stuff must be wrong.”
What still amazes me is how I could go along with all the totally implausible fairy stories while being immersed in a culture which took it for granted; but, which when looked at with the slightest skepticism, are obvious nonsense. Cultural reinforcement is a powerful thing.
I’ll give a longer answer on my blog. But in a nutshell: I was raised Catholic and took it seriously. As I grew older I read the Bible and was horrified. I then found out that the priests didn’t take it all that seriously.
Then I began to interpret the rituals more and more symbolically. Then, by the time I was midway through graduate school, I realized that I believed NONE of it.
Atheism: I am an atheist with respect to all of the gods that I’ve heard of; frankly believing in them is ridiculous. The word salad gods make no sense (among these, I prefer Miranda’s Holy Rabbit)
I remain agnostic to the possibility that there may be some god that I haven’t heard of that might be plausible, but such a god doesn’t interact with our senses and, well, its existence can be pondered as an intellectual exercise, period.
Raised Catholic, atheist now because:
never got answers in the religion classes they sent me to (lack of evidence)
made no sense to me (incoherent)
religion seemed like a very human thing
didn’t like how people could use religion
saw an isomorphism between the Santa myth and other religions that no one believes in now
So when I stopped believing in Santa, I stopped believing in any magic bearded man that judges you. (And no, I didn’t stop believing when I was 25, it was at the very young age when kids stop the Santa business.)
I mean to say an isomorphism between the religion people believe in now and other things people don’t believe in.
We all depend upon evidence and reason for learning. Evidence and reason can help us draw conclusions about nature, not some proposed realm beyond nature that includes or is “God.” Thus, the existence of “God” is beyond our grasp. It is unknown and unknowable. In other words, the agnostic position is defensible. As an agnostic, one can choose to believe either that: (A) one or more God-notions is true or (B) no God-notion is true. An agnostic who chooses to accept some God-notion(s) can only do so based upon faith or faulty logic because those are the only alternatives to drawing conclusions based upon evidence and reason. The main (if not only) justification for basing beliefs on faith is that it helps support beliefs that are somehow comforting. Faith offers a security blanket and a thumb to suck on (as Asimov suggested). But faith is a misguided approach when seeking truth about nature. To believe based upon faith is to disregard evidence and reason–our useful tools for getting closer to truths about nature. Since I’m more interested in understanding nature as it is than in grasping comforting, unverifiable, faith-based (or illogically-based) ideas about what is beyond nature, I’m an agnostic who chooses not to accept God-notions. What do you call an agnostic who chooses not to believe? Answer: An atheist.
At the most basic level, I think that theism is the idea that mind or intelligence constitutes the foundations of reality. Mind is more basic than matter. Reality is thus based upon the values and purposes of an agent, rather than impartial natural phenomena. That is really what it is all about. So, at a very general level, such a thesis could be true. Perhaps a future science and philosophy might discover something of this kind. I don’t think anyone should be confident enough to rule it out as impossible. At the moment however, given reason and the evidence that we actually possess, theism is extremely unlikely. Atheism shouldn’t be motivated by any of the negative effects that theistic beliefs can have in society (though they can be highlighted nonetheless), it should just be motivated by the plain old lack of evidence for the thesis that it rejects.
As a teenager I fell naturally into skepticism about God as it became clear to me that the stories of Jesus, Moses, et al. are no different in kind from stories of King Arthur, Paul Bunyan, and so on, and that the Bible belongs in the same class of literature as the Iliad.
At around 19 I had a particularly vivid dream in which I was trapped in a falling glass elevator about to crash fatally into the ground. In the dream I reflected that if ever there was a time for God to make himself known to me, this was it. So I opened my heart and nothing happened; I was alone in there. Then the elevator went smash and I woke up. That’s the point at which I knew I’d moved beyond mere agnosticism into full-blown atheism.
As an adult I’ve had time to consider the question from a variety of angles, and while the lack of evidence for any sort of god is certainly a factor, for me the central point remains that religion is clearly a human artifact and God a fictional character with no relation to reality.
I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, and I remember the moment when I lost my faith: I was 17, and I was in the middle of reading Atlas Shrugged, when it suddenly dawned on me that everything about our world is exactly as you would expect it to be if there were no God. I realized that there was simply no reason to believe God existed, and that everything made far more sense under the assumption that he did not in fact exist. In an instant, my faith was gone — though it took me a while before I told anyone about it, and before I stopped living a religious lifestyle.
I like this, more succinct version of my idea on this. Basically, if something is equivalent to not existing, assume it doesn’t exist.
Like the, “God only helps those who help themselves.” If I tried to use that logic anywhere, people would think I’m a jerk. “Sorry, I only write software if you write it yourself. Then give me credit.” And there’s of course the, “A long history of scientific discoveries and highly trained medical professionals cured me. It was a miracle!”
If you were instantly atheist, how did it take you a while to stop living religiously? Did you still pray? If it’s more cultural, people around here seem to call that a “cultural [whatever.]”
It’s difficult to instantaneously change your daily routine, especially when you’ve lived your whole life among religiously observant family and friends. So at first I continued going to synagogue, for instance, even though I didn’t actually pray. It took several months until I completely phased out all my religious behavior.
Gotcha. I went atheist when I was a kid, so my parents were the ones that made me go to church, wasn’t my choice like it sounds was the case with you.
Auschwitz, 1968.
I stood before the iron gate at age 8 and realized there could not be a god worth worshiping. The point was brought home a few days later when I saw the Russian tanks rolling towards Prague. “New boss, meet the old boss.”
It’s really all about the lack of evidence. But I can’t discount how I got started down that path. I always found the religion of my childhood to be a dreadfully uninteresting affair. And the woefully inadequate answer I received as a small child when I asked my mother who was more powerful, Santa Claus or God, may have played a part.
As I have answered in the past, I’m an atheist simply because there is not sufficient evidence to believe in any definition of god I have ever heard. The argument that there could not be evidence for god only works for the general western definition that PZ and others assume. as the default definition.
I responded to PZ here, but I doubt he’s seen it:
http://shaunphilly.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/missing-the-dendrology-for-the-trees-pz-myers-and-evidence-for-gods/
I think this article went over my head a bit. Are you saying that by using the reasoning that there is no evidence, therefore we don’t believe, we’re allowing for the possibility that a god or gods would necessarily have attributes that would be measurable and observable?
If the existence of gods depended on things that couldn’t be observed, how would you know that this god wasn’t really some figment of your imagination?
“Just knowing” doesn’t cut it; Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews and others “just know”…
At 17 it was 1968 and the Age of Aquarius. I had a summer job at a pathology lab and worked with a monk, a Mormon, several Catholics and a couple of atheists. I was given a free copy (score!) of the Book of Mormon which I read cover to cover and I think I got a planet out of the deal which is pretty cool.
It was a time of discovery and I was reading Lao Tsu, the Maharishi Yogi, Bagavagita and all sorts of stuff. I was moving away from my Episcopal roots, however, I remember clearly when everything clicked into place.
I was talking with the lab manager, Al, who was a terrific scientist and I admired what he did in the lab and how much he knew and one day at lunch we were kicking around religion and mystical ideas and he said this:
“I stopped believing when I learned to think for myself.”
By Jove, that was it! Religion did your thinking for you, but I could do it all by myself. That was it. I was done and I never looked back.
That said, I love the Christmas season. Lights, trees, feasts, presents, Christmas morning, the music, yep, I’m a nut for Christmas. Only a grinch would complain about peace on Earth, good will towards men. And if there’s a buffet going I can become a cultural Jew faster than you can say cheese blintz!
I found living through all the happy horseshit of the Counterculture instrumental in arriving at atheism myself. I was 18 in ’68…
Can’t help it that this thread is peas porridge cold…
I was *born* in 1968….
Well, let me tell you what you missed…uh…let’s see…uh…
/old sixties joke
😀
I can’t be certain that there is no god anywhere, in the loosest and most impersonal sense of the word, one that implies an utter lack of creative intelligence or consciousness. Frankly, whether or not such a god exists is of no importance to me.
However, I can be certain that none of the gods I’ve heard about so far exist. Anthony Grayling is correct in that these gods are so obviously invented. No matter what angle a theist takes, there is no positive evidence for it, and the fact that so many claims either prove untrue or otherwise fall flat is evidence against their existence.
For example, Mackie clearly demonstrates that God cannot be both all-powerful and omnibenevolent as long as evil exists–and all but the most hair-splitting theologians acknowledge the existence of evil, because it necessarily must exist for their theology to be coherent. I happen to know a few theologians, and the answer to this problem is always the same: define the words benevolent, omnipotence, and evil until they don’t mean anything. But when they do that, we still have a situation where god is claimed to be supremely good, is able to do all things, yet bad things still happen. So here we have a situation in which what is commonly claimed of God is demonstrably false. If what is claimed of God is not true, then what do we know of God? Nothing. If we claim to know things we do not know, or claim to know things that are not true, we’re guilty of a delusion. Delusions are necessarily deviations from reality. Isn’t this negative evidence for the existence of a god? Isn’t this positive evidence that god is imaginary?
An increasingly popular tactic I’ve encountered is denying the application of logic to God entirely. But if logic doesn’t apply to God, and God is illogical, then statements such as “God both exists and does not exist” are therefore true, and God disappears in an Adamsian poof of logic. Making logic apply to God pays better (not great, but better) dividends to those who are arguing for its existence. But even here, you can see people reaching ever farther to try to salvage their case for belief, which to me screams desperation. If the evidence for god is so great, why must it be taken to these lengths?
Biblical literalists are easy to handle, since they rely on the infallibility of their text for their faith to remain coherent. All it takes is a single inconsistency in the text for their system to break. Besides the disparity between what is claimed of their god and what he actually does in the Bible, people will try to claim the “interpretation” loophole (funny how a monolithic document such as a literalist’s bible is now open to interpretation; another sign of desperation). But there are also things that are not open to interpretation. Direct contradictions exist. Conflicting records exist. For instance, who was Joseph’s father? Jacob, or Heli?
I’ve barely scratched the surface of reasons to doubt the claims of believers and have not even touched the reasons why disbelief is preferable. The point is that on an individual basis, the gods promoted by the world’s religions are demonstrably invented. While I can’t say for certainty that no god exists, I have no problem saying specific gods X, Y, and Z don’t exist.
I am a 7/7 atheist.
Nevertheless, I realize my rationale (and others’!) just might be erroneous, so I cannot rule out there being some evidence that might convince me that “God” exists, but I have absolutely no idea what such evidence might look like.
(I can envision some things – a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, perhaps – I might regard as highly suggestive, with the same reservations as Ophelia, but nothing that would be conclusive.)
How did I get to this point? (With some elision.)
I went to Catholic church with my mother when I was a small boy, stopped when my grandmother died, but I don’t think my faith then had any more conviction than my belief in Father Christmas.
I think I became an agnostic through intuition rather than rationalization. An early interest in mythology showed me that there was very little to distinguish between dead and living religions. How to know which, if any, was true?
And I think this view was reinforced by reading much sf by Asimov and Clarke – and Asimov’s non-fiction. I guess I gained a humanist perspective through osmosis.
As an older teenager and later I read more on ancient and modern traditions, with interest, but without finding anything compelling in them. But I still felt that, perhaps, there was something “out there,” and still called myself an agnostic. (If I’d known then what I know now, I might have called myself a pantheist or panentheist.)
Throughout this I’ve seen no remotely compelling evidence for “god” and plenty for a wholly naturalistic worldview.
But it is only within the last few years that I started thinking more critically about my worldview – coincident with the publication of The God Delusion (which I still haven’t read, however!) – and realized that any notion of “god” was inconsistent with my naturalistic outlook.
Then, within in the past year I discovered Gnu Atheism in the blogosphere (*looks around*), and have sparred with fundies on Twitter, which has sharpened my thinking and my convictions.
Jerry says, ”If one is an atheist because of a lack of evidence for god, that presumes that there could have been evidence in favor of god.”
I’m not sure that that logically follows. Isn’t the only presumption that there could in principle have been evidence? There could, in principle, be evidence that the moon is made of green cheese…
Lack of evidence. I’m 100% with you on this one.
My “a-ha” moment probably came when I first developed the ability to recognize when someone was trying to pull a fast one on me. A quick glance at religion, and well you do the math.
Factual claims that don’t hold up to testing, more plausible (natural) explanations for many of the Divine Experiences, understanding of the human needs to assuage fear of death, loneliness & purpose etc., understanding of the way powerful memes insulate themselves from scrutiny, seeing the nature of cult dynamics (groupthink, social pressure) in addition to the afforementioned bullshit detector all combined to make it pretty clear to me.
At the end of the day, if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. God would be the ultimate “too good” concept. Throw in all the incoherence and inability to even define it and yeah…bullshit.
Depends what you mean by evidence, Jerry. That humans believe in made-up things like Santa Claus, and that they engage in storytelling involving fictional characters; these were both evidences for me that God too was made up. These aren’t empirical investigations on God, however, which is what the discussion is centring over.
I often say that there could be evidence for something godlike, but to call it God in the sense that is referred to in classic theism is unjustifiable no matter what the evidence is. After all, how do you get evidence that God is:
a) immaterial.
b) eternal.
c) beyond space-time.
d) omnipotent.
e) omniscient.
f) the grounding of being.
g) the source of goodness.
h) ultimate simplicity.
I’m betting that no empirical evidence could begin to demonstrate the existence of such a being. Like I said above, I think you can show evidence of something, but to call that something God is to make a leap of faith. That speaks to the poverty of the concept as being incoherent and unfounded, not that atheists are close-minded to the evidence.
I was raised in a conventional Catholic family, and actually enjoyed going to church when I was little (They talked in the secret code of Latin back then, which was so exciting!), but never took the theology seriously. So much of it was obviously fiction, even to a six-year-old kid. I just assumed that religion was some relic from the past when people were simply less educated, and would quickly disappear. I’ve never felt that belief in a God would be helpful to me in any way in understanding how the universe works, and I have not really thought deeply about it, to be honest.
I became an atheist before I knew the term existed, somewhere around age eight. It was an entirely intuitive conclusion – given what I knew of the world, even at that young age, the idea of God, as depicted by Christianity, seemed absurd.
There was no explicit weighing of evidence, though I’m sure the complete lack of any was a part of my subconscious reasoning.
Despite ridiculous claims to the contrary, proving a negative is trivial (see modus tollens, for example). I see all gods, as depicted by existing and historical religions, as already disproven.
It’s the nebulous god concept promoted by people who claim to be Judaists or Christians (there are no such “liberal” Muslims) – which has nothing in common with the god belief that’s actually defined by their religious texts – that defies absolute disproof by epitomizing the very concept of incoherence.
Because the concept is completely undefined except by analogy to an already-disproven god from those religions’ ancestry, I cannot think of any evidence that would support it.
But it’s not my job to imagine evidence for a claim that I’m not making. All I can be reasonably expected to do is evaluate what others claim is evidence for their belief, which I’m perfectly willing to do. They haven’t come up with any yet.
Athest since the age of nine,I was made unwelcome in the scouts for not wanting to participate in prayers at the end of meetings. God never made sense even then. 40 odd years on I would say that the universe as we observe it does not show evidence of any supernatural components and as far as any specific understanding of gods is concerned totally rules them out. As has been pointed out, if we ever did see evidence of a “higher power” by definition it would have to be natural and of our universe. Ergo, not god.
Like Michael Kingsford Gray (post 2) I am an Australian. My parents were atheists who shucked off their religious vestments during world war 2. Nevertheless they educated me at an anglican (episcopalian) school where I learned about the anglican concept of god. The principal reason I am an infidel is ‘godists’ never give you a god model which can be tested. Their god concepts are just vacuous noise.
One major factor for me: the existence of many, many conflicting religions, both existing and extinct. And they all seem to have taken themselves extremely seriously. They can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong. And if people are so clearly capable of being so very wrong about religion, it’s far more likely they are all wrong.
It’s one of the reasons I’m in favor of teaching world religion classes in public schools.
Have never believed. Growing up in a world in which biblical-style miracles never took place made it clear to me in early childhood that a book describing a world in which they often did must be a work of fiction, even if some historical background had a basis in fact.
I knew I couldn’t prove the non-existence of god, but I had certainty that no such entity cared if I believed in it, as it could so easily have rectified my non-belief had it had the slightest such inclination.
All experiences I have had since childhood have strengthened that attitude and have made religious belief seem progressively more baseless and ridiculous. One reason it seems even sillier now than it did then is that as a child I assumed that religious grown-ups did have some better reasons for believing in god than they were sharing with children and that such further evidence, even if I still found it unconvincing, would be accessible to me in adulthood (just like the then still-mysterious details of human reproduction). I find it laughable that now, as a grown-up, there really are no better reasons on offer for belief in god than the ones I considered so inadequate when I was still far from fully-grown. It greatly detracts from my ability to feel any respect for believers.
Several reasons:
When I was very young I wondered how there could be different churches all different but all claiming to be right. No – someone had to be wrong.
Later when I learned more about the world it was other religions than xtianity. Most of them claimed to be right – but how could that be?
As I grew older I realized that the stories themselves didn’t make any sense – logically incoherent and self-contradictory. At the age of fourteen I realized that if I were god I wouldn’t have organized everything the way that the gods of all these people had.
By this time I was heavily immersed in mythology and knew the stories of Asgard and the norse gods, of the greek pantheon, Of Glooskap (though I still have a soft spot for that numbskull Ableegamouch – he reminds me of so many bosses and fellow workers over the years), of Rama and Shiva and Hanuman, of Jizo and Quetzalcoatl and so many others – all mythological and ywhw was obviously just another of these.
Later I took a lot of time to study xtian religion itself and also its scriptures. Once you see how the sausage was made and how bogus the scriptures are, how they’ve been twisted and forged over the centuries and you see the establishment of xtianity as a political exercise intended only to unify the roman empire, it’s impossible to take any of it seriously. And none of the other religions present a better picture. Who honestly believes, for instance, that the earth is supported on the backs of four elephants who are standing on a turtle? or that the world is resting on the shoulders of a giant named Atlas? Just as who could believe that the mother of Yeshue bar Yussef wasa virgin or that she was “assumed” bodily into “heaven”. At what altitude did she find herself unable to breathe and suffocate? And did she arrive in heaven DOA? Same with Yeshue himself reported in the ‘inerrant word of god’ to have done a similar stunt and continued upwards until too small to see……If they didn’t call it religion no-one would believe it – so I don’t.
So I guess my best evidence for rejecting religion is the falsity of scripture, which anyone can verify for themselves if they wish to do so.
There are other factors though. Yeshue bar Yussef is reported to have said “by their fruits you shall know them” – referring to false prophets and others who would wish to exploit the gullible. This is a good test and when I apply it to the pope and cardinals and many priests and mullahs and imams and anglican bishops and TV ‘evangelists’ I see that they are not men of god despite their claims and I wish not merely not to follow them but to oppose them as I can.
I don’t see evidence for souls…
without souls that can suffer or be saved, gods just seem irrelevant.
That would be by number one reason for disbelief in gods.
Lack of evidence would be number 2– and lack of a coherent definition would be number 3.
Magic isn’t real. And religion works exactly as you’d expect it to work if it wasn’t real, and not at all like you’d expect it to work if it were real. So that’s that.
I guess that’s an evidence based reason.
But I could also see a… lets call it logical reasoning sans evidence based reason for rejecting the idea of a god. God as defined by western theology tends to involve a lot of ridiculous traits like “ground of being” or “necessary being” or “greatest being possible” or “infinitely [whatever].” Some of these are logically inconsistent. Others are logically incoherent. Others couldn’t possibly be differentiated by evidence from other traits. For example, what evidence would distinguish an omnipotent being from a really powerful being? Still others couldn’t be evidenced at all: what evidence would demonstrate that something was the basis of all morality? Is/ought probably prohibits that.
Now you could certainly come up with evidence for something roughly like a god, but the specific ideas of god that most people talk about seem like they’ve been augmented by theology so much that its probably pointless to even expect them to be supported by evidence.
Not that this really matters though. There’s lots of evidence that should shake my atheistic leanings very easily. A good start would be any simple demonstration that magical powers are real. I don’t even have a stringent definition of magic. Just levitate or cure amputations by prayer or something and I’ll admit that everything I’ve ever thought about religion is in jeopardy.
“… that presumes that there could have been evidence in favor of god.” Yes but, scientific training means one should be open to the possibility while not necessarily expecting it will occur?! In other words, don’t you have to say there is a possibility even though you might attach a vanishingly small probability to it? I may have – i.e., did – become an atheist because of an experience in church that was too contradictory to ignore but I now articulate it as “there is no evidence I’m aware of; if there was any real evidence, we’d all know about it and we wouldn’t be talking about “faith”(Hitchens or Dawkins – I can’t remember but it’s a great point); I do not expect to be provided any evidence; I do not think it worth my searching for evidence.”.
My attitude is that there could have been evidence for gods but the world doesn’t look anything like a world run by magic and built entirely for our benefit would look. A world run by magic would look like Disc World or perhaps like one of the universes from various computer games, Mario galaxy maybe. If we really were at the centre of the universe I might be more inclined to believe, because that would be some evidence for the magical man theory. But our universe shows no evidence for any god, so the reason I don’t believe is, no evidence.
Then when I read more about things I realised the concept is incoherant and that nothing could change my mind. It’s nature all the way down. The reason why we ask for evidence is to force the believers to examine their beliefs themselves, not because we may be convinced by it, for a start there isn’t any and in thousands of years they haven’t managed to improve their arguements so it’s not likely to happen now.
The world only makes sense if there are no gods.
A la Daniel Dennet, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, when there should be evidence, but there isn’t any.
I expect there to never be any evidence for any god in the future, because there never has been any evidence in the past.
Humans have made attempts to contact a god since the dawn of the human brain. No contact yet.
There are no gods.
RE: evidence. Scientific training makes me (at least pretend to!) reserve some doubt about the total impossibility of evidence. OTOH, it also causes me to think that the possibility of such evidence appearing is some number with a fair number of zeroes to the left of it before coming to a decimal point. And scientific training also makes me interpret such low probabilities as essentially indistinguishable from zero. So it becomes more a matter of semantics than anything else—but sure eats up a lot of time that might be spent on more interesting subjects.
I have a slight problem with the use of “tentative” as Jerry and some others have described their stances because to me that word connotes a position somewhere in the middle of the possible probability range, whereas I think most of us would use an adjective (if one exits) that connotes an “extremely unlikely (yet not zero, that we know of, anyway)” possibility.
I’m an atheist for many of the reasons already listed. Earliest reasons were the obvious similarity between god-myths and all the other fairy tales we hear as children, and realizing that the fact one could choose what strain of religion to believe in (thank you, 60’s) meant none of them could be the “true” one. Without having heard the wonderful statement about everyone being able to have their own opinions but not their own facts, I arrived at a similar understanding independently (as I’m sure is true for most of us). Adding hard sciences and math to the equation in college cemented the absurdity of the concept of a personal deity. (Deism itself seemed less easy to dismiss, although for a while I’d have said it was the least parsimonious choice. Then along came multiple universes and now I’m not so sure anymore!)
There are already 261 replies, so I doubt my own contributes anything, but here goes anyway.
I’m an atheist because I’ve been impressed with the quality of thought and evidence proffered in most scientific disciplines, which puts in stark contrast the muddy and contradictory thinking that pervaded my religious upbringing and education.
My belief was weakened by the fact that I experienced no connection with God, despite seeking it and earnestly praying multiple times per day for a decade. He never answered me in any convincing fashion, and eventually I couldn’t fool myself any longer.
I do think the God concept is vague and incoherent in most believers’ minds, but I don’t see why there couldn’t be evidence for or against specific well-defined god concepts.
Born and raised by atheist parents god was never a consideration when i was growing up.
I am yet to hear a coherent enough formulation of the god hypothesis. Until someone can present to me a testable hypothesis for god, question of evidence doesn’t even come up.
That is why I am still an atheist.
Unnecessary concept, and highly implausible. Plus, religions are evil.
Succinct, but sufficient for me. I like that!
The religions that make truth claims about the nature and existence of god are so adverse to reasoned skepticism and demand dogmatic acceptance, thus they are not a pathway to truth. What I am left with is apathy to the concept of god as I have no logical reason to believe in it.
Uh oh… now there are two of us. Whatever shall we do!?!
😀
Religious dogma couldn’t stand up to young questioning mind and first-run viewing of Cosmos. Serious Pwnage ensued.
Seeing as how so many others have so eloquently outlined their own reasons (with which I largely agree) for why they are atheists, I just wanted to add my 2 cents.
The lack of evidence for god (any god) is damning and surely important in any rational persons statement of (lack of) faith. However, evidence, or the lack thereof means nothing unless there is a definitive logical statement that it confirms or contradicts. There is no standard idea of “god” or any such deity, no way in which to adequately setup a suitable “god hypothesis” that would not be inherently contradictory with many other such hypotheses. I became an atheist, after many years as a devout and sincere Christian, not because I saw no evidence for god (though there was none), but because I had no way of describing “god” that wasn’t immediately incoherent or plain wrong.
The more I read and understood, the more I realized that no one has any idea who or what “god” is, or how he/she/it might be placated or otherwise contacted. So I must agree with PZ Myers when he said that we should stop letting the faithful think they can “convince” us by dropping some wonderful, magical piece of “evidence” into our laps and shouting “HERE! THIS IS PROOF OF MY GOD!” Their “god” is a logical impossibility, and any scrap of fluff they put onto the pedestal of “evidence” is so much dung and manure, a futile gesture of a dying breed unwilling to let go of the days when just the mention of some deity’s wrath would squelch all dissent.
In short, I am an atheist because “god”, any “god”, is a logical impossibility. Would some future evidence as yet undiscovered that proved undeniably that some deity exists in some fashion somewhere in the universe convince me to change my mind? Perhaps. But I’m not going to hang my hat, or give religious nutters the world over even a semblance of respectability for their trumped up nonsense.
I’m an atheist because I can’t find any plausibility in anything approaching a literal interpretation of the mythologies of the religions I’ve been exposed to, and to me that’s not a doubt, it’s a disbelief. To me a concept of deity that could be contained in a religion as generally practiced is probably going to be either incoherent or implausible as well. I think there _could_ be a coherent concept of deity, but I have yet to see a religion based consistently on one, and to me that makes atheism a reasonable alternative.
It’s been said, but as a young Tennessean Christian-raised atheist, I’ll add my voice to the discussion. When I first began questioning the tenets of my Presbyterian upbringing, I called myself agnostic. But to me now, “agnostic” means there may or may not be a deity – defined, of course, in the way that humans define “deity.” The whole “toothfairy agnostic” concept, built on the idea that you can never definitively disprove the existence of a god, never held water for me. “Atheist,” to me, means, not that you completely reject the idea of anything supernatural in the universe, but rather that you don’t believe human notions of deities are correct. It’s not about limiting oneself only to scientific facts that humans are able to gather. To me, you can be an open-minded atheist who recognizes the possibility of some supernatural force(s) in the universe but cannot see a conceivable reason to connect this to a god or gods in superstitious religious texts. If you reject the idea that humans have special (supernatural) knowledge about the way the universe was created, you must be an atheist – not an agnostic, which, I think, gives more credit to religious superstition (“it might be true”) than is due.
I like this very much. It’s not inconceivable that some day we will run into some real phenomena that most human beings would be happy to call spiritual—healing by “the laying on of hands,” for example. (See Linda Nagata’s The Bohr Maker for a science-fiction version.) But this discovery would go no distance at all toward demonstrating the existence of any of the gods we have been hearing about for the last 5,000 years. Even if we verified the existence of an “afterlife” — I forget who first pointed this out — even then, we would not have seen evidence for any god.
Not only a lack of empirical evidence, but a lack of any reasonable justification, of the type I would require for any other claim, whatsoever. Causes that are agents are by their nature complex and unlikely causes. Furthermore, if anything we tend to overestimate the likelihood of intelligent causes, because our minds are biased towards dealing with intelligent or social obstacles, which were highly relevant to our evolution but seem to be relatively rare types of intelligence in the universe at large.
With that prior improbability on one side, and nothing to balance it out except an irrational bias, it is proper to reject such a claim out of hand, whether it is possible to empirically test it or not. Different god claims are testable to different degrees. None are reasonable given the current state of evidence. Not only are they unreasonable, but they aren’t even special. There are literally dozens of sci-fi ideas about the nature of the universe that are more plausible than any god hypothesis. Gods have such an disproportionally large degree of attention that there’s little point in giving the idea any credence or respect at all unless one shows up to be studied.
It also seems like the idea of the supernatural is rather ridiculous. To quote the inimitable comic “Girl Genius”, “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.” The idea of something empirically observable but insusceptible in principle of scientific analysis proposes something that is either causeless (and therefore utterly lawless and inexplicable even as an extra-scientific phenomenon), or something that is caused but unpredictable in principle from those causes, which seems absurd. Until something shows up which compels belief in the supernatural, such a concept is of no use whatsoever in constructing a picture of the world. Even if there were ghosts and goblins and gods, I think it is almost certainly the case that this “supernatural” should be treated identically to any confusing but natural thing under study.
My atheism comes, in short, from the observation that religions are composed entirely from fantastic and/or confusing, ridiculous claims.
My parents were godless, but they let us believe whatever we wanted, and supported the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. The Maryland school system supported Christianity by having students recite the Lord’s prayer every day.
California had abolished that practice by 1961, and within a couple of years I found myself riding home on a school bus, passing a church, noticing that I hadn’t thought about God for a while, and startled myself realizing that I didn’t believe it anymore. At all. Just Santa Claus again.
I was, I think, 11 or 12, passionate about astronomy, fairly well-grounded in biology, awakening to an interest in girls, so it seems that God failed to compel my interest, and how could He?
My brother and sister relate similar experiences, and their children are also resolute, not to say devout, atheists. That’s not to say that the kids didn’t stray from the fold; most of them did get involved in faith-based groups, but so far all of them have freed themselves.
So far, fun-loving atheism is proving not only heritable but contagious.
Two reason, one it is the lack of evidence.
Second, if there really was a god, I would do everything in my power to fight him, as all the evidence shows that if there is a god, he is a real bastard.
I became an atheist after reading The Selfish Gene. This didn’t make me think about a lack of evidence for a god,it made me think that a god just wasn’t necessary.
I actually did believe in God when I was younger, and up until my early twenties. I went to church ocasionally, mainly because my family or parents made me, but I did actually pray often and genuinely believe. I can honestly say I stopped believing when I got a little older and matured. I used to think that my prayers would actually be able to bring me luck in a way, and everything, but eventually I started seeing that my prayers had little influence on anything that happened. Eventually, when I started seeing that things weren’t really influenced by anything other then random occurences, I began to have doubts about my prayers, and god and religion. Then I got into the arguments for and against religion, god, and evolution and it became harder to believe, and actually a lot easier to move away from it. After this, I realized that Science isn’t perfect, but it answers a lot of the questions on life, where we’re going and where we are coming from.
For me it was a 4 part journey.
1-In seminary I just finally blew a mental fuse with the continued…”you are evil and have original sin” nonsense that I left and soon realized catlick dogma is BS. 2-From there to Buddhism and philosophy, and 3-finally-nothing.
4-After reading 100s of blogs of all sorts I realized that atheism sounded right bu then changed to A-theism, as I don’t believe or dis-believe in S/He/IT. Its that S/He/IT is completely irrelevant as the universe is where I exist and the rules are made ‘with out g0d’. IF there is something beyond then I will deal with it when I get there.
After being a card-carrying theist, baptized, confirmed and married in a church, most of my ‘rites of passage’ have been within the theist milieu.
When I die, my family and friends are having a wake, drinking to my ‘health’, cremating me in a cardboard box, and having my ashes scattered on the little hill located in the middle of my 14acre property. I want my last right of passage to be as far away from theism as I can get.
It is just so obvious from any cursory reading of sociology, anthropology, etc., that religion is nothing other than a geo-culturally dependent variable of the independent variables of everyday social and physical reality. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Christianity is simply crap.
I became an atheist after reading the bible, but I remain one because of the evidence – the fact that virtually all conceptions of god are inconsistent with what we know about the universe. For me, this comes as close to positive proof as can be possible.
That is, to be convinced of the existence of a god, I would need to be shown that everything I currently perceive as real is in fact not. Since the same “brain in a vat on Mars” argument applies for evidence of any kind, for all practical purposes I am certain that god does not exist.
I have never been a believer but sometimes wanted to be. There is no evidence, true, but I could also find no version of a god concept that satisfied. I would like my existence to continue and be part of something more than myself but none of the ideas I have come across help me in any real way. Additionally I am thoroughly a Kantian liberal and every religion seems to be built around authoritarian structures. I think faith and authoritarianism both destroy human potential and limit the world we could have. And before anyone brings it up I am a sane human, not a moral relativist.
The lack of evidence is a lack of evidence everyday, in everyway, in every detail of the world so it is a very conclusive lack. I just cannot summon any belief or hope of a belief and would not like it much if a god did exist.
I was raised Catholic. It was a long and complicated journey to atheism. Lack of evidence for god did play a role. I often challenged god and practiced superstition, but I didn’t get the results I wanted. I thought sometimes I was asking for too much. It all seems stupid and ridiculous now, but a lot of this occurred in my youth. As I learned about the world, science, and other religions, Catholic dogma and religion seemed ridiculous. It made me angry. I was bamboozled! But I’ve lightened up.
I might believe in god now if all of my prayers had been answered. But those were the prayers of a kid and a Christian. We’d be living in a “perfect” Christian world. It would be a bore. Getting to atheism was hellish at times, but thank goodness I got past my fears of challenging god, my beliefs, and my superstitions. I do prefer my life without belief in god, saints, ghosts, and other superstitious nonsense. Life is more interesting.
I haven’t issued a challenge to GOD in some time. So here it goes…
Dear Jesus, if you are here, I know you can hear me. If you are here, ride down a rainbow on a white horse carrying pink cotton candy in your right hand and a sword in your left. The cotton candy is for me. The sword is so you feel a little more secure in holding the cotton candy.
Okay… right… NOW!
Well I waited and nothing happened.
I’ve given god numerous chances in the past. Because this is a public challenge, and because I’m a nice guy, I think it is only fair to give him another shot. So here we go…
Last chance god…(drum roll please)…NOW!
Nothing. No surprise. I tried this crap for years growing up and not a scrap of evidence. I just looked outside. I don’t even see any cotton candy!
My goodness there are allot of responses! My reasons for being an atheist are:Lack of evidence in a God, the bible’s baseless assertions made by men in a pre-enlightened age, the bibles violence and cruelty based on “Gods” demands of submission to him, and the facts of evolution. B.T.W. no amount of reason or evidence will counter peoples faith. FAITH TRUMPS EVERYTHING!
I am an atheist because I believe that science, reason and logic rule over fantasy, supersticions and mythis. I am not educated in science but I do trust that science, when combined with reason and logic reap sound pieces of evidence that support thruth to Atheism.
I was brainwashed Roman Catholic in Pennsylvania. Anyone that was not Catholic was “Public”. It took me years to realize that religions are based on lies and that the supernatural parts of religion are mere fantacies and myths. I was considering becoming a priest from the ages of 18 – 24. Now, at 47, I am finally coming to grips with Atheism and I find all religions repulsive.
So to answer the question why I am an athiest I would have to say it is mostly because of the unthruths all religious dogma preaches. I believe any intelligent, educated, wordly person (including religious scholars) must know that religions are man made and based on illogical concepts. The only reason religious scholars keep the lies going is because of money. Reliigons take in billions of dollars. We know that many people will do anything to protect their money making business. That’s why I am now a Proud Athiest. I regret that it took me years to “come out” of this second closet!
1. complete absence of evidence. 2. the behavior of religionists in history. 3. the outright irreconcilability of religions, even those deemed “similar” 4. corny religious music and infantile prayers
No, it’s not for lack of evidence; the evidence for there not being a god is overwheming to me. Every day all I have to do is contemplate current happenings on this Earth and that our solar system keeps a’spining in the immense universe. Evolution is a fact. If the Bible, Koran and especially Joseph Smith’s rediculas book of Maroni are the evidence that these “persons” present to us, they are all laughably poor, no, really no evidense at all. The first only a copy of more ancient, supernatural Mythology, the second we know the source of it’s near unintelligble ranting by someone who had the Bible read to him, and the third, a con man of witching rods and other hocus pocos. I am moving more every day past Richard Dawkins 6.9 point towards 7 in being a radical atheist. If someone says to me, ‘I hear you are an atheist.’ I say yes but it depends on what YOU mean by an theist.’ They invariby answer, “An atheist is a person that doesn’t believe in God.” I answer, no that is not I; I interpret the word litteraly from the Greek, the same language your New Test. came from, A,no + THEOS, god (deity); There is no God! Believe and belief are weasle words!
So, I just finished reading through all of the 283 (so far) responses to Jerry’s wonderful question.
And I am most thoroughly impressed and quite heartened. So much sanity and rationality!
I think there’s great potential for this thread to be useful beyond the initial group catharsis.
First, any of all y’all who encounter believers who misunderstand why people are atheists or who are interested in understanding why people don’t believe, send them here. This thread should do wonders for dispelling misconceptions and enlightening those who mistrakenly believe they’re already enlightened.
Second, I rather suspect that an enterprising student of sociology should be able to perform some sort of an analysis on the thread. Certainly qualitative, but probably also quantitative. Yes, the respondents are self-selected, but they’re self-selected from a readily-identifiable and not-insignificant group: vocal participants of the atheist web-site-osphere.
Lastly…I’d like to thank everybody who answered Jerry’s call. I enjoyed reading the responses, and I think the world is a (slightly) better place because this thread exists.
Cheers,
b&
Seconded.
I felt heartened last night after checking in, and am determined to continue reading everyone’s posts.
I have a much clearer sense of the different paths we walked to be here and yet it seems that I could have quite a good conversation with most everyone here.
Thank you.
I was raised on fairy tales and fantasy novels. Religions were obviously a story someone made up. They usually had all the elements of a good fantasy novel: angry deities, adventures and sacrifices. The old testament is like an epic horror film, with god dishing out death and destruction. The Rig Veda is full of great stories, but is an extremely boring read a lot of the time. I loved the old Pueblo myths, too. Objectively, how could one myth be the true one? Isn’t it much more likely they are all just stories.
I had some fuzzy spiritual beliefs but lost them gradually in my teenage years when I realized they possessed absolutely zero explanatory power, and mostly just served to make new-age goofballs some money.
It’s complicated…
If I have to choose, the short answer would fall in the empirical camp. But actually, no matter how I look at it, I come up with the same answer.
I grew up without a religious narrative, not as an “atheist,” but in a family where religion was just not a part of our lives. I lived next door to Jehovah’s Witnesses, across the street from Christian Scientists, and when Kennedy ran against Nixon I learned that “Protestants are good, Catholics are bad”! So my atheistic views started as a combination of:
(1) “God” never having been part of my life
(2) The plethora of beliefs I encountered, not all of which could be true, which leads to the logical conclusion that none of them is!
(3) My own thoughts that if there had been an entity capable of creating the universe, it would be way incomprehensible to us, rather than the anthropomorphic creature of the Bible. Why would it bother creating us, and why would it want to be worshipped or care what we believed?
As I learned more about science, I saw that everything could be explained, and I didn’t see any “evidence” for the supernatural in my life. As I learned about the vastness and weirdness of the universe, I couldn’t believe that it had been created just for us!
I remember an incident from when I was about 5 years old. I heard the story of Cain and Abel, and wondered about the wife Cain found, afterall their parents where the first humans, right? I remember asking the pastor about it, I don’t remember the answer, but it didn’t satisfy me. In hindsight that was my first step towards atheism. In my early teens I kept asking myself: “Do I believe all this stuff?” For a long time the answer was: “Dunno” For a while I was very much into parapsychology and all that, but I realised soon that the scientific values where scant.
The answer to “Do I believe all this religious stuff?” became “No” when I was 20. I had no name for what I was, this was 30 years ago in Germany and it really didn’t matter. But after reading “The God Delusion” I found my label, I’m an atheist. I’m a gnu atheist, even.
I went to a Christian school, where we read a lot in the Bible (not such a bad thing as far as acquiring language skills is concerned). What turned me into an atheist, at about the age of ten, was the realization how immensely implausible it was that the creator of the universe would be bothered with the affairs of one particular group of primitive people in the Middle East a few thousand years ago, even with the private lifes of individuals, while this same god had been conspicuous by his absence ever since. Christianity is so evidently made-up and nonsensical that it will always be a mystery to me how intelligent people can fall for it.
And the same goes for all religions, of course.
Interesting to read the responses here, and to me it would be even more interesting to tease out some patterns in it. I wonder for example if there are people who are motivated more by disillusionment than others, having had some initial attraction to God beliefs, and others who never found those meaningful at all. That might help explain why some atheists feel more threatened by religion than others.
Also, the assumption that people form opinions by reasoning from evidence is an attractive rationalist hypothesis, but I’m not sure I find it entirely plausible. Why do all of us as atheists fail to find God beliefs meaningful or useful, when so many others do. I’m just not convinced that it’s because we reasoned purely from evidence and they just blindly accepted fairy tales without evidence. That just seems a little too self-congratulatory to me.
I thought about that as well Todd, but I came to a different conclusion.
Many people here seem to, like me, be attempting to reconcile the cultural narrative that we were born in to, re: religions, with our experiences. Not that we just started one day deconstructing religions rationally. That part comes after too many contradictions emerge directly from our experiences.
Oops, I left out what I was responding to which is
“some atheists feel more threatened by religion than others”?
Do you actually know an atheist who is threatened by religion? I sure don’t.
I expect that there are thousand of atheists in, say, Iran, or Pakistan, or the USA who feel mortally threatened by religion.
Sure, but that’s not the kind of threat Todd is talking about.
Yash, you’re right, that’s not quite what I was talking about originally, but I don’t make as much of a distinction between those kinds of threat as you seem to be making. I think a lot of us feel threatened by the potential for religion to become a force for totalitarianism when it mixes with politics, and that’s part of what leads to it becoming the more direct kind of threat. Or don’t you see it that way at all?
Yes, I know several athesists who feel very threatened by religion, particularly a friend in Pakistan. And I suspect that many of the anti-religious atheists feel threatened by it, although in a less direct and physical sense. More in a political sense.
You said:
I don’t understand what connection it is you are claiming to see between the “disillusionment” and the “feeling threatened.”
Yashwata: The connection I envision is that people who have experienced an indoctrination from an early age and overcame it are more likely to see religion as threatening because they recognize the effort it took to fight the indoctrination and the effect it had on their early life. Those of us who avoided that kind of early treatment, I am imagining at least, may not see why it should be so difficult to deal with because they haven’t had to deal with it in that manner. Just my thoughts, I can’ speak for any perspective but my own.
Well, heck, that sounds plausible. Sorry, Todd, I thought you were saying something quite different.
That’s cool, thanks Yash. I’m curious, what did you think I was trying to say?
No “Reply” link on your comment — I guess you can only go so deep — so I’ll put it here.
Theists have accused me of being an atheist because of some kind of neurotic reaction to the idea of religious belief. “You feel threatened by the divine serenity we derive from our faith,” they might say. As a result, I have become neurotically sensitive to that preposterous suggestion.
Yashwata: “neurotic reaction to the idea of religious belief.”
I’m glad you clarified that. Although I think the idea of a pathological fear of an idea and some sort of reactance in response is plausible in theory, that definitely isn’t what I was referring to here. I meant a real fear with identifiable consequences.
As a child I was God-soaked; Sunday school, Daily Vacation Bible School, church choir, prayer meetings, testimonial nights, Bible competitions, Christian Service Brigade, baptized in the baptismal, under my grandfather’s painting, while the church organ, donated by a great-uncle, played. I prayed hard, loved Jesus with all my heart, but I never got the feeling of bliss that everyone talked about. Then when I was 12 I discovered masturbation. Wow! How could anything that felt sooo good be bad? Then I started noticing the hypocrisy of some of the church goers. I began having more trouble believing the stories; especially when they said everyone who didn’t believe just like we did were going to be tormented in Hell forever. Then I discovered science and history in the form of World Book Encyclopedia, then in school. By the time I got to high school biology, taught by a wonderful guy named Bob Martin, I just sort of forgot about religion. It was still there, a dark presence deep in my brain, gibbering about Hell and Damnation, but I just sort of ignored it. I drifted along as a wishy-washy agnostic for many years. When I started hearing about Intelligent Design, and since it was now the Age of Google, my research led me to Austin Cline’s About Atheism, then to Panda’s Thumb where I followed the Dover war, then to Pharyngula. Finally, a couple years ago a friend loaned me a copy of The God Delusion. Then, like Saul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from my brain and the world made infinitely more sense. I was finally able to openly admit to myself that I no longer believed in any god or gods and that religious belief made absolutely no sense. I re-read the Bible, read the Quran and the Book of Mormon. All I found was sadness, hate, evil and simply unbelievable nonsense. I read Dennett, Harris and Hitchens and they made a lot of sense. I became more aware of the out and out lies spread by supposedly religious people whom I have now come to despise. So now I call myself an atheist. I can see no evidence whatsoever for any gods, nor do I see any need to evoke any gods to explain anything in world. Still, sometimes late at night, when it’s quiet, I still hear that nasty little imp that was implanted deep in my brain as a child, but now I know its not real.
I don’t believe in God or any gods for the same reason that I don’t believe in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or Santa Claus. The arguments for God’s existence, whether ontological, teleological, or cosmological, simply are not convincing, while the arguments against God’s existence, especially the arguments from Evil and from Scale (for the latter, see “The Non-Existence of God” by Nicholas Everitt), are quite convincing. The “God of the philosophers,” i.e., the classic omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Being cannot exist, as those attributes are internally and mutually contradictory. The God of the average believer, is, on the other hand, not very different from the Zeus of the ancient pagan Greeks, and thus not much more than a cosmic tyrant at best, and a comic book super-hero at worst. In any event, there is no evidence for such a being actually existing.
I was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness. A very strict cult (aren’t they all?) Demons were all around, ready to pounce on a child if you were not following the ‘truth’ or reading ‘blasphemous’ material. When I moved away to work, I found it pleasing to miss the 5 hours of indoctrination. Guilt and fear of ‘Jehovah’ ensued. Many years later, after marriage & kids, I one day spied in the library ‘Did Jesus Exist?’ by G A Wells. Reading it, I had an anti-religious experience.
Suddenly those strange passages in the bible made sense. It was BS, for writers personal motives! One thing stopped my absolute freedom, the problem of altruism in nature. A reading of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins explained it completely in evolutionary terms.
I had my childhood stolen, but I got better. Of course, the God hypothesis is completely ridiculous.
Always been an atheist, because:
a. There is no evidence whatsoever to support any God hypothesis, or attributed miracles (lack of evidence).
b. Logical incoherence in the concept itself (anecdotal evidence).
c. The world operates as is without the need of any divine or supernatural agent (negative evidence).
Today, I have even more reasons than that.
The more supreme, ineffable, and “omni” a god is, the less capable any evidence would be of demonstrating its existence. Any claim to an absolute, eternal truth requires a basis of equal weight, and no such thing can be found here. Even if such evidence did exist, the fact that we filter everything through limited, frail, untrustworthy human perception would taint it irrevocably by the time we had a chance to consider it.
My personal path to atheism started with pursuing for a while an evangelical Christian faith. When I fell out of that, it was in part because I realized I was called upon to believe in a god who would determine our place in eternity based on decisions made temporally. This is an explicit contradiction right in the Bible: the whole point of the book of Job is that human understanding is nothing before the vastness of God, and yet the New Testament makes clear that our choices on Earth will be held up to God’s perfection and found wanting, for which his justice demands punishment. Even the so-called “free gift” of salvation requires a temporal choice on the part of the recipient in order to go into effect. At its best, that allows the theologian to slyly have it both ways; at its worst, it makes God into the most horrible monster imaginable.
Not every modern theology is so strict about judgement, but the core logical problem exists for any claim about the absolute: Our faculties are too limited for us to confirm it. Visions can be hallucinations; apparent violations of physical law can be undiscovered natural phenomena; memories can be distorted. Any “evidence” of the supernatural is ultimately an attempt to disprove naturalistic explanations, which is a philosophical impossibility.
The only “god” that a human being can justifiably recognize is so fuzzy and limited as to be hardly deific at all. Often these are gussied-up aspects of simple human experience, like feelings of connectedness or love or transcendence. Interesting – potentially fulfilling, even – but not godlike in the way that those who call themselves “theists” and “atheists” mean it.
Even though I do identify with some definitions of atheism, I consider myself at core an agnostic in something like the original sense: I think that knowledge of the divine is impossible to recognize as such. Even if you did encounter genuinely divine knowledge and acknowledge it, you could only do so mistakenly. 🙂 So while, yes, there could be a being or beings who are “greater” than my perception with creative power over me and the universe, I literally can’t conceive of the evidence that they could present that would adequately substantiate the claim of their own identities. They might through hands-on experience convince me of attributes like their physical power and access to other realms of existence; perhaps by taking me there, they could even convince me about the afterlife and what steps I need to take to determine my place in it. But as functionally sure as I might be in those facts after having had the chance to test them, they could never add up to the full picture of omni-whatever, at least not while I remain a temporal, limited being myself.
Lack of evidence. I graduated from not caring (apathetism if you will) to not caring and not believing. I have yet to see anything that would induce me to proclaim faith. Religion seems to exist for the same reasons as other human endeavors: to gain wealth, political influence, etc for itself. No different from modern corporations except for religion’s lack of honesty in seeking profit. And the occasional oil spill….
I have a mind that religion cannot satisfy.
lack of repeatable evidence for the supernatural hypothesis + overwhelming evidence for natural processes making everything we can observe = no need for the supernatural hypothesis.
i was technically agnostic until my late 30s, when research into consciousness and latest findings from neurobiology finally dispelled the last doubts i had. cartesian duality was the last place where ‘magic’ was hiding out for me, but i eventually grokked that qualia are nonsense; you get qualia when you ask the question wrong.
Like some of the other people who commented here, I was raised in a very religion soaked environment. When I married my husband, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t a believer as well. I mean, it all made such sense. There just HAD to be a god. Then I started reading stuff to find an argument to present to my husband, so he would “see the light.” Instead, my eyes were opened. When I wasn’t saturated with the lies and brainwashing techniques that seem to be intrinsic to religion, I began to let myself acknowledge all those contradictions that I had noticed but glazed over. Honestly, and this may sound stupid as hell, but for me the ultimate evidence of evolution being true, for me, was presented by Richard Dawkins when he described how the sinuses drain on the top. This was for me, my AH HA moment! I thought, wow, how bloody dumb would a creator HAVE to be in order to put the drain hole on TOP? If we were ALWAYS upright, as the religious tell us we were, then it would have been designed differently, right? So that is why I don’t believe in a god anymore. Our sinuses drain from the top.
Deconversion via decongestant? 😉
Here’s why I am an atheist:
1) Lack of personal experience. I was born into born-again Christianity and never even thought to question it until I went to college. I subsequently realized that Philosophy and Comparative Religion courses in college tapped into a subconsciously-building doubt due to a specific lack of experience of Jesus’ or the Holy Spirit’s presence, which I was told by both church and Bible is a self-evident fact of every true believer. I asked Jesus repeatedly for assurance and help in my unbelief – yet there was never any answer. Not even close.
2) Cultural issues: Having been exposed to Comparative Religion courses in college, as well as meeting people of different faiths (e.g., Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu) in college that I never met in my “Christian bubble” as a youth, I realized that the conflicting claims of all religions makes it improbable that they can all be true.
3) Philosophical reasoning: towards the end of college and thereafter, I delved further into both the theistic and atheistic arguments for and against the existence of gods as well as the supernatural. I found all the pro-theistic/pro-supernatural arguments, however sophisticated, simply wanting. Furthermore, in the past 10-15 years I’ve been an avowed atheist, I’ve read and continue to read books by prominent academic and popular Christian writers (including Francis Collins, Donald Miller, etc.) and find their arguments not only wanting, but downright infantile.
4) Naturalism.org and the writings of Nietzsche. Tom Clark has a nice compilation of all things naturalism-related, as well as the latest reports from the various sciences, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, etc. Nietzsche is grossly misunderstood by most, but the key works for me were/are: The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good & Evil, and The Antichrist.
I was raised a staunch catholic and when I left high school I firmly believed in God though no longer called myself catholic. It took about 6 months of university before I started to question religion and from there about 2 years to give it up completely. Anthony Grayling talked about 2 types of proof, it was the first kind, formal deductive proof that caused me to give up my religion. None of it made any sense, the beliefs of the christian faith are logically incoherent and contradictory. Those that are not fail the second proof test (scientific proof).
To me the question of whether god exists is similar to asking whether there is a box somewhere that contains Tuesday. No evidence could ever convince me that the statement is correct because it is nonsense. For god to exist the entire universe would have to be very different god requires mathematics itself to function differently let alone physics and the other sciences. I will concede that it is theoretically possible to construct a universe where God could exist and where evidence of god could be produced. For that universe to be this universe all the sciences and systems of logic would have to be shown to be wrong and changed (quite substantially). I think this too is what Anthony Grayling was saying when he said you have a lot of work to do [evidence wise] before you are able to come to a position where you can ask what evidence would convince you of god.
Dear Prof Coyne,
Thank you for your excellent question, Prof Coyne. I will give my answer but I would first like to speak words of appreciation to atheist scholars and atheist ‘everymen’ as well.
I found your website months ago through reading other excellent atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and ‘weblogs’ like Debunking Christianity. I especially enjoy Mr John Loftus and his website from where I discovered your current article. I will bookmark your website to read now. But I can already tell I will appreciate your sophistication and intelligence, along with Richard Dawkins and several other atheists. As for Mr Loftus, he is very easy to read and I frequently feel moved by his ‘everyman’ perspective on life. Although Mr Loftus is not what I would label a thinking or intelligent person, but I believe the other atheists I mentioned are intelligent and think deeply on issues, it does not considerably matter because Mr Loftus speaks to our hearts. While other atheists might be intellectuals, he is not as smart but he is passionate and fiery. His passion and fire make up for what he lacks. If our feelings and emotions are ‘right’ brain phenomena, and logic and reason are ‘left’ brain phenomena, Mr Loftus is more the ‘right’ brain to other atheists’ ‘left’ brain. But we all need to work together to make a ‘complete’ brain. His passionate feelings and emotions are the wind that drives atheism forward while other atheist scholars are the ones who ground atheism on firm intellectual foundations. I will mention my appreciative comment on his website as well.
My story is that I am 42, a mother of two teenagers, one boy and one girl, but whose successful businessman and soon to be ex-husband left me over 15 months ago for a younger and more attractive woman. We were Roman Catholics who did not believe in divorce. But now we are getting divorced. After we became pregnant with our first child and at his strong request, I myself left a reputable American doctoral programme years ago and thus my dream to become an academic and scholar. It’d be an understatement to say I’m devastated. He and the Church ruined my life and my dreams, and my children’s lives as well. My first reason is therefore a personal reason. I apologise for such strong language but I hate my husband and I hate the Roman Catholic Church for what they did to me and my children. I should say another reason I appreciate Mr Loftus is because he has publicly revealed he comes from a similar background to mine. He too had marital problems when he allegedly ‘committed adultery’ with another woman. But there is no such thing as ‘adultery’ as it is an invention of the Church. His wife was a Christian shrew. But what is worse is Mr Loftus’ Church would not help him. He therefore had to leave his Church and wife. I applaud him for his bravery.
But I also have factual and intellectual reasons. Through reading many atheist scientific columns, articles, and books, although I apologise I haven’t read your books but I would like to, I have become convinced that atheism is true and there is no god or gods.
My deepest thanks once again for all the good work you do to tell people the truth, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to share our reasons for why we are atheists. I will definitely visit your website again.
Regards,
E.S.
The short answer is: a severe lack of evidence for god, as in, none.
The long answer follows.
First off, one should know that I come from a very religious background. My grandfather has been an Apostolic Lutheran pastor for my entire life, and my mother became “born-again” at some point after getting pregnant. When I was a child, the family would play “Bible Trivia,” and I kicked butt because I enjoyed me some Bible stories.
Around about the seventh grade, I started thinking, and one thing that kept going through my head is that the deck was stacked against humanity from the start, if one believed the book of Genesis. God was omnipotent and omniscient, so he knew exactly what sort of creation he’d made, and the consequences thereof. So, here’s Adam and Eve, with one rule to follow: don’t eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. What follows is well known of course, the “Fall of Man.” What got me though is that God should’ve, indeed must have, seen it coming from the very start, and took no steps to prevent it. There are many that could’ve been done: don’t let Satan in the garden, don’t make the bloody Tree, make sure Adam and Eve really are obedient and not prone to disobeying just cuz of a few honeyed words, just to name a few.
What this would mean then is that God wanted it to happen, knowing full well he was still going to lay the blame at the poor human’s feet and punish them accordingly with pain, misery, and no access to immortality (the given reason for being kicked out of Eden is not the sin itself, but so as to keep them from eating of the Tree of Life). That’s an eyeopener for a child of that age. That made God out to be someone rather despicable, as opposed to the loving, forgiving deity I had been taught to worship.
Another way in which the deck was stacked, according to the teachings I had received, is the simple math about the causes of sin: the devil, the world, and our own flesh. The only saving grace was to pray to Jesus to make you a good person, and give you strength to resist temptation. “For all of sinned and fall short of the glory of God” Rom3:23. Well, yea, when things are set up like that!
I’m pretty sure, though I don’t exactly recall, that before I concluded I was atheist, I concluded first that God just flat out didn’t deserve my worship. And this led me to believe that there was no God. Yes, I know, crappy reasoning. God could’ve existed but really just been that rotten. I make no excuse, except that I hadn’t been taught critical thinking in my life.
I won’t go into all the details of the teenage years that cemented the “God, if existing, is rotten” idea, and the conversations I had with my Grandfather during Youth Bible Study meetings that didn’t help the case for religion. I will say that I gained a better understanding of evolution during that time, which my family’s church views as the enemy (when my Mother gave me a subscription to Discover magazine for my 13th birthday, she warned me that if I started talking about evolution being real, she’d take that subscription away — I kept my mouth shut), and this understanding helped further the belief that God doesn’t exist.
I backslid around the time I was 18 or 19, when I had a powerful emotional experience that I believed was my soul touching another. This I took as proof that souls existed, which meant there was an afterlife, and more in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy (thank you Shakespeare). I spent the next few years trying to understand that experience, and figure out which of the New Age beliefs, or combination thereof, were right. I still viewed the Christian god as horrible, so I wasn’t about to go there! However, I continued to read about science, one of the loves that has remained with me since early childhood, and eventually, I simply couldn’t maintain the belief that anything genuinely spiritual/supernatural had actually happened to me, or the belief that there was any sort of deity looking down.
So, I became agnostic. Some more time passed, some more study took place, and eventually, all I could admit to is “atheist.” Frankly I find myself more satisfied with the evidential conclusion then I did with my past views. I have even come to view the world with more wonder and awe than I did when I believed in the supernatural.
I was a gullible idiot. Unlike all of you smart people that saw through the lies and brainwashing at an early age; I swallowed the whole catholic doctrine. My parents, teachers, priests and nuns wouldn’t lie to me would they? I went to catholic schools, we had religion instead of science. Catholic doctrine was taught the same as math, english and history. It was all taught as facts. I was too stupid and gullible to realize the difference between religious fantasy and fact. Religious freedom? There is no freedom for children raised with 24 hour brainwashing. We were repeatedly mentally raped. I was so terrified of their hell that I figured my only salvation was to become a priest. Fortunately, a year in the seminary with a good library and it was obvious even to me how much suffering and pain the catholic church had inflicted on millions over centuries. No sane person would be part of that organization. I was no longer a catholic but it’s easier to remove two hands full of cholla cactus than get all that catholic crap out of your brain. Took a long time and a strange journey through buddhism, hinduism and zen. I am convinced by own unfettered logic, long study and reason that there can be no god as described in the bible, koran, etc. At 61, I stand free and proud with the rest of you; a product of 14 and half billion years of wonderful evolution. And a final word to the Catholic Church: fuck you.
I suppose there are quite a few coherent and logically possible god hypotheses, if you ask the right people. I’m not going out of my way to learn these hypotheses and determine how they could be proven.
I was never personally presented with a coherent religious belief system. I live in a secularized Lutheran culture where religious practice is not so much faith-based as tradition-based. Discussion about religious beliefs is not encouraged because someone might get their feelings hurt. I was raised to respect the tradition and ignore the lack of content. Eventually, it started to creep me out.
I’m actually quite curious about what the people in “my” church supposedly believe, but that’s elusive to find out. People here don’t like being told what to believe, so the church doesn’t tell them. As a teenager, I read (unlike anyone else) the official Cathechism and thought that if only I thought it a little harder it would make sense. Years later I realized that it was just a collection of vague references to some obscure theological concepts that most people would feel outlandish to think about.
Reasons for not believing in god:
1. No reliable evidence for any gods
2. The arrogance of the religious to explain exactly what god is without any supporting evidence. (Plus they’re not all the same)
3. A perfectly plausible and evidence based explanation exists (science) for much of what we see around us. Therefore there is no reason to postulate a god to explain it.
4. The fact that life was not created for humans in mind is not a problem. I would much rather accept life for what it is than live my life hoping that some made up deity is true.
Born and bred LOL an atheist.. I was presented with the other- well okay the christian- argument/s for god/religion.. it/they came up far short as did/do many of the christians I interact(ed) with.. the memorable ones anyways. The ones who told me as a child I was going to hell due to my lack of belief in god.. my 7 yo response to that was well if I don’t get to go to heaven due to lack of belief in god.. I cannot go to hell as I do not believe in the devil either.. that threw their little minster’s daughters brains for a loop. Although I continued to be told of my destiny of hell as they were playmates..
I am a self-diagnosed Aspie and logic tells me that the whole god thing makes no sense and science is beautiful both in its failings and its successes.. and its ability to be wrong is what makes it right. For me and in general. Occam’s Razor can apply- god is unnecessarily complex for the situation.
God has had much bad done in its name and not nearly enough good for it and religion to be allowed a seat at the grownups table.
I was an adult Sunday school teacher and also taught a weeknight Bible study class at my church. The more I studied the Bible the more doubts I had. Once when doing an 8 week study of Genesis and Exodus I remember asking myself “Do I really believe any of this?” The answer that came to me was no. I didn’t really believe all the Apologetics I had read that attempted to rationalize these stories. People told me to pray but that didn’t seem to help either. I also realized how little knew about Biology, Chemistry, and Astronomy and began to read more on these subjects and try to understand more about the universe I live in.
For me the “evidence” that the Church offered just wasn’t compelling and that’s why I’m an atheist.
It took me a while to get around to responding to this. Actually, I don’t recall having any religious beliefs at any point in my life. My brother and my best friend since childhood both agree that I have never in my life professed a belief in anything vaguely religious, and they are both religious people. My parents were Methodist and occasionally took us to church, but I was just bored with the hole thing. It seemed silly and uninvolving to me and totally not worth spending any time or attention on. It wasn’t until I was about 20 or 21 that I first read some of Ayn Rand’s and Nathaniel Brandon’s stuff. I’ve since come to regard much of what Rand had to say as dogmatic and dramatically lacking in compassion, but she at least informed me as to what I was – an atheist. She and Brandon also proved to me that it was a perfectly OK thing to be. I have never been presented with any reason why I should reevaluate that position – and it’s been 40 years since I figured that out. So I seriously doubt I will suddenly discover some reason to be a Believer.
Stan
My father was a catholic churchgoer, while my mom is catholic also, but an anti church catholic. But both of them are basically rational people.
I realised I didn’t believe when I was 8: we were told at religion class that we are old enough to pray also by ourselves. I started to do it on my way to school like a forgotten assignment and just realised that there’s no one.
I still went to church with my dad and to religion class (to avoid any conflicts). I found it just dead boring, especially when I started to be old enough to actually understand the sermons. As a teen I told my dad I didn’t believe, which he interpreted as “everyone has their phases of doubt”. I never discussed this again with him, and there weren’t any conflicts (he didn’t bring it up and didn’t say a word about my living with someone without being married, and I didn’t).
I kind of never understood (and understand) how anyone could take religion seriously, as a kid I considered it as one of the strange things adults do :-). And I just never met with a good reason to believe…