The problem of evil is insurmountable, to me. And yes, I’ve read the attempted… um… surmounting.
The PoE (and its cousin, the problem of pain) are only really an issue if we insist on God being omnipotent AND omniscient AND omnibenevolent. Eliminate any one of those, let alone two or three, and you’re golden.
Which is not to say that I believe in Odin.
I have a problem with the lack of evidence answer, since theists claim lots of evidence, much of which we believed in when young. The determination that this evidence was bogus is more like it, but that naturally has lots of pieces, not just one. You can find a smoking gun to prove someone guilty of murder - you have a harder time finding a single smoking gun to prove him innocent. (In interesting cases where there is no solid alibi, that is.)
The thing that sent me over the edge was discovering that the Bible has not been written by Moses as I learned in Hebrew school but assembled much later. I had never believed the Bible inerrant, but realizing that it had been assembled by people with no direct knowledge of the events therein (and that my hardly hyperreligious Hebrew School teachers had not seen fit to tell me this) was enough to knock the last vestiges of belief right out of me.
I think Lobsang wrapped up my thoughts on the subject nicely. It’s just too dumb for words.
For me it’s always been the fact that people believe wildly different and fantastic things just because someone (or the Bible) told them it was so, and yet they are all so sure they are right.
Here’s a thought: When did truth depend on how many people subscribed to it?
For me the hardest part about arguing against a god is arguing against something that doesn’t exist in the physical world and can also control everything in that world. So if there actually was a god he could probably cook up the world we are living in now. However, even though I’ll allow for the possibility that such creature can exist, his existence would be meaningless to me. Like Sagan’s invisible dragon in the garage that no one can see or detect. Great, but why should I care?
That argument doesn’t mean I’ll believe any deity imagined by organized religions. Once you give god attributes, it’s easy to disprove those attributes. The second you say god loves everyone I can prove you wrong by pointing to all the senseless suffering.
The main reason I don’t believe in a Christian god is because I don’t know why I should trust the bible. What makes it more special than any other book?
Pretty much the same reason I don’t believe in leprechauns.
The religion I was brought up in said God was omnimax. I didn’t need to be converted away from any other religion.
The reasoning that cemented me into atheism is this: All the fairy tales of magic that are supposed to guide our lives need to be considered in some sensible structure, and while their truth is impossible to swallow, the idea that ignorant primitives invented them is very easy. Taking their word for things they could’t possibly have known anyway just seems nuts. We make sense of the world to respond to what it has brought so far, and I can’t make any sense other than this one.
This really doesn’t work for me. The spiritual/metaphysical parts are for me the core parts of religion, with the ‘code of conduct’ parts then being built around that. If you’re only choosing to follow the bits about how you live to your life without believing the central part about God, then to me you’re not really believing in that religion (in effect it’s being a atheist masquerading as a theist).
Sure - something that a religion says about the way you should treat others might appeal to you - but why adopt that religion? Why not just select the ethical precepts that work for you, and use them in your life?
It’s not the most compelling argument perhaps, but it was the nail in the coffin of my atheist conversion:
As Pierre Laplace said, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Once upon a time – before science – if the wind blew, waves rolled, and lightning cracked, the best explanation that could be thought of was a supernatural one. It explained everything.
It was born out of ignorance.
That hypothesis is no longer needed, so why use it?
Stop being rational! It’s Saturday!
I take it back!
The thing for me is that the very idea that what we mean when we say God is incoherent.
That, but actually the kicker was my first paleontology & geology courses, which made me viscerally aware of Deep Time. Handling trilobites and greenstone belt rocks just makes the concerns (often bizarre sexual, tribal or dietary proscriptions) of any Bronze Age Sky-Father trivial. The attempted modern gloss of mysticism and metaphysics on top of that was always pathetically transparent.
Two things.
First, the vast amount of completely wasted space in the universe.
Second, the fact that we get sunburned.
Both of these lead me to the conclusion that the universe is not designed around us. And if the universe isn’t designed for us… then who’s to say that it was actually designed? And if the universe isn’t designed, then why should I believe that there’s an actual designer?
That wasn’t the point I was making.
Most of the replies here just pushed me further away from faith into atheism as I got older and learned more. The closest to the Big Event that had me seriously question there was any kind of diety was that I asked him to come into my heart.
At that time most of my friends were somewhat religious and outside my immediate circle they were very religious. A few times I discussed my difficulty in believing though I was unable to express it well. I was constantly told, “ask him into your heart”. I did and I was sincere. Nothing ever happened. Two thoughts then came to mind, I was either so horrible that I was beyond saving, which I knew wasn’t true or there probably was not god and why am I letting a fairy tale make me miserable.
I just don’t have a need for it. Emotionally I don’t have a need for religion, and intellectually it just seems like superstition. It’s hard to be more specific than that. One thing about God is that it doesn’t actually answer any of my questions. If the answer to why are things how they are is, “because God made it that way” then I want to know who or what made God that way. I end up with an identical problem when going back to “before” the Big Bang, but the scientific method has a much better track record on things closer to home both geographically and chronologically, so I give a lot more credence to the scientific method to explain things that are far away and a long long time ago as well