I think a lot of it for me is the multiplicity of religious beliefs. A devoutly religious person is somebody who believes ninety-nine religions are wrong and one is right. An atheist is somebody who believes a hundred religions are wrong. I have a hard time seeing why I should believe one religion is true if I dismissed all the others as false.
I don’t know if there’s a “compelling argument” in my case, but I can give you the tipping point.
I was vaguely deistic up to age 10, figuring that there had to be *something *which created the universe. Then one night I was sitting in the bathtub and I realized, “oh, no there doesn’t.” A universe that just exists is perfectly consistent, and certainly no more nonsensical than a God who just exists. And that was that. (So, basically, an Occam’s Razor type deal.)
There’s a lot of reasons. To be honest, I never was a religious person in the first place–my parents are also basically atheists, although recently my mother has become a kind of fan of Buddhism. I’ve thought about lots of reasons that people have already mentioned, but religion never really made sense to me in the first place.
When I read this question, though, the first thing that popped into my mind was also the question of suffering–not evil, specifically, because it’s easy enough to get into all kinds of philosophical hand-waving about free will and so on, but just plain old human suffering. For example, I remember learning about infantile Tay-Sachs Disease in a college biology course. This is a disease that affects the most innocent possible creatures in a way that almost seems designed to be as cruel as possible–to have a normal, perfectly healthy child for a few months, to fall in love with the child, to see it grow, to see it start to become a proper little human being–and then to see it all start to fall apart, to be forced to watch your child’s body destroying itself by inches… and all because of one little gene, one little mistake in the system. A misplaced comma. A sentence copy and pasted into the wrong place. How could an omnipotent and benevolent God allow such a thing? How could an omnipotent and benevolent God create such a sloppy system in the first place?
That’s one thing I will never be able to understand about the religious. How can they reconcile such a thing with a just God? Is it simply hope? I think back in the old days it must have been easier–you could just believe that it was Satan, that there was a big baddie out there who gets his giggles by doing a little fiddling with human DNA once in a while. But it seems that blaming such things on Satan has gone out of fashion these days, along with fire and brimstone, and nothing has popped up to really replace him. I just find it incomprehensible.
The only real reason that anyone believes any particular reason is that it’s dominant in the culture they grow up in (whether that culture be national or even just your family). Now the discomfort of not knowing things and wanting to fill in the gaps are pretty universal. That’s why people latch onto religion. But the reason you grasp onto any particular reason is because that religion is dominant in your social environment.
So then - we have billions of people who have legitimate faith in their own religion. Whatever reasoning you have for believing in your religion - that it seems intuitively correct, that you can feel god in your life, that little coincidences in your life are actually tiny miracles that god is giving you, etc. are all beliefs shared by all of these religious people. But they worship different gods, or at least in different ways, and they can’t all be right. This means that even if we assume there’s substance to one religion, there are billions of people out there who have just as much faith, just as much devotion to their religion - and they must be wrong.
There’s an implicit argumentum ad populum going on here. A particular religion has been dominant among your culture for thousands of years. Billions of people have lived their lives around what this religion says. It shapes your society, your laws, your social structures. How could it possibly be baseless? No, there must be something there, right?
Which is exactly what the people who believe in the wrong religions (from your perspective) think too. The intuitive response to this idea is to say “yeah but, in my case…” and fill in some sort of special pleading here. But are there any rational reasons to suspect that your claim to having it right is somehow greater than theirs? Is your devotion somehow more legitimate? Those little coincidences you see in your life that you think are god’s work - do you think they don’t also experience that sort of thing?
So the only reason to grasp onto any particular religion is because your culture is pushing you to accept it as legitimate. And yet we have so many contradictory religions that some must be wrong. Billions of people, with the same level of faith and history and mythology and beliefs, must be wrong. So then - from your perspective, their religion must be wrong, their god doesn’t exist, and all of their faith is just them convincing themselves to have faith in nothing. So now we can have religions with billions of believers, all just as dedicated as you, all just as well educated about their religion as you, all who feel the presence of god - and yet they must be wrong.
Thus, religion can and does spring up in every civilization, and it inspires utter faith that they’re the ones that are right, and yet most must be wrong. How would you be able to demonstrate yours is any different?
Looking at it another way - let’s say god doesn’t exist nor has anything supernatural ever existed. What would the world look like?
It would look exactly as it does. Cultures would create beliefs to explain the unknown. First, primitive cultures would explain the sun moving across the sky as a sun god moving. Then we’d develop more complex mythologies, like greek polytheism where confusing and unpredictable things in nature were the result of competing gods. As we became more savvy and knew more things about the world - that the sun crosses the sky due to the Earth’s rotation rather than needing a sun god, our religion becomes a bit more subtle and savvy - now we have just one god, and he acts in very subtle and mysterious ways so that you can never quite pin him down.
And so a world without any god would look exactly like it does today. What, then, is invoking any particular notion of good needed to explain?
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I’ve never experienced anything where a god was even remotely the most reasonble explanation.
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Everywhere God has ever been said to reside, when we’ve been able to examine it, god was found to not be there. Similarly, we may still stumble upon Saddam’s hidden stash of nuclear warheads but eventually after every place we were told they’d be found has nothing you start to suspect they never existed.
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Since I’ve never had a personal experience of revelation and since all the people who claim to know the form of god can’t seem to agree I have no basis on which to choose one other than aesthetics. On that basis, the Judeo-Christian god doesn’t even come close to leading the pack.
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Most of the philosophical quandaries god seems to be designed to solve aren’t actually solutions but rather simply a form of pushing off the question. “We exist to fulfill gods plan” doesn’t really explain anything since it just pushes it out a level to why god exists.
I have opened a somewhat-related thread in Great Debates, if any of y’all are interested:
Apostates: how hard was it for you to give up your religion?
The fossil record.
What pops out at you as the most persuasive arguement against the existence of smurfs?
Lack of evidence is perfectly sufficient. The presumption of non-existence is the default. It is not something one has to be persuded to, it’s something one has to be persuaded away from.
To me - like you - the most convincing piece of evidence against the kind of god that’s popular right now is just the scale and age of the universe and everything in it. It’s absurd to believe that this abundance of stuff we won’t ever be able to visit was all created just for us billions of years before we (or the earth) even existed. We certainly don’t need it. Even just our galaxy is probably already orders of magnitudes bigger than it “needs” to be.
On the other hand, the most convincing evidence for a creator god with intentions on creating our kind of life is the apparent fine-tuning of physics. I’m aware that this is a god of the gaps argument, and it’s not nearly enough to convince me, but I don’t think the anthropic principle is all that good in this case, so I’d like to see either some strong restrictions on the possible physical laws or evidence of a multiverse or some other mechanism that strengthens the anthropic possibilities.
There’s not some huge persuasive moment. It just seems unlikely, that’s all. When everyone with utterly conflicting views firmly believes their view is absolute and correct, in all likelihood all of them are wrong.
Pale Blue Dot - Wikipedia This is one of many. Sagan had them take a picture of the Earth when the Voyager was leaving the solar system. The Earth is just a pale blue dot in an enormous universe. The idea that god listens to us or knows we exist is so egotistic. The self importance needed to believe in the god /people connection is overwhelming. We are less than a speck in the universe.
To me, the compelling logic is: what explanation might have been devised by various semi-primitive, semi-cilvilized people beginning to grasp the concepts of morality, consciousness, causality, etc. that would be satisfying to them? The answer is: they would have come up with something like God. The Judeo-christian Bible explains, in a farkockteh way, how humans got here, and where “here” is, and what those funny points of light are doing shining in the night-time sky, and why large parts of the earth are wet and others are dry, and until we actually began to, um, know anything, these explanations bamboozled people into thinking they had some standing. Now we know better–it’s all BS, spun and twisted into elaborate shape for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean anything to me. If it was on the money about stuff a little more, I might have to consider if the text, and the beliefs, made any sense, but it’s never on the money, so I don’t.
For me was realizing that I didn’t need to use any magical thinking to make sense of the universe.
Taoism and Buddhism (yoga et al., if you wish to be broad) certainly were never common in the West for many Westerners, yet plenty of them have explored and adopted same. Note I am specifically taking issue with your use of the word “only” above.
I’m a Humanist, and I find the possibility of a God to be insulting. We don’t need something supernatural or superhuman or unearthly to guide us; Humanity is sufficient to guide itself.
When I think of the vastness and complexity of the universe, It doesn’t make me feel tiny and insignificant. It makes me feel proud to be a member of the only earthly species that is capable of comprehending these things.
And I hear religious people saying how God gives them strength. But what I see are people who have no idea how strong they could be, on their own.
And too many people focus on an afterlife . . . because they’ve given up on this life.
Pretty much all the reasons listed here and more; Occam’s Razor, the multiplicity of religions, the incoherency and silliness of religions, the total lack of evidence, the breaking of physics, etc. But if I had to pick a single reason, probably the reason that really started me towards atheism I’d have to pick what religion does to people, and the world. It makes people behave in stupid and evil ways; it corrupts them. Everywhere I turn, I see religion inflicting suffering and death and oppression; and the stronger religion is, the worse it is. Regardless of its truth or lack thereof, I regard religion as an evil in its own right, and would oppose it even if it was true.
For me it was the fact that people used to believe in Zeus/Jupiter. Fanatically. Now they are myths of legend.
Couple this with the fact that there are dozens or hundreds of mainstream religions that wildly disagree.
Plus the bible is just a few good tidbits on living alongside a bunch of bad tidbits on living, all jumbled together in a pile of crazy nonsense.
Mainly though, it was just apathy.
Apathy + ‘Those guys were obviously wrong’ + ‘If there does happen to be a truth, then most of these guys are wrong, and there is no way of telling who is right, so odds are all of them are wrong too’ + ‘Has anyone ever actually read this? I mean really read it? This is crazy nonsense!’ = athiest.
That, that was it for me too.
I remember the first time I heard that these Greek and Roman myths, that I was already familiar with, were the religions of these people. I’m not sure what I thought they were before that, likely I never gave it any thought (I was like 13 or 14).
That was the crack in the dam. I don’t recall how fast it took, I may have became an atheist that night. I know I was an atheist by the time the family moved from that state three years later.
I came to atheism by a somewhat different route.
I was an agnostic, but I was prepared to give religious/spiritual stuff the benefit of the doubt.
Then my mental illness really kicked in. I spent a long time struggling with it, and I’ll be spending the rest of my life struggling with it.
One of my best strategies for dealing with a brain that wants to kill me is to really understand what magical thinking is, and to be constantly aware of the way that magical thinking can creep into my thinking, and to shut it down with as much empirical evidence and cold hard logic as possible when it does show up. My continued life literally depends on doing that.
So, the side-effect of that is that I’m very aware of exactly how much magical thinking and downright superstitious bullshit are part of the human way of interpreting the world. Once I thought about it, it became obvious to me that all this God nonsense is just stories people invented to comfort themselves and avoid thinking about their own mortality.
I’m not the kind of atheist that wants to argue with believers and prove how wrong they are, and I’m really not in it to try to prove how superior my way of thinking is to anyone else’s. I’m just a mental patient who isn’t enough of an egotist to believe that there really is any conspiracy against him.
I’m still here, I’m still alive, because intellectually I know that the universe does not hate me. God does not hate me. The world does not revolve around me, and the universe does not revolve around genus homo. I matter to my friends and my family, and that’s it. And that’s plenty. Making up fairy stories about how magical beings are fighting over possession of our souls… OK, that’s crazy. And believe me, I know crazy when I see it.
Once I thought I had a religious experience, but I later realized it was only my own ego.
I’ve gone from wondering about God to wondering about the Earth Mother to agnosticism to atheism. The last step wasn’t really very hard; I thought about the laws of physics, I thought about violating them, and I realized that was extremely unlikely on a universal scale.
I don’t believe in ghosts any more, either. Anything supernatural is, to me, by virtue of its very NAME, so improbable as to be considered impossible. Beyond nature? Nope; not happening in this universe.
I firmly believe that any sentence which begins, “Science can’t explain…” should end with, “…yet.”