I’ve come very close to considering myself an atheist.
It’s hard to pin down definitively, the best I can do is descriptively.
There’s a way of conceptualizing reality that you can get to via many different paths including Skinnerian behaviorism, philosophical existentialism, that stuff that infected academia in the 90s called poststructuralism, or via any of a number of forms of causal empiricism and/or radical materialism. What they all have in common is that any intentionality and any meaning that anything might ever have — not just the conscious intentions of Some Specific Entity or the Ultimate Meaning of the Universe — all wash out as artifacts of some other meaningless and arbitrary process.
That would include you, for example. The poststructuralist would say “you” are a construct of your location in culture and history, with all meaning for you and to you and of you, including every aspect of your so-called “consciousness”, are artifacts of the collision of large impersonal discourses between historically poised abstractions. Using different language, the Skinnerian would agree: you don’t possess a will and act of intention, you’re a matrix of responses reacting to stimuli, and you neither “choose” nor “cause” anything, you merely passively react. Mainstream sociology, with its insistence on the totality by which all of the contents of your mind is socially determined, would nod in agreement. The folks who perceive the entire universe as a large collection of energetic subatomic particles with mass and momentum interacting according to the mechanical laws of physics, with everything else only an illusion, would not contradict them except to question notions such as “history”, “culture”, “society”, etc; they’d agree completely on the total lack of conscious actors to be found anywhere in any setting.
And having dispensed with a conscious focal point from which questions of meaning can be considered, they also dispose of meaning. It’s not merely that if you had been born to the parents of Adolf Hitler and raised in the environment in which he was raised you would have done no different from what he did in his life — that’s true enough, but more to the point, the only reason that you, reading this, harbor any belief or attitude towards the life and deeds of Adolf Hitler that would be critical of them are attributable to your social cultural and historical location, and by definition there’s no neutral point from which to find in your favor and against the opinions of some neo-nazi who is inclined to revere the sonofabitch.
OK, for shits & giggles we can toss in a biological determinist, who would disagree with the thesis of the prior paragraph… but who would say it’s your genes, your chromosomes, and if you’d had Adolf’s you would have been him. Different determinism, same lack of a you except as the passive expression of something that does not itself possess thought or will.
These folks collectively would more often than not identify themselves as atheist. They could not, in any kind of consistent good conscience, say that they came to that conclusion as conscious thinking people, as a mental act of commitment to rationality, or anything of the sort, though: nope, they are atheists for the same reason they are everything else that they happen to be, which all has to do with exterior mindless forces eliciting behaviors, imprinting its messages as their “thoughts”, and so forth.
So… to answer your question, what would it take to change my mind such that I would embrace an atheistic explanation of reality self and universe? Mostly only this: create a discourse within which we can all assume intentionality, consciousness, meaning, and purpose really do exist, even if we aren’t disposed to agree on a great portion of what they are and/or should be.
Mostly you have that in the casual-discussion zone, so we can chat about politics or express our shared disgust at how people have treated people in this or that context or debate whether this or that would be a better societal rule or norm. But because discussion does go into the abstract land of ultimate meaning and knowledge often enough, it is necessary that you really do assert that these things are essentially real, and by essential I mean not reducible or explained away as artifacts of mindless, arbitrary, meaningless mechanical processes. And whether you can pinpoint exactly how it works or not, you also have to declare for our capacity to sense it (know it, be aware of it) aside from processes that themselves can be explained away in such fashion.
Doesn’t need to be a Jehovah-Almighty, gave-you-a-Bible kind of thing at all, though.
