(December 13, 2015 at 12:34 am)Amine Wrote: Welcome! How long ago did you make your transition from religion to agnostic-atheist? What precipitated it?
It was a slow process over a few years. Several factors led to my deconversion:
1) Atheistic science has answered all of the claims of ID. Modern science simply does not need "god" to explain anything and everything. From the absolute origins of the Cosmos to consciousness and free-will, well-established explanations and models exist. The "god of gaps" is shrinking into nothingness.
2) The argument of evil. God, if he/she/it exists, is impotent on a cosmic scale. Natural suffering, which has occurred over the course of hundreds of millions of years, is more consistent with naturalism than even with a sadistic deity who gets amusement in the sufferings of conscious beings. The "laws of Nature" seem, to me, to be ones of pitiless indifference to the plight, good or bad, of conscious entities.
3) The argument of Dawkins. Complexity does not arise ex nihilo. Everything that Science has ever observed has been the story of going from simple to complex, including, "us," all of whom started off microscopic. "God," if he/she/it exists, demands an explanation of his/her/its origins, a standard which we apply to every single thing in our lives.
4) The Universe is, probably, eternal. As with the number line, time is probably eternal, without a beginning or an end.
5) Religious faith is driven by emotionalism. People don't like death, and religion is simply a coping mechanism, individual and societal, which helps people deal with death and loss. But, as with drug abuse, religious belief is selfish, because it posits an afterlife, where none exists, dishonoring the memory of those who have died and the lives which they had lived.
6) Religions are hopelessly contradictory. They contradict themselves and each other to the point where they are absurd; no one agrees on anything, and beliefs that were once widely held (such as the Limbo of the Children) are, today, virtually extinct.
7) Religions make no testable predictions. People used to believe things because "it was taught in the Bible". Bishop Ussher's calculation (4004 BC) for the Creation of the World was widely praised by churchmen across the World, both Catholic & Protestant, and English Bibles included it in their text for over 200 years. It was only after the rise of modern geology, that the "calculation" was dropped.
8) Religious worship is primarily social. It is not a source of truth for most people (to quote an episode of Futurama, "It's mainly a Christmas & Easter thing."); they don't even believe in it, except, perhaps, at a "high level." People go to church to meet other people, to have their kids play with other children, to find dates, spouses, etc. It's just another service which people buy and sell in a free-market. Most evangelical Christians know, for instance, that they (and, their candidates) do not have a "snowball's chance" of getting elected, but their politicking helps relieve the cognitive dissonance that they are experiencing with regards to their religious faith.
