(January 9, 2016 at 12:30 pm)wallym Wrote:I disagree, I would argue he never stopped believing in the existence of god if he never stopped believing god was responsible for morality. Even if he was trying to just make a case for objective morality, to make the leap to god requires you to believe that god exists and is capable.(January 9, 2016 at 12:10 pm)Mr.wizard Wrote: Right but my issue was with him saying he was an atheist but could not see how morality could exist without god. That to me is a contradiction, you cannot believe that god doesn't exist and at the same time believe he is responsible for your moral choices.I think the contradiction you are identifying may be the reason why he discontinued his disbelief. If you can't get rid of your belief in morality, and you think morality can only come from God, you have to go back to believing in God.
That's why I was pointing out that it is not instantaneous. While tearing down your belief system, you're going to, for a while, believe a lot of contradictory things until you analyze those beliefs. Eventually if you're working on it, you'll either dump the contradictory things, or be forced to reassess the initial change.
It's not uncommon for people to believe contradictory things for a while, even knowingly. You just have to toss the two contradictory ideas into the mental thunderdome, see which comes out on top, and then reevaluate. But that can take days, months, years, decades, or never happen. So the idea, to me, of having contradictory beliefs for a week seems like a non-issue.
The path to not believing in god is not instantaneous, believe me I know, but I didn't start at the end. I didn't come to the conclusion that god doesn't exist first, when I started to realize that god wasn't responsible for morality, good, evil, finding my car keys, etc... was the beginning of the de-conversion and the domino effect of beliefs with last domino falling being the existence of god.