I'll take a shot as a former theist: It never occurred to me that God in some form or another might not be real until I was well into my twenties and I didn't start considering myself an atheist until I was in my mid-thirties. I'll be 70 before I'll have not believed in God for as long as I believed.
My parents believed in God. Everyone I knew believed in God. God's reality was matter-of-fact, taken for granted as a given. I don't recall being exposed to any thought at all that the reality of God might be in doubt. In my mid-teens I read the Bible cover-to-cover twice, which put me off Abrahamic religion, but it still didn't occur to me that there was no God, just that the Bible was clearly written by humans. I was raised in a literalist faith, which I think is more likely to break given a close study of actual scripture rather than a spoon-fed diet of selected readings doled out by preachers and Sunday School teachers.
I still thought the universe required a creator as an explanation. My journey to atheism was roundabout, I became disenchanted with some other weird beliefs I had (pretty much all of them: ghosts, ESP, Nessie, ancient astronauts, etc.). I began to come to an understanding of how to apply skepticism. By the time I was in my thirties, I'd stopped believing in every weird, unevidenced thing except God. After an astronomy class where I was first exposed to naturalistic theories for the origin of the universe, I was down to keeping a space in my head for God because I didn't want to be close-mindedly dogmatically sure there was no God like those atheists. I did consider myself agnostic.
I took a couple of classes in logic, learned about the burden of proof at the same time my Intro to Religion prof was claiming he wouldn't cover atheism because it was illogical, and based his reasoning on fallacious logic. If he had just said he wasn't covering it because it's not a religion, I might have stayed agnostic. So I read George Smith's 'The Case Against God' to find out what it was my prof was so keen to avoid covering for bad reasons. And there went my last little corner reserved for God and I realized soon after that I had become an atheist.
Short answer: I believed because I was raised to believe and was sheltered from any idea that might undermine that belief.
My parents believed in God. Everyone I knew believed in God. God's reality was matter-of-fact, taken for granted as a given. I don't recall being exposed to any thought at all that the reality of God might be in doubt. In my mid-teens I read the Bible cover-to-cover twice, which put me off Abrahamic religion, but it still didn't occur to me that there was no God, just that the Bible was clearly written by humans. I was raised in a literalist faith, which I think is more likely to break given a close study of actual scripture rather than a spoon-fed diet of selected readings doled out by preachers and Sunday School teachers.
I still thought the universe required a creator as an explanation. My journey to atheism was roundabout, I became disenchanted with some other weird beliefs I had (pretty much all of them: ghosts, ESP, Nessie, ancient astronauts, etc.). I began to come to an understanding of how to apply skepticism. By the time I was in my thirties, I'd stopped believing in every weird, unevidenced thing except God. After an astronomy class where I was first exposed to naturalistic theories for the origin of the universe, I was down to keeping a space in my head for God because I didn't want to be close-mindedly dogmatically sure there was no God like those atheists. I did consider myself agnostic.
I took a couple of classes in logic, learned about the burden of proof at the same time my Intro to Religion prof was claiming he wouldn't cover atheism because it was illogical, and based his reasoning on fallacious logic. If he had just said he wasn't covering it because it's not a religion, I might have stayed agnostic. So I read George Smith's 'The Case Against God' to find out what it was my prof was so keen to avoid covering for bad reasons. And there went my last little corner reserved for God and I realized soon after that I had become an atheist.
Short answer: I believed because I was raised to believe and was sheltered from any idea that might undermine that belief.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
