Why are you an atheist?

[Mister Agenda]

Hi Everyone,

I am really interested to hear how you ended up as atheists at this point in your lives.  I didn't grow up going to church or in a religious home (though my mom claimed she spoke to spirits), but I had a belief in God from an early age nevertheless.  Of all the various beliefs and religious that one can hold to, why has atheism won?

Hi Ongietan and welcome to the forum. I hope you decide to make start an introduction thread so we can get to know you better.

I was raised Pentecostal and was quite devout at a young age, I believed it all and spoke in tongues and prayed a lot. I believed so much that I made a project of reading the Bible, cover-to-cover. I did that twice. It cured me of being a Christian, I had too high an opinion of God to believe the Bible was inspired by an omnibenevolent deity when it was clearly an imaginary being indistinguishable from a heavenly middle eastern potentate with too much power. I didn't become an atheist, but for about 20 more years I was what I would now call an 'agnostic theist': didn't know but still believed.

Having never been taught any degree of incredulity, I believed in pretty much everything that I now think is imaginary. Ghosts, alien visitation, Bigfoot, Nessie, ancient aliens, ESP, you name it. I was in my twenties before I got an inkling of skepticism when a couple of teenagers proved the Duke University studies which seemed to support ESP statistically were childishly simple to deceive and the effects that they observed disappeared when they changed their protocols to eliminate deception. As the years went on I started to develop standards of evidence for what I would accept to be real. Gradually, I stopped believing in ghosts, alien visitation, Bigfoot, Nessie, ancient aliens, and ESP. I still believed in some kind of creator deity though, all this couldn't have arisen by chance though? And you can't prove God doesn't exist, everyone knows that. I didn't want to be one of those close-minded atheists, so I kept some headspace for the possibility of God.

In college I learned a bit about cosmology and found out there were actually plausible natural explanations for the origin of the universe. I had a comparative religion professor who said he wasn't going to cover atheism because it wasn't true, and cited that the atheist, if they had a 'god detector', would have to search the entire universe before they could conclude there is no God. It occurred to me that if you have a 'god detector', it would prove that the omnipresent deity I believed in didn't exist the first time you turned it on. It was a stupid analogy in some ways, and if the prof had said he wasn't covering atheism because it wasn't a religion, I might not have been interested in further research. Instead, I thought I'd check out a book on atheism myself (The Case Against God by George Smith) and see what it's really about. I learned about 'soft atheism' or 'agnostic atheism': doesn't know, doesn't believe. No unwarranted certainty or close-mindedness there. In the meantime I was also taking a class on logical fallacies and the burden of proof, and started to realize the religion prof who kept trying to argue for the existence of God didn't have ANY arguments that were actually sound.

Around the end of that semester, I came to the realization that at some point I had stopped believing in God. I didn't have that 'headspace reserved for possibility of God' anymore. I'm still willing to be convinced, but I don't believe, and that makes me an atheist. I've actually become a hard/strong/gnostic atheist on the literal tri-omni Abrahamic God; it's logically incoherent, but the God of Deism, eh, maybe but probably not.

Atheism isn't a belief or religion to hold to, it didn't really 'win out' in any sort of contest between competing beliefs, it's just the brain state that I defaulted to when I stopped believing any version of God (or gods) was actually real. The flaws that make the Christian version of God unbelievable (lack of credible evidence for its existence, all arguments for its existence are flawed) also make all the other god ideas unbelievable as well. I wasn't going to start believing in Brahma when I realized Yahweh wasn't real, after all. I did wind up a nontheistic Unitarian Universalist for some years, though my connection to them now is mostly that I give them money every year so they will continue to let me use one of their classrooms for meetings of the Freethought Society of the Midlands every other Thursday.