(June 28, 2014 at 6:28 pm)Jenny A Wrote: For atheists who once believed I ask the same question:I was raised a Christian, which means that I believed because everyone else believed. For a child, Yahweh and Jesus are what you get when parents forget to tell you that Santa Claus is just made-up.
Why did you believe?
Jenny A Wrote:What made you stop believing?I gave up my beliefs gradually because I believed that they were supposed to make sense. Not in the apologetic way, where you end up with a lot of "it could have been this" or "who are you to say that god didn't do it" or "scientists are wrong/mislead/part of a conspiracy/etc." Trying to make mythological creatures fit into the modern world worked as well as it could be expected to.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
