Do you ever doubt your atheism?

[robvalue]

For me it comes down to definitions of what it is I'm not believing in.

I generally say I'm an atheist because I don't believe any of the current claims about god. I have no doubts that I am right to not believe them as there is no good evidence. In fact the "evidence" presented is just plain laughable to the point where I can't even believe there is any kind of debate about it.

If you take this classical definition of god as being all knowing and all powerful, then this isn't even something that is internally consistent, such a thing cannot exist.

If you start applying caveats to this (like religions do to avoid these paradoxes) then the whole thing just becomes so utterly ridiculous that I have absolutely no reason to believe it either. It's clearly just some imagined concept of a "powerful enough but plausible" god, which beggars belief.

If you tone it down and just say that god is the creator of our universe, then the only believable version of this is the deistic approach. It created the singularity (or similar) which led to the big bang, then left it all to spiral out from there. There is absolutely no reason to believe that such a god has had any influence over the universe following this initial creation. But this is still an argument from ignorance. We don't know what happened before the big bang, so some being created it. I could also only view such a creation as an experiment on behalf of the god, seeing what would happen after making this singularity. And it doesn't go any further explaining things, because you then have to ask where is this god, what meta-universe is he existing in that we can be a lab experiment within his universe, or outside of it.

If you tone the crazy way down, and forget all this creator business (which is just the human desire to attribute explanations to things in my opinion) you are left with "there may be other stuff going on in ways we cannot understand or cannot yet detect". This stuff could possibly include "life forms" of some sort. That's the point at which I will hop on and say sure, it's in fact very likely there is plenty of stuff going on of this kind. But I see no reason to try and attribute any kind of qualities to it, for the very reason that we know nothing about it by definition!

I mean, that is my main objection to religion in the first place. Believers define god in such a way that he is totally and utterly beyond our understanding, exists beyond our universe and time, and so on, he is so amazingly "different" that you can't prove he doesn't exist, because he is outside any framework you try and place him in. His plan is too complex for anyone to understand. But yet we have a personal relationship with him and have evidence that he is 100% true (a book) and that his motivations are purely good. That seems like a lot of understand of something which cannot be understood.