Now I'm Not a Believer

[robvalue]

Hello there, welcome to the forums

Thank you for sharing your story. It sounds like you've been on quite the journey. You may find my blog useful in sorting out some your thoughts. If you're interested, click on the link in my signature.

With regarding to disproving God, generally it is impossible to prove a negative. For example, I can't prove there isn't a spiritual dragon in the room with me right now. So all I can do is take the available evidence, and come to the most likely conclusion. Since there is absolutely no evidence that there is a spiritual dragon in the room, then I can discount the idea as unsupported and exceedingly unlikely. It may even be impossible that such a dragon could ever exist.

All of these arguments apply equally to "God", and like you say, defining what that is becomes very hard. I have a section about that on my blog. Trying to disprove God is looking at it backwards; like the dragon, we should look at if there is any evidence there is a god. And there is none (in my opinion). So it falls in the same category. Logically speaking, God is the same as any other "unfalsifiable" proposition; that is, anything that can't be proven to be wrong. So we either treat all such things as in some way credible, or we discard them as useless concepts until such time as any new evidence arises.

Of course, this is all speaking as if we are logical robots. And the belief in God, in my opinion, does not stem from logic in the first place, but rather from emotion. So if there is an emotional attachment to a concept like God, then that's not something you can logically dissect in the same way. But I hope that you could examine the emotion instead, looking at what makes you feel that way, what your emotions are telling you, and consider if it is reliable. It's my opinion that this emotional attachment is what keeps people believing in God even when they admit they have no good reason to.

I'm sure you'll find lots of support and helpful discussion here!