I can certainly respect your inclination to avoid cutting yourself off from an idea entirely considering the vast-ness of what we don't know. That being said, I'm versed in some areas of study that might be of some help. This might be kind of a long post. I'll do my best to break it up and space it properly for forum reading.
I grew up in a protestant pastor's household. My dad got the call to ministry when I was maybe 8 or 9, so that wasn't my whole childhood, but I was being taken to church long before that. Growing up that close to ministerial study has given me some advantages in understanding both before and after my transition into atheism.
I have most of the Bible (content if not chapter and verse) committed to memory, I know a thing or two about the ancient language versions of the texts, I have studied various world religions, and I am well-schooled in Christian apologetics. Not just the typical bullshit you hear, either; I would drag quantum mechanics and time-warping into it to try to claim that 7 days and x billion years could be the same amount of time depending on where you were "standing" in space-time as it expands, and that you could prove this with math. I couldn't do that math, of course, nor did I have even a rudimentary understanding of it, but that's an example of the shit I used to say to try to make my understanding of the natural universe mesh with my religious upbringing.
I'm also a trained magician and hypnotist. While I'm not a psychologist by any stretch, my study into the aforementioned fields has given me broad insight into how humans perceive (and fail to percieve) the world, how they build and assimilate beliefs and ideas, and how they deceive themselves and each other. I also have insight into how religion (knowingly or otherwise) makes use of hypnotic principles and processes to bypass and subvert critical thinking to take over emotional centers and reprogram belief, and how it sometimes even uses magic tricks to manufacture miracles (see: faith healers).
Finally, I'm a trained actor and storyteller with a passion for folk lore and mythology. Once the god glasses came off, I could easily see how my mythology was similar to others, and how it had even been influenced by others and redacted over time.
What I'm getting down to is this: given my experience in the aforementioned fields, I have every reason to believe that the christian god I grew up with and all the rest of humanity's gods are fictional characters dreamed up to fill in a lack of scientific understanding and a lack of a sense of purpose in the world. Furthermore, as far as I can tell all empirical evidence thus far points to a completely natural universe, devoid of "supernatural" influence. The christian god in particular is either an impossible paradox or an evil fuck depending on which way you choose to look at it.
Neil Degrasse Tyson once said an interesting thing about the "God of the Gaps" model, which is what most of us call it when someone says "Well, the gods could still be out there somewhere in something we don't understand or haven't discovered yet." I'll paraphrase, but basically he posits that if that's how you want to play this game of whether there's a god, there's a whole list of things throughout history that we blamed on gods until we understood them and realized that they seem to exist and function on their own in a system of cause and effect, free from the influence of anything supernatural. On those terms, god is an ever-shrinking pocket of scientific ignorance that continues to recede every time we discover something.
While it's healthy to say we could never know anything for sure, there is a healthy amount of evidence to suggest that the very concept of god is something man dreamed up, and that nothing that meets the definition of "god" could actually exist in the universe we observe. Even if we one day find some supreme consciousness or powerful cosmic entity and choose to term it "god," it will likely redefine what that word means because it won't be anything man has used the word for thus far.
I grew up in a protestant pastor's household. My dad got the call to ministry when I was maybe 8 or 9, so that wasn't my whole childhood, but I was being taken to church long before that. Growing up that close to ministerial study has given me some advantages in understanding both before and after my transition into atheism.
I have most of the Bible (content if not chapter and verse) committed to memory, I know a thing or two about the ancient language versions of the texts, I have studied various world religions, and I am well-schooled in Christian apologetics. Not just the typical bullshit you hear, either; I would drag quantum mechanics and time-warping into it to try to claim that 7 days and x billion years could be the same amount of time depending on where you were "standing" in space-time as it expands, and that you could prove this with math. I couldn't do that math, of course, nor did I have even a rudimentary understanding of it, but that's an example of the shit I used to say to try to make my understanding of the natural universe mesh with my religious upbringing.
I'm also a trained magician and hypnotist. While I'm not a psychologist by any stretch, my study into the aforementioned fields has given me broad insight into how humans perceive (and fail to percieve) the world, how they build and assimilate beliefs and ideas, and how they deceive themselves and each other. I also have insight into how religion (knowingly or otherwise) makes use of hypnotic principles and processes to bypass and subvert critical thinking to take over emotional centers and reprogram belief, and how it sometimes even uses magic tricks to manufacture miracles (see: faith healers).
Finally, I'm a trained actor and storyteller with a passion for folk lore and mythology. Once the god glasses came off, I could easily see how my mythology was similar to others, and how it had even been influenced by others and redacted over time.
What I'm getting down to is this: given my experience in the aforementioned fields, I have every reason to believe that the christian god I grew up with and all the rest of humanity's gods are fictional characters dreamed up to fill in a lack of scientific understanding and a lack of a sense of purpose in the world. Furthermore, as far as I can tell all empirical evidence thus far points to a completely natural universe, devoid of "supernatural" influence. The christian god in particular is either an impossible paradox or an evil fuck depending on which way you choose to look at it.
Neil Degrasse Tyson once said an interesting thing about the "God of the Gaps" model, which is what most of us call it when someone says "Well, the gods could still be out there somewhere in something we don't understand or haven't discovered yet." I'll paraphrase, but basically he posits that if that's how you want to play this game of whether there's a god, there's a whole list of things throughout history that we blamed on gods until we understood them and realized that they seem to exist and function on their own in a system of cause and effect, free from the influence of anything supernatural. On those terms, god is an ever-shrinking pocket of scientific ignorance that continues to recede every time we discover something.
While it's healthy to say we could never know anything for sure, there is a healthy amount of evidence to suggest that the very concept of god is something man dreamed up, and that nothing that meets the definition of "god" could actually exist in the universe we observe. Even if we one day find some supreme consciousness or powerful cosmic entity and choose to term it "god," it will likely redefine what that word means because it won't be anything man has used the word for thus far.
