Share your worldview?

[vulcanlogician]

Great responses - very helpful and well argued! I appreciate it.

All in all, quite interesting and a lot of similarities. I need to do some deeper thinking on a lot of what was said, but a couple questions do jump out -

1) How do you deal with the idea of ceasing to exist after death - or doesn't it bother you?
2) How do you explain what could be considered evidence of intelligent design (such as DNA) - or the statistical improbability we could have happened by random occurrence.

Another is - Can you explain why you became an atheist? But that could easily be a topic for another thread.

1) I assume that I will cease to exist after death, but I don't know for sure. Nobody does. Sure, people claim to know, but people claim a lot of things. People claim to have knowledge that we will be reincarnated after death. I don't assume that they know what they are talking about. How could they know? Same deal with heaven/hell. Nobody knows what happens after death. Nobody.

2) Intelligent design? Have you studied our solar system? Rocks flying all over the place, crashing into one another... balls of gas coalescing into ringed mega-planets. Yet an orderly system emerges from it. To say it was intelligent design is to focus on the order and ignore all the disorder.

With biology, we have natural selection. Think about a game of king of the mountain. The guy who struggled to the top didn't get there by design. He just had the right set of attributes required for the task. If you ran a tournament of king of the mountain where all the losers were eliminated, you'd see a common "design"  emerge when you inspect those players who were able to remain in the game. For instance, they'd be strong... or perhaps nimble, or both.

I had probability explained to me in terms of Yahtzee. Rolling a Yahtzee is rare, right? Yes... it is unlikely. But guess what? So is rolling 1, 2, 2, 3, 5. It is just as unlikely that you will roll 1, 2, 2, 3, 5 as it is that you will roll a yahtzee... but when you roll a Yahtzee on your first roll you say "Wow! I got lucky! There was a slim chance of that happening." But, really, the chances were no better (or worse) than rolling 1, 2, 2, 3, 5.

I became an atheist because it seemed like a reasonable position to hold. After looking at both sides of the issue, atheism seemed far more plausible. This process started when I was around 12 years old and started thinking about things for myself. Before then, I simply accepted theism because I was told by family and others that God exists.