atheists- why do you not beleive in God?

Question

Was there a turning point that made you not beleive? Or how exactly did you come to be an atheist?

The reason I ask is that I always hear "logic" of why God must exist, but I never hear of why God must not exist. And I'm just curious to hear your viewpoint :-)

Answer 1

When I was a kid I went to church, and I really liked the sign on the wall that read, "God is Love."

Then I started to read the Bible, and in shock and dismay I read about an angry, murderous, misogynist, spoiled brat of a deity who is in seeeerrrrious need of a time-out. Or a spanking, for preference.

I could not reconcile the two in my head, and I decided that I really believe in Love over anything the Bible had to say. So, when the two clashed, the Bible lost. Later studies of the history of the Bible confirmed my hunch that it was a man-made document and not divine.

Over the years, my study of religions made me start to think that people's religious experiences had some interesting things in common... and perhaps all the personification of deities are mere metaphors for something bigger even than 'God', and are well-meaning but misguided attempts to define something indefinable.

So THAT's what I really believe in... not a deity and most certainly not the Christian deity, but something more abstract.

Answer 2

This is the third time I've answered this question.

People. LEARN TO USE THE GODDAMN SEARCH FUNCTION. We are mutilating the remains of the horse now, never mind kicking it.

I'm an atheist because there just isn't any evidence for a God. I used to be Catholic, but only as an intellectual exercise once I reached the age of reason. I eventually became an atheist once I looked around and did my homework, like reading the Bible.

God must not exist if he is defined as omnipotent, omniscient, and/or omnipresent. Email me if you don't know why.

Answer 3

I was born an "atheist". Religion was never forced on me and I was always free to think and decide on my own. Thus I never became one. I always was one.

Why don't I believe in god? Hmmmm. Lots of reasons but the main ones must be these:

1) It's like a form of control (god and religion)... obey and follow or else you'll burn for eternity... something man would easily create to gain power in the world

2) The lack of scientific evidence of anything resembling a higher power as described by christians and the bible.

3) The fact that to me when you weigh up the two forms of man's creation (the bible vs evolution), the latter sounds logical and believable.

4) Too many weak excuses as to why god/some miraculous sign hasn't appeared to turn us all into followers

5) I think for myself and never follow what someone else shows me and tells me to.

6) Religion is too much like politics and thus it destroys this holy, godly aura its supposed to carry. It is a form of politics.

7) If god was so mighty why would he/she/it allow such suffering and cruelty as seen on Earth - disregarding the excuse that its part of "the plan".

Answer 4

I'm not a an atheist, I'm a Christian, but having studied philosophy and religion I may be able to help with an answer....

Atheists basically choose to beleive that unless something can be proven through "natural" means, then it should not be believed to exist. "Natural" means that one of the 5 senses must be involved - touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste. Within philosophy, this particular branch is called "naturalism", and it is only one branch within all of philosophy.

"Logic" will always depend on a person's chosen world view. If a person chooses to be a "naturalist" and only believe that those things which can be sensed are real, then that person will be an atheist. People who believe that things can be real even if they are supernatural (or "metaphysical", above the physical plane) will typically accept the possibility of a real spiritual plane to our world.

People who are "agnostic" believe that there is a spiritual plane but it cannot be known, since it is not sensed physically, what the truth is about the spiritual plane.

Christianity, and many religions, can be "proven" if someone has a worldview that includes all possibilities, and if the person adopts certain pre-suppositions.

The bottom line is that all people choose to believe certain pre-suppositions, and it is from their own chosen pre-suppositions that things can be "proven" or not. In that sense, everyone, even atheists, live by a form of faith. The difference really comes down to the fact that atheists choose to put their faith in the physical world and their ability to know the reality of the physical world through their senses, and they go on to argue against those with different faiths from their chosen philosophy of naturalism.

This is why atheists will typically rely on science for all their "proof" and they will shun philosophy, except where philosophy supports their chosen belief - bear in mind that science itself, and scientific method, is a product of the philosophy of naturalism, one philosophy out of MANY.

Answer 5

The absence of proof is proof in itself. There was no one day where all the sudden I was like "God can't be real". It's been going on since I was a little child. I just kept saying I was Christian up until age 13 because that's what my parents wanted to hear, and people tend to be very rude to Atheists.

Answer 6

People are born atheists. There are tons of gods that man has invented (I'm sure you agree that all the others are made up). I just believe yours is made up too. That, and the Bible puts forth several ridiculous, and contradictory ideas. Genesis and Noah's Ark come to mind. There is scientific evidence to contradict both of those stories. The Bible itself has a very shady history. Councils of men decided which books to include and which to leave out. Plus, religion and religious people have a reason to perpetuate and expand their belief---money and fear of death. Science gives us answers unbiased by human emotion, and unbiased answers are more likely truthy.

Answer 7

Atheists don't generally say "God must not exist". They usually just state disbelief in the idea that he does exist on the basis of lack of evidence which is the logically correct stance.

Answer 8

I'll believe in the existence of anything for which evidence is given. Believing deductively in God makes good sense - there was a time when people were asking the same questions as we ask now, and then, "God did it" made a great deal of sense. How else were they to explain rainbows? the fact that orange segments can be easily separated by animals with opposable thumbs? the movement of the planets and stars? At such a time, the only evidence worth considering was in favour of God.

It takes little effort to see that many of the questions answered by "It must be God" have, over time, been answered by more prosaic, but no less beautiful, explanations. God didn't give rainbows as a way of saying sorry for slaughtering every man, woman, child and newborn in a fit of crossness, they are caused by the defraction of light through rainwater. This is a conclusion drawn from accepting the evidence in favour of the defraction of light over the biblical story, and it gives credence to the belief that empirical evidence is deeply important in informing belief. The notion of evidence is not ancient, it has gained in significance in the last 250 years or so.

Those of us who now expect evidence are still asking the same questions as the men who wrote the first biblical myths to explain the world around them, but our criteria demands that falsifiable (that is, it is considered for all possibilities that would prove it wrong - the thesis "all swans are white" is falsified by the existence of a single black swan) evidence is provided. We weigh up the evidence on both sides. Fewer and fewer questions can be answered by the answer "It must be God" and for the atheist there are none at all for which the weight of evidence for alternative explanations does not outweigh any possible argument for God. We still believe deductively - few things are "proven" (for as I've said countless times on this site, proof is not the same as evidence, a fact that krikors_lamb below me would do well to take on board if s/he wants to comment on anyone else's worldview). That's why the famously unproven theory of evolution is obviously right - because deductively it carries infinitely more evidence than any alternative theory - for the time being. It is ironic that the Creationists' weapon against evolution is to attempt to falsify evolutionary evidence with "scientific" (it really doesn't deserve the title) counter arguments - the method scientists use to test and verify their ideas. Prioritizing evidence falsification in this way is fatal to the Creationist cause, as the same must be applied to their own "evidence", and it is no surprise that the conclusions on sites like Answers in Genesis collapse quickly under scrutiny, and even they resort to their readers' resistance to evidential argument - or as it is also known, faith.

Now, to believe in God, I want to see God in a test tube. Unharmed, and just a bit of him, but verifiable and unequivocal God-stuff. Faith means having no evidence. That is why it is impossible to believe in God.

Answer 9

I used to believe in God, but now i am an Atheist. One day i was in religious education class when i just thought to myself 'why do i actually believe in God?'. I realised then that it was just because i had been told by my parents, like they had by theirs, and so on and so on because it says so in a book, written by a man. If you actually look at what the bible says, it has so many contradictions and impossibilities (such as men who live for hundreds and hundreds of years in genesis) that its impossible to take seriously as the word of God.

Another reason people believe in God (wheter they like to admit it to themselves or not) is to explain our surroundings. If we don't understand something (such as the beginning of human life) it's easy to just say 'God did it'.

The main reason people believe in God is that it's comforting to think that there is a heaven, and someone watching over us always. You have to realise that you aren't basing your belief in God on anything other than that deep deep down (whether you admit it or not) it the easiest, nicest option.

Therefore, i have realised i have more reason to be Atheist than believe in God. As science advances further and further, i believe more and more of the Bible will be made to look like a fairy tale, as the entire book of Genesis, when read with an open mind, already does.

Answer 10

No turning point for me. Gradual dissatisfaction with the answers to questions that I had regarding God and faith, the ability to recognize logical contradictions, and a growing awareness of geology, astronomy, and paleontology that provided testable, physical evidence that Biblical claims were missing something.

The only evidence for the existence of God is the Bible. Yet the Bible makes huge errors regarding the real world: The age of the Earth, claiming rabbits chew cud, claims of a worldwide flood, dead men coming back to life without any other historian of the time noticing.

The Bible claims that God exists and that all its tales are true. Yet there is zero physical evidence of any of the tales actually being true, and quite a bit of physical evidence that shows the opposite: No evidence of a worldwide flood, no evidence of a migration from Egypt to Canaan, so such thing as "gopher wood", no "firmament" in sight, and so on. Instead we have evidence of long-term geological processes, zero mention of the presence of Hebrew slaves in Egypt, the existence of civilizations that somehow didn;t notice they were flooded out, a testable age of the Earth, and exploration of outer space.

Then there is the behavior of God as described by the Bible: The OT God is a petty, egomaniacal, wrathful monster who inflicts plagues, misfortunes, and atrocities at whim, and commands genocide for his own glory. In the NT, God is suddenly more reasonable and can even be talked out of doing things, but still demands absolute devotion and ego-stroking or else people will be cast into burning fire forever. A God who is so upset with humanity that he has no other choice than to send himself down to Earth to put on a song-and-dance act ending with his own murder so that he can save us from his own wrath.

Huh?

The actions of the Biblegod make no reasonable sense, nor does it make any kind of sense to send this soul-saving message for humanity to one tiny corner of the world and remain totally silent to the rest of the planet. Religions since have had to come up with all manner of ludicrous explanations for why God concentrated on one tiny portion of the world and ignored everyone else...when the far more reasonable explanation was that Biblegod was purely a local deity blown into elevated status by its worshippers centuries after the fact.

The Biblical tales can be easily traced to previously existing myths of the existing and prior cultures of the region, the Biblegod who is so benevolent and merciful acts like a petulant tribal chief, and the Bible itself has been tinkered with and added to over the centuries to fit the needs of the religious authorities of the various periods.

The Bible is therefore unreliable at best, outright fiction at worst. Since the entire existence of the Christian religion relies of the truthfulness of the Bible...you do the math.

To sum up: There is no evidence for the existence of God at all. Until someone presents real, testable evidence of God, I have no reason to believe such a being exists. Especially when today Biblegod behaves exactly like something that isn't there at all.