atheists, do you ever question your beliefs?

Question

I am a christian. I question my belief all the time. I sometimes think what if there is no God...right now, I am reading richard dawkin's The God Delusion. I believe that questioning your faith is the best way to be stronger in your beliefs.

I am wondering if atheists do the same.

sure you believe in facts, and whats there to question? but about the things that arn't facts that make you atheists, such as origin of universe, life. do you question what if there is a God?

about whether i question the belief of tooth fairy or pink unicorns...i do not because there is absolutely nothing to support them. The Bible supports God.
now, of course there are fairy tale books that support the tooth fairy. but, we can trace them back to when there were first made up. we cannot with the Bible. the events in the Bible can still hold to be true. after all, archaeologists are searching for answers of whether events in the Bible happened or not.

Answer 1

I was a Catholic. Now I'm an atheist. Yes, I did a lot of questioning. I still mull over philosophical questions and come to the same inescapable conclusions.

I always wonder if Christians ever seriously ponder the possibility of Quetzalcoatl existing, or Ra, or Krishna, or Zeus, or Dionysus, or Zoroaster, or Mithra, or Freya, or Cthulu, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Answer 2

the fact that the bible is a set of collected testaments,
and the fake that they were chosed out of many to make up the present bible, means that some others that were not included would tell a different story. the bible did not say anything bad about Jesus nor the God, but the fact that Jesus who once lived was a human meant that he had to have make even the slightest mistake in that lifetime.
and after the Gospel of Judas was discovered, it proves the fact that many other such gospel's that tell a different story is not in the bible.

with regards to you answer of the existence of a God.
i repeated to many other people who have asked before,
the answer i told them, which i shall carry on telling others,
is that a need of a God is not that very great.
Einstein once asked, "how much choice did the God had in making the Universe." in reply to that.
years later, Stephen Hawking answered,
"if the non-boundary proposal is correct, the God had no choice in the Universe, but he could set the initial conditions(science) that would make up the Universe."
and thus it does tells us that God had a limited choice in making the Universe, whether he exist or not, barely affects our lifes. for he cannot affect us from where he stands...

"Its difficult to talk about the Universe without the concepts of a God, but as a physicist i try to stand on the scientific side."
Stephen Hawking

"Even if there is a complete set of a grand unified theory what is it that breathes fire into it, and allow beings like us to ask of the Universe?"
Stephen Hawking

Answer 3

The core of my beliefs, as in not believing in dieties? Not really. It's surprisingly hard to set aside pretty much all I know and try to form a worldview based on faith. It's just not worth the effort.

I did consider believing in the FSM, the beer and strippers scenario makes pascal's wager seem like a much better proposition... but no.

I have thought of gods, and found the hypotheses unfounded in reality, and pretty much disproved. I see no partuclar worth revisiting those doubts unless there is new information to justify it.

Think of gravity... I've gone to normal way from force explanation to einsteinian curved space and from there to the exchange of virtual particles explanation...

I was fine with the base theory, it explains enough to be functional, I saw no need to speculate other options.. when I got more familar with the theory of relativity, I went back to gravity, and adjusted my thinking... With new evidence comes the need to question old beliefs.

FSM people say gravity is in fact his noodly appendices that keep people to the ground, some cult claims it's original sin that does it...
I don't see the need to take those into consideration right at this moment. But if there was something to give them credibility, I'd doubt my earlier beliefs, and would look to finding out the truth.

So, no, I don't what-if god. No point. Besides, there are thousands of gods, if I what-iffed all of them, I'd have no time for anything :)


That explain it any?

Answer 4

I am catholic. I studied world religions in college and it was really hard to hear about all those other religions out there.

Who was it that said never stop questioning? I think it was Einstein. Yeah I ponder things all the time always trying to search for something, proof, answers to questions that have never been answered and never will be. Maybe someday it will all fit together like a big puzzle. Until then I will resort to the only thing I can do, have faith.

Answer 5

christians throw pascals wager around all the time so i think about it then but i usually don't question what i already questioned and found true. until i get new data i don't question what i know to be true. the more crazy philosophical things i believe in are always open to question though but mostly while refining them or when i receive new data.

edit: well we found Troy so does that mean Homer's Illiad and Oddyssey is true? just because events in a book are found to be historically true does not mean that the mythological parts are true.

all you have is the bible to support you beliefs? think about that. you have nothing otherwise. does that make any sense especially when that book is so flawed and written by pre-bronze age men?

Answer 6

Never! I KNOW there is no god! I think religious people question their beliefs because there are so many different sects of religion! If yours is the right one then all the others are wrong! As an atheist I believe in science and facts...what's to question! Good luck!

Answer 7

Of course we do, that's how we became atheists :)

We're all told certain things by our parents as children and it's important for us when we reach adulthood to examine our most deeply held beliefs. Often times it's easy to criticize other people's beliefs, but you should question your own first.

As an atheist (who used to be Jewish) I'm still open to there being a god, but now I demand evidence first. Therefore, I'm open to changing my beliefs if presented with sufficient physical evidence. A personal experience isn't even enough, now that I know how easy it is for the brain to have a false experience. A seizure in the temporal lobe is known to cause intense religious experiences.

Therefore the only way 'to be sure' is to use science, which tests claims that are 'falsifiable'. If a claim can't be proven false, then it isn't worth considering.

Answer 8

Yes, I always question everything - hence the atheism. Saying that god created the universe does not satisfy me intellectually. Sure, there are things that we do not know and things that we may never know but that doesn't mean one should resort to saying that god did it. 'God' is not an explanation. I may as well say that the universe was created by a horde of super intelligent mosquito's and I would be just as close to the 'truth'.

Answer 9

Why do people strive to know where we come from or who might have created us? It is a question that cannot and never will be answered. The human mind is to feeble to grasp the meaning of the universe, and to accept that maybe we were just here and that no one created us. Is that not what the Christians believe of their god that he just was? why couldn't it be the same for humans and all other life on our planet?

Don't try to solve the unknowns. just eat, s ****, and be happy is my philosophy

Answer 10

For me, nothing to believe in, nothing to question.

How about you? Do you ever question why you came to the beliefs that you do have? Were they something that you concluded on your own, or were they your parent's beliefs and you just followed along? If you were born to a Muslim family, would you believe differently? What if one of your parents practiced a different faith than the other?

Answer 11

I am someone who constantly questions my beliefs. Sometimes I think there's a god, but not the god of the bible, because I don't believe any god would send his children to eternal torment. Then sometimes I think we were created by chemical processes in the early earth and then evolution. I question things too much I think. Richard Dawkins is a cool guy and I really like watching his lectures and documentaries.