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Atheism

This is a personal page about why I am an atheist. It isn't supposed to be a cogent general-purpose argument against belief in gods.

Technically speaking, I am an agnostic, because I don't believe that the existence of gods can ever be definitively proven or disproven; but I feel so personally certain that there are no gods that I regard myself as an atheist.

Upbringing

My parents didn't raise me with any religion. (My father was some kind of agnostic, and I'm told my mother was an atheist.) In fact, they didn't expose me to religion at all. I remember asking a teacher at my infants' school why we sang these songs about "He" and "Him", and wasn't it wrong to capitalise those words in the middle of a sentence?

I think that most people take belief in gods from their upbringing. That is to say, I don't believe that the Christian ethos is somehow intrinsic to the cosmos, and would be "discovered" under other circumstances: I think that it is a gradual invention of society. If the Americas had surpassed Europe in technological progress, I expect that they would have sent missionaries here and that the prevailing religion today would be something very different (and equally arbitrary).

Since I've been old enough to perform logical reasoning, I haven't seen anything that appears to indicate the existence of gods, and I'm past the "larval stage" where I can be fed information without analysing it for consistency; so I don't have a reason to believe in them.

Occam's razor

I believed in the principle of Occam's razor before I ever knew it by that name. The idea is that, where some phenomenon has more than one possible explanation, you should tend to favour the one that involves the fewest unproven entities.

For example, spontaneous combustion might be caused by malicious invisible fairies who can sprout fire from their fingertips, but that's clearly absurd: such an explanation, chosen at random without evidence, is no better than any other. Per Occam's razor, a theory involving human body fat and static electricity — while still only a theory — would be a better one, because it does not "invent" any entities.

I haven't seen anything that cannot be reasonably explained without resorting to gods; therefore Occam's razor appears to rule them out.

Omnipotence paradox

God is said to be omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient (all-knowing). It strikes me that such a perfect being would not have needs and desires, since these indicate a lack of something. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient god even bother to create anything? Certainly not for observation (as in the traditional Christian model of finding out who obeys and who rebels), for God, being omniscient, would already know the eventual outcome.

In particular, the idea of allotting fallible beings to a heaven or hell depending on behaviour (which, since God is omnipotent, is necessarily controlled by God — there can be no other independent being with autonomy or "free will" without weakening God's powers) seems simply childish, and in my opinion reflects a very human fallacy: that everything should be "fair", an eye for an eye. The behaviour of the universe does not reflect this.

The only way that a god can be truly omnipotent is in the case of pantheism, where God is the sum of the parts of the universe, and God is literally everywhere because everything is God. I reject this idea because I don't think that the universe, as a whole, is a sentient being.

God seems like a human construct

My intuitive feeling is that something as important and all-pervading as a god would be immediately obvious and knowable. I don't think that knowledge of a god should be contingent on enlightenment, or an ancient book with almost no relevance to modern culture, or having to select one of various similar sects (Catholicism vs. Protestantism, for instance).

I'm also very sceptical about the fact that there have been no convincing, documented "miracles" since Biblical times (and I don't trust that book). Why would a god want to hide? It might be claimed that it's a test of faith, but I've seemingly dealt with that under omnipotence.

Why do so many people believe in gods after so many years, then? I suppose that people want something higher — that isn't just another fallible person, like a president or a king — and that most people are more willing to believe something matching that criterion than to think hard about what is probable.