Question:
Why are you an atheist? Why did you reject religion and theism?
Response:
Although more personal than the other questions addressed here, it is asked often enough that it really merits some sort of answer.
I was not always an atheist. Although my parents did not raise me to be religious, they also did not raise me to be an atheist. However, when I was in school, I was invited by a classmate to start attending a Christian church, and I did so. My parents did not attend with me, but they also did not discourage me. On the contrary, they did whatever was necessary to help me attend and participate in the church’s youth activities.
Over time my interest in the church waned somewhat, but at no point did I ever actually stop being a Christian or believing in basic Christian doctrines. Indeed, my interest in religion itself actually grew, and when I began to take classes at the University of Pennsylvania, I immediately signed up for courses dealing with religious history.
Through these courses, I acquired a perspective on religion which was both deeper (I learned more about Christianity in my classes than I did in my church) and broader (I learned a great deal about a number of non-Christian religions and non-orthodox Christian groups). As a consequence, I began to lose the belief that Christianity was the One True Religion.
In its place, I came to believe that Christianity was a valid religion, but perhaps one which had been perverted over time through human actions. In addition, I came to believe that other religious faiths were also equally valid alongside Christianity. With some exceptions, I did not believe that any particular religion was more True or More Valid than any other. Because of this, I felt that I was unable to actually adopt any religion as my own; instead, I simply retained my belief in God and sought to consider which particular religious doctrines (aside from basic theism) could be counted as reasonable and worth holding to.
However, I never got very far in that quest. As I continued to take classes in religion, history, and philosophy — both in America and abroad — the premise that a god existed came to seem less and less credible. Indeed, over time I grew to regard it as being just as untenable as my earlier assumption that Christianity was the One True Religion.
When I took a closer look at common arguments for the existence of God, they no longer looked very sound and no longer justified a rational belief. When I took a closer look at common arguments for the nonexistence of God, they looked much more sound than I had assumed, and justified a disbelief in the existence of the sort of god I believed in and which tended to be claimed by most monotheistic religions.
I could continue to strip away from God attributes which I could not justify, but the further that went, the more empty the concept of God would become. What’s the point of believing in an empty and meaningless God? I could try ascribing attributes to God which seemed reasonable and which might evade the arguments against the existence of God — and indeed I did just that. However, in retrospect I found that those were simply the attributes which I personally valued. I was doing nothing different from what theologians and religious leaders had done for millennia, assuming that if God existed, then God must value the same things I valued. What made me right and them wrong?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Granted, it was possible that I could be right — but there was no reason to think that I was. I could pick attributes out of a hat and stand just as much chance of success. The fact of the matter is, I was desperately trying to salvage my personal faith in God by taking away from the concept all of the attributes I didn’t like and fill the concept with attributes I did like. There was no reason for this except to salvage faith. There was no reason for the attributes, except that I liked them — and this meant that there was simply no basis for me to argue that this new God, created in my own image, was any more reasonable and any more likely to exist than any of the god-concepts I had rejected.
In the end, it seemed better to set aside this creative effort in favor of further learning and study. However, greater attention to the topic of theism and God led to an even further weakening of my faith. Gradually, without my really realizing it, my faith was simply evaporating. At some point, I turned around and realized that lacking any good reason to believe in any gods, my belief had completely disappeared.
So, in the end, my road to atheism was through education about religion and philosophy — the more I learned about the two subjects, the less tenable both religion and theism became for me. My actual and current disbelief in the existence of any gods is based upon the fact that I simply lack any good reasons to believe in any gods. Without good reasons, belief for me is impossible.
