Why I'm an atheist

[sarahmichigan]

This is going to be kind of anti-climactic since I've been thinking on it for a while and leading up to it, and yet it's going to be short. But here goes.

I'm an atheist because I think the burden of proof is on those who believe in ANY kind of supernatural phenomena. As far as I can tell, material, natural explanations explain the world and how it works and how it came into being just fine.

To me, positing a Higher Being (especially the more specific you get about what this being is like) to explain things is like saying that tiny black fairies contort their bodies to show the time on my digital watch rather than relying on naturalistic, material explantions about electricity and such.

Now, I understand why some people have an intuition that there just MUST be something bigger than us that created the world. That's fine, and I can understand that. (I have trouble figuring out, sometimes, how people go from "some higher being" to "my specific sect or doctrine," but that's another subject.) However, I don't have that intuition.

I remember when I was taking philosophy courses at Western Michigan University, and sometimes the professor would ask, "What's your intuition about that statment or assertion?" This was in the context of many philosophical arguments, not just ones about the existence or non-existence of God. I remember thinking, "Intuition?! This is supposed to be a philosophy course, and not a New Age class about how to fine-tune your ESP."

But really, when it comes to belief in a higher being of some sort, I think a lot of us are going off our gut feeling. My gut says that only the material world exists, and there isn't anything "super" above the natural world. Any weirdness that can't be explained by science can usually be explained by psychology.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_earthshine_/]

This is a good breakdown. There's a lot of space in that (possibly multi-dimensional) spectrum between "fanatical atheist" and "open-minded agnostic" (including "open-minded atheist" and "fanatical agnostic" -- the pairings expressed prior are to show the extremes, and not to suggest that atheists are always fanatical or that agnostics are necessarily open-minded). I'm always interested in knowing exactly what an individual means when they claim to be either, because the terms really have come to mean different things to different people.

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

Despite my own expressed opinion above, I tend to distinguish the groups this way when I'm talking to people:

-- First group: Hard atheist (or Strong atheist)
-- Second group: Soft atheist (or Weak atheist, but that sounds like it's potentially insulting)
-- Third group: Agnostic

[mcniadh.livejournal.com]

How about:

--First group: Absolute atheist
--Second group: Relative atheist
--Third group: Agnostic

[http://users.livejournal.com/_earthshine_/]

Sounds good to me. The hard/soft terms are new to me, but make perfect sense.

I'd also consider adding the term to the agnostics, as well. By one dictionary definition i've read, an agnostic is not merely somone who doesn't believe arguments for or against God's existence, but actually believes that God and truth are essentially unknowable. I'd be inclined to think of someone who says that "there CAN be no knowledge either way re God's existence" as a "hard agnostic", while someone open to the possibility might be called a "soft agnostic".

What's funny is that i believe God exists, but could also be called a hard agnostic by that definition, because i don't believe one can truly "know" of that existence in the usual sense.