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

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

To partially rescind what I said earlier... for me, "agnostic" is a label that can go with other labels. So you're an agnostic atheist, as opposed to Richard Dawkins, who appears to be a hardcore atheist. I guess, the more I think about it, I'm the one who's abusing "agnostic" by diluting it down to just mean someone who doesn't feel like they have irrefutable proof (either through scientific evidence or staunch belief) of their belief system, and who would be open to change if acceptable counterevidence comes along (as opposed to someone who doesn't have a belief system on account of needing proof and feeling proof is impossible... somewhere between my wishy-washiness and Bill's hard line in the sand).

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying agnosticism absolutely means the hard-line view, just that it could be argued that way, so your case wasn't "clearly agnostic". Your version would fall within the agnostic range for most people's purposes; I just got the impression you were trying to define the far boundary that would be completely unambiguous, and wanted to point out that there was something beyond it.

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, misunderstanding then. I was trying to set the parameters of the line between atheism and agnosticism (as in, "Bloomfield is definitely in Metro Detroit, Flint definitely isn't -- but people are divided about Pontiac" -- I wouldn't be trying to suggest that Bloomfield is canonically "Detroit" [and yes, I know you dislike analogies, but I think this is a passable one ;) ]).