Quote from peilthetraveler:
I am going to open this question to everyone. What evidence did you weigh against God to make you believe God doesnt exist?
I am actually not surprised that atheists & agnostics know more about religion because many religious people do not question their religion or run away from the hard questions (like why does God let bad things happen, or where did Cain get his wife, ect)
It works like this....You start off Christian and you do not question it. Someone asks you a hard question that you cant answer, then you become atheist. If you look for and find the answers, you go back to being Christian. For the most part though, once an atheist has decided there is no God, he will not go looking for information that there is one, he will only look for information that there isnt one.
Atheists never do step 4 of the hypothetico-deductive model(scientific method) which says that they should try disprove their own theory that there is no God. All they do is try to prove their theory.
Well, call me strange but I believe in something if I have evidence it exists. I don't believe in something without evidence, then wait until some evidence comes around to prove that it doesn't exist.
For example, I have no evidence the tooth fairy exists. When I was young I did, I was lied to by my parents that it came along dispensing money for teeth that fall out. So I pretended to be asleep, and when my parents came in to put the money under the pillow, I woke up and caught them red-handed. I was sceptical in the first place, but this confirmed it. The evidence contradicted what I had been told.
I have no evidence that giant marshmallows orbit the Orion Nebula. So I don't believe it until I see some evidence that there are in fact said giant marshmallows there.
By contrast, I have seem pretty convincing evidence that the USA exists. I have multiple times got into planes, flown over a large expanse of sea and then land, arrived in airports where American accents were common, seen signs and papers that repeatedly referred to being America, and so on. People I have met from there talk pretty convincingly and universally about their experiences growing up and living there, and it fits consistently with everything else I've seen and read. It is theoretically possible that this was all some giant stunt pulled by millions of non-Americans and a colludiing world population just to trick us, but I think the odds are against it. Similarly, I may just be living a total hallucination, and in reality am just some brain-blob living in a vat somewhere like the Matrix, or even an artificial intelligence created by someone or something else, but until I see some reason to believe that, I'll favour the more plausible version.
Hence, I believe America exists. I cannot be 100% certain, but I am about as certain as it is possible to be given that I'm limited to sense-data.
To use another example, I think Australia is in a housing bubble that will eventually burst. I am far less certain of this than the USA's existence, but I have enough conviction to wager a reasonable sum of money on it. Maybe my belief level here is about 80% or 90%, rather than 99.999%. The reason is that it fits the pattern of every other bubble I've ever seen, read about, or lived through, and they all ended the same. However, I have also seen the uncertainty in markets, so I know sometimes they do something different and I might be wrong. So I am confident, but not certain, that this bubble exists and will end.
That's my system of belief-formation - weight the strength of my belief to the preponderance of evidence. It should now be pretty obvious why I and other non-believers don't believe - we start from a position of not believing something without convincing evidence, and so far, there does not seem to be convincing evidence that god exists. And at the same time, there is a gigantic weight of evidence that humans are gullible, irrational, instinct-driven animals that have a tendency to over-infer agency and meaning where none exist (effectively, seeing patterns in random data), overrate their intelligence and ability to draw conclusions, believe things on the basis of emotions rather than facts and evidence, and tend to (as a group) follow authority and their parents without much questioning.
Why do you think people overwhelmingly adopt the religion of their parents rather than a separate religion? If weight of evidence or reasoned arguments were how people formed their belief, then there would be as many muslims per capita in Japan and Rome as there are in Riyadh, and christians would be plentiful in Iran. Why do you think people in the past believed that the fire and wind were gods, or that there were multiple gods? Why do you think that religious belief is inversely correlated with IQ and the level of education? Why do you think people are superstitious, and belief in evidence-free nonsense like astrology, dowsing, palm-reading and the paranormal? These are all powerful pieces of evidence that people are prone to irrational and nonsensical belief systems in the face of uncertainty, and that such beliefs propagate from generation to generation through parent-child indoctrination. It's not a huge leap to conclude that religious belief follows a similar pattern.
There are further reasons to cling onto belief. Cognitive dissonance - it is hard to give up an important belief system you have moulded your life, family, and friends around. It is hard to admit you might have been totally wrong. Look at communists after 1990, how many true communist believers do you know of who renounced their views then, and said "you know, capitalism was better all along. It's flawed but communism is a lot worse and this proves it's a failure. I'm changing my mind"? Almost none did that. Instead they made up excuses. So even if you could provide compelling evidence that religious belief is irrational, most believers would just go into denial rather than upend their entire world view.
Secondly, the notion that there is no god, no divine justice, no afterlife where you get rewarded for good behaviour and punished for sins, is quite scary to many. It means the world is in some ways a cold, uncaring, unfair place. Many poor people act good, but suffer and die young, or get killed in wars or by tyrants or disease, and it serves no purpose at all (or even serves evil purposes). If there is no after-life and god, this means they died in vain. Meanwhile some demonstrably evil people achieve success, power, wealth, women, luxury, and status. This sticks in the craw of most normal people. Believing in an all-powerful god who will judge us in the afterlife is a comforting belief to many, when faced with the indifferent nature of the world and the evil aspects of human nature.
My question in return is twofold. Firstly, how do you form your beliefs? Weight of evidence, like me? Or some other method, and if so, what? Secondly, even if you form it on weight of evidence, and simply disagree in your assessment of what evidence is there, how can you be 100% certain in your belief? You see that's something puzzling for any logical thinker - religious believers aren't 90% confident that god exists, or even 99% confident. They are almost all 100% sure god exists. What evidence could there possibly be so that you can be 100% sure?
