By my pal, Lenny.

Longer ago than I'd thought, 3/26/94

I am an atheist. I don't believe the existence of God can be proven one way or the other, so you might say I'm technically an agnostic, but I choose to reserve my belief for those things/ideas which have some evidence for their existence, and whose presumed existence adds some value to my knowledge or understanding of the universe around me. That evidence can be either physical or logical, but I have seen or heard absolutely no evidence for the existence of a God that satisfies the above criteria, and I've been looking for a long long time, so I call myself an atheist.

To save time (and to get some responses), I'd like to describe some of the more frequent reasons presented to me, and why I find them wanting.

Many people use a God to explain the unexplainable. We have no clue as to how self awareness is produced, for example, so we posit the existence of a soul created by God to animate us. The first reason I don't accept this is because historically, as knowledge has advanced, Gods have died. The God of Thunder was created to explain something about which the people of the time had no clue, not even a hint as to how to proceed to investigate the matter. Now, anyone proposing the actual reality of a Thunder God is looked at askance, as it should be, As knowledge continues to advance, it seems reasonable to assume that this will happen to God as well. Of course, there may be some physically unanswerable questions, such as "what happened before the (theoretical) Big Bang?" According to current theory, that knowledge is absolutely unavailable to us now, forever and ever. Still, what's wrong with simply saying "I don't know, I never will". That doesn't deny the fact of something's being there, just that we can't know it. Of what value is positing a God to explain it, especially since we ALSO can't know any of HIS true nature? You are simply substituting one mystery for another, increasing the complexity of the picture to no purpose.

Another reason proposed is that matter, space, the universe around us is finite and must have had a beginning, must have come from somewhere, and that somewhere is God. Well, that only begs the question, where did God come from? If you can accept the existence of a God with an unbounded time line, why can't you accept the material of the universe, in one form or another, with an unbounded time line as well? No new knowledge or understanding or predictive power is added by putting God in the picture, you just add needless complexity. The principle of Occam's razor (simply stated, the simplest explanation which accounts for all current observation is the one which is "most correct" (did I mention I don't believe in truth, only currently acceptable guesses?), and adding additional complexity is counter productive at best) would lead one to discard the existence of a God.

People tell me, "I FEEL God, it just feels RIGHT to me". I have two problems accepting this as evidence. First, there are many things which seem perfectly self evident and right, but which are demonstrably wrong, so the fact that something simply appears self evident, with no actual support, doesn't convince me. As an example, it seems completely self-evident that time and space are invariable constants, but Einstein showed us that they are variables. If you get into quantum mechanics at all, many many things which seem patently obvious turn out to be totally wrong. Second, it once again adds no new understanding or knowledge about the universe, it has no value.

A big one is that people NEED to believe in a God, that they require it for their own emotional stability. While I certainly wouldn't ask anyone to remove the source of their peace of mind, I don't choose to believe things simply because they make me feel good. I still remember how much it hurt to stop believing in good old Santa, but I don't believe in him anymore, and neither do my children (they're too old now, I certainly let them believe when they were young).