When I first started atheist-blogging, on a blog prior to this one, I figured the obvious place to start would be with the story of how and why I became an atheist. So I wrote a series of posts about the story; about growing up in a non-practicing family of mixed religious heritage, about considering different religions, and about eventually becoming first an agnostic and ultimately an atheist. Looking back, there’s a rather important aspect of the story I didn’t cover; the details of why I ended up as a non-believer rather than a believer. The short answer to that, of course, is that I didn’t find any of the supposed evidence to be convincing; but it would be worth blogging about the question of why I didn’t.
I’m therefore going to write a short series of posts on the arguments I encountered while researching the question of whether or not God existed, my reaction to them, and why I ultimately found each of them unconvincing. I weighed up the evidence as well and fairly as I could, and I’ll try to do the same in recounting it (although bear in mind that I’m relating things that mostly occurred thirty or more years ago). I’ll link each of them back to this post to give me a single place to refer back to if the general question ‘So, why don’t you believe in God?’ ever comes up.
This list will be for posts on the topic of atheism vs. theism. While I was looking into this, I also spent a lot of time researching the more specific issue of whether I should believe in Christianity. However, while this is obviously a linked subject, it’s not one I’m covering here; I want to write a separate series of posts on that issue.
The first four posts in this list deal with the same time period in my life, as they refer to arguments that I kept running across in my search for answers about God and religion, and my reactions to those arguments. From ‘How I became an agnostic’ onwards, they deal with thoughts and events that happened at different stages; in the list, I will aim to put these chronologically in the order of where they happened in my life rather than in the order I wrote the posts, as that seemed to make more sense.
‘So how could X have happened without God?’
‘But your life is meaningless without God!’
‘But without God we wouldn’t have any morals!’
‘What about prayers and personal experiences?’
C.S. Lewis’s moral argument – part 1
C.S. Lewis’s moral argument – part 2
C.S.Lewis’s moral argument – an ironic postscript