Negative atheism? (Introduction)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Tuesday, December 16, 2014, 15:19 (3630 days ago) @ dhw

dhw writes: "Agnostics may have made up their minds that they can never know whether there is or isn't a god, but they can still try to find out why there is something." -The question is what was the agnostic before he "made up his mind" to not make up his mind? -Was he like me a rationalist - one prepared to examine the evidence for and against any proposition and to proportion his views to the evidence? Having done so I am led to the atheist conclusion, that all talk of gods and supernatural forces and transcendence and such like is hogwash. I didn't start out as an atheist.
That would be begging the question. I felt it necessary to resolve the question and applied reason to the task and came to my conclusion.-No doubt some theists might claim to have started out from an open-minded rationalist approach, but in my experience they all tend to believe things because it's what they were taught by people they trusted and did not want to let down, as a result of their general cultural background. Mostly they admit this openly. They call it "keeping faith".

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GPJ