Negative atheism? (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 17, 2014, 19:01 (3629 days ago) @ George Jelliss
edited by dhw, Wednesday, December 17, 2014, 19:16

GEORGE: 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". -
Delighted to see you back with us, George! David is always talking of Nature's balance - and we need your atheistic views to balance our discussions!-David regards his decision as being based on science (which I think one can safely call “rational”). You, George, say that your own decision is rational. I would say you are both right, though you come from different angles. You rationally dismiss the concept of an almighty, eternal consciousness for which there is no evidence, while David rationally dismisses the theory that chance could put together something as complex as a living cell that can reproduce itself and evolve into the organisms we know today. I find myself agreeing with both of you (while also taking into consideration other factors we needn't go into here), and so I sit on my fence.-My own background was that I was raised as a Jew, and as a child believed what I was told. In my early teens, I began to think for myself, and became an atheist. In my late teens, I read Origin of Species, thinking it would provide scientific confirmation of my atheism, and was flabbergasted to read numerous references to the Creator. (It was you, George, who alerted me to the differences between the first and later editions.) I was also shocked at Darwin's explicit refusal to speculate about the origin of life, which my atheistic self had taken for granted to be a stroke of luck. And so although I had concluded, like you, that gods were hogwash, I found myself confronted with the realization that the origin of life itself was a mystery, in which case the development of beings like ourselves from microorganisms suddenly became another mystery. And the more I looked into the problem of origins, the more mysteries I found, consciousness being a prime example. And so I see rational cause for NOT believing one way or the other (God, chance). It was a conclusion I reached in my late teens (only later did I discover that Darwin himself was an agnostic), and although I feel I have learned a great deal since, what I have learned has so far not clarified any of these major issues.