Welcome to the Blog

To start off this blog I thought that I would sketch some brief autobiographical notes for the benefit of the reader. However, since I have always been an atheist, or at least since I have been able to comprehend the existence of god, I don't have a conversion story. For as long as can remember I have always regarded god's existence as being logically impossible. And for equally as long I have been utterly puzzled as to how people can believe something which is so obviously false (I shall come to the arguments against god's existence in coming weeks, so for now this statement is merely an assertion).

Of course, that isn't to say that belief in god is necessarily irrational. It depends entirely upon what basis theists and/or deists have for believing in god. Certainly if the believer is versed in the various academic arguments for and against the existence of god then I don't believe that they have sufficient justification for reaching the conclusion that an immaterial spirit (or however they wish to define god) exists. I myself am not entirely convinced by the arguments of other atheists and so I don't expect believers to convert to atheism because of them. If anything, agnosticism is the justified position, despite the flack "fence-sitters" have received over their decision to await the required evidence and/or argument to convince them either way (which may never come).

However, if the believer is unfamiliar with the arguments then their faith is probably a result of childhood indoctrination, which one cannot help. But it may also be because they believe that they have experienced god in some empirical sense. Perhaps they witnessed what they believed was a miracle, or had a prayer answered. The fact that these experiences were not veridical (i.e. not genuine experiences of god) does not mean that concluding that god exists from them is irrational. If the experience seemed genuine to the witness then, even it were not veridical, the only rational conclusion one could draw (on a practical level) was that a being consistent with the nature of the experience, exists. Of course, as god is impossible such experiences cannot a priori be veridical, and hence it would be irrational on a logical level to assume believe in god.

To conclude my inaugural blog post I would simply reiterate my belief that god's existence is impossible. If the theist or deist genuinely believes that god exists then they have every right to continue to believe, but in the face of arguments to the contrary they are unjustified in steadfastly pronouncing the modern discoveries of cosmology as proving their claim that god is the originator of the universe. Or some other aspect of our existence as making god's existence more plausible than not, as the natural theologian Richard Swinburne would be inclined to argue.