mindstalk | (Reply)

Back around ages 13-14, I managed to reason myself from "theist because that's what I was raised with and I hadn't bothered to think through alternatives" to "essentially an atheist even if I-at-the-time thought of myself as a deist", before making the jump into self-admitted atheism around age 16 or 17. Specifically, via the pathway of:

1. The most relevant-to-future-plans thing God does is Afterlife Stuff.
2. God is supposed to be a benevolent figure.
3. But there are all these stories about Hell, whose existence would clearly not be compatible with God's benevolence.
4. Therefore, Hell is fake, and those stories were made up to try to push anyone not clever enough to follow through on this line of reasoning into being more virtuous out of fear.
5. ...wait a minute, do I actually have any more evidential basis for non-Hell afterlives than for Hell? Shouldn't doubting the one also mean doubting any others?
6. And how are afterlives supposed to handle slow multi-step processes of brain damage, anyway? The intuitive story doesn't seem to actually hold together well in edge cases, on inspection.
7. Afterlives are fake. By a similar token of lack-of-evidence, God isn't intervening in the world on a regular basis, because otherwise it'd be, like, noticeable. So I guess I'm a deist now!

And then I noticed that this kind of implied a lack of evidence for God existing at all and thus that God probably didn't exist, but for reasons I no longer remember in much detail I continued thinking of myself as a deist for another couple years anyway, until I learned enough epistemology to realize that "I think X is possible but very unlikely" is approximately synonymous with "I believe not-X". (At which point I updated to just straightforwardly thinking of myself as an atheist and stopped participating in most religious rituals (aside from the particularly fun ones), which my parents were disappointed-but-understanding about.)