What makes an atheist not believe in God?

[robheus]

I don't think they were invented for deluding people, so much as the were invented BY deluded people.

 

Perhaps also.

[robheus]

Here is a somewhat larger expostition to this topic.

 

The basic question in the OP was: what are the reason an atheist is not believing in a God.

 

First I'd like to state that it is not a matter of belief. I think my position towards this, is not a matter of belief but coherent logic, and that any argument I know of that pre-supposes that the logic is wrong, is either refutable or flat out wrong.

Second, I do not necessarily posit myself as an atheist, since an atheist is just reasoning from the other position, it is positing itself as the opposite of theism.

 

However, I commit myself to the worldview of materialism, which is an outlook on reality that reality is in primary sense material existence, and in which the mental or consciousness is a secondary feature of reality.

 

In this worldview it would be non-sensical to ask where does matter come from, since matter is the substance and ground of all there is. There positively is matter instead of not.

 

Since matter is one undivided substance you can not really divide it up into seperate pieces without running into contradictions. For instance in dividing up the world into physical reality and mental states and consciousness, the problem always is where to place a dividing line, since either you end up having mental states and consciousness, but not being able to explain how you move your lips and produce sounds and movements of your limbs, either you end up explaining how chemical substances in living organisms and organs like brains can produce poems, make music and have dreams, and such.

 

Matter is always in motion (change) and spacetime are the modes of existence of matter. Matter is infinite, and neither creatable or destructable (which does not contradict that mass can be converted to energy and vice versa, since both are forms of matter).

 

The idea of God - in contrast to that of materialism - is that matter is not eternal, and the universe as a whole supposedly had a beginning, and that beginning supposedly was God. God then is only consciousness (or spirit, immaterial). So, theism takes as the ground that there is an (eternal, infinite or timeless) higher being. The world itself is then pictured as just degrading matter. No new qualities are being brought into the world (it all started out perfectly, but then degrades, and new qualities never form).

 

The refutation of this idea and this position is that placing God outside the universe, outside of space and time, realy make it a nothing, and secondly, the trouble of defining such being as conscioussness is problematic, since (before creation) outside God there is nothing, and so there is no distinction between God and not-God. For human beings however, the faculty of consciousness, and to distinguish I from not-I, can only be made because there are distinct people, which have their nature outside of them, and which makes it possible to distinguish between "I" and "not-I".

I am a distinct object from for example the apple I eat, the chair I sit on, and so on, and they are objects to me, and I am an object to these objects, which means there are objective relations between me and objects outside of me. For the higher being, no such objective relations exist, and hence no objective existence can be assumed.

 

So this makes God only as an imagined being, and not a real phenomena of the world.

Edited July 7, 2012 by robheus

[Keenidiot]

 

Scientifically we know energy cannot be created only converted, Life is a form of energy, Is intelligence? Ahh we'll leave that to the deep thinking philosophers to sort out over the next thousand years.

 

Life is not energy, it's the application of energy. Like the lightbulb in your room, when it burns out there's no more light. When you burn out, there's no more you.

 

I am an atheist because humans have love of creating myths to explain things that were not understood. We have narrowed our gods down as our wealth of knowledge has grown (except in Hinduism of course, but that's not a common result. And it's a rather complicated mash of faiths and beliefs, including some atheist ones.)

 

That we desire something more is understandable. But often what we desire is not the same as what is.

[HerbertSu]

Religious men and women wear sunglasses, atheists and realists wear prescription ones.

 

One large reason that atheists are atheists is because they just don't like how religion has affected human history and how it can turn any person into a bigoted a**hole.