One more former extremely devout Christian (Evangelical 22 years, then Catholic 6 years). I’d like to add just one thought. If you consider only the likelihood or unlikelihood of the Christian God, you might be missing something important. (I was.) You need a theory to compare it against, that you can judge to be more likely or less likely.
For myself, I stayed Christian for years after devouring the material on LessWrong, acknowledging that in some ways my religion seemed to have a lot going against it, but lacking an alternative that I judged clearly better. Then one day I stumbled across an exposition of an atheist worldview that “clicked” in a way that no other had for me, and it switched me from devout Catholic to atheist in the blink of an eye. (Despite the consequences, the moment was pretty underwhelming, actually.) YMMV, of course, and your conclusion may vary also—each of us can only judge the theories we encounter and only based on our own knowledge of the evidence.
Briefer: Comparing theories requires at least two. You’re intimately familiar with one theory and are troubled by uncertainties, so it might relieve your uncertainty to learn more about the alternative theory.
The switch flipped for me when I was reading Jim Holt’s “Why Does The World Exist?” and spent a while envisioning and working out the implications of Vilenkin’s proposal that the universe may have started from a spherical volume of zero radius, zero mass, zero energy, zero any other property that might distinguish it from nothingness. It made clear to me that one could propose answers to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” without anything remotely like a deity.
One more former extremely devout Christian (Evangelical 22 years, then Catholic 6 years). I’d like to add just one thought. If you consider only the likelihood or unlikelihood of the Christian God, you might be missing something important. (I was.) You need a theory to compare it against, that you can judge to be more likely or less likely.
For myself, I stayed Christian for years after devouring the material on LessWrong, acknowledging that in some ways my religion seemed to have a lot going against it, but lacking an alternative that I judged clearly better. Then one day I stumbled across an exposition of an atheist worldview that “clicked” in a way that no other had for me, and it switched me from devout Catholic to atheist in the blink of an eye. (Despite the consequences, the moment was pretty underwhelming, actually.) YMMV, of course, and your conclusion may vary also—each of us can only judge the theories we encounter and only based on our own knowledge of the evidence.
Briefer: Comparing theories requires at least two. You’re intimately familiar with one theory and are troubled by uncertainties, so it might relieve your uncertainty to learn more about the alternative theory.
What sort of presentation of atheism did you stumble across that made it so clear?
The switch flipped for me when I was reading Jim Holt’s “Why Does The World Exist?” and spent a while envisioning and working out the implications of Vilenkin’s proposal that the universe may have started from a spherical volume of zero radius, zero mass, zero energy, zero any other property that might distinguish it from nothingness. It made clear to me that one could propose answers to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” without anything remotely like a deity.