Paul Hoffmaster contacted me. This illustrates my point.
Why I’m an atheist, the answer is easy. Why Not?
My first loves of science were astronomy and dinosaurs, nothing unusual for a kid. I would get any of the few books we had at the grade school library and would read the death out of them. Now this was the mid 50’s and a lot has been learned about these subjects since then. They were very clueless to what killed off the dinosaurs and the astronomy hadn’t found the big bang’s background radiation yet. There was and still is a lot to learn about just those two areas of science.
So, why did I became an atheist, well it wasn’t that I became one, I just never really bought into the god of the bible to begin with especially the son part of it. In reading those science books, not once did they go on saying anything about or against any god, nothing was written one way or another about it. The books only were on what was learned far at that time. Just the information was given and any ideas of what that information may mean, but nothing on any religion or any god. There was no axe to grind unlike the religious. It was what the religious people (many in my family) that would say this things were wrong without anything in their defend outside of using the bible, and that made me think that it was them that had problems and not the reality that was in the science books. If I would speak of dinosaurs it was them would deny that they ever existed, because it would weaken their idea of a god and their self importance in the scheme of things. And the size and age of the universe that really was a real big blow to their ideas of a god. My answer to them would be (if I wasn’t so young at the time) that they should change their idea about the deity of theirs or just drop it altogether, now there is a dream.
Not long after this time came the space race, I was so happy with that. I thought, a childish one I know now, that this would get more people to rethink their ideas about the bible god. As I learned, the older people by and large miss seeing anything that was not as they wanted it to be. New information going in and old ideas still coming out.
Now look at all that has been added to our knowledge since then, and still we have people with their heads in the sand still wanting it to be all about them and their idea of a god. I wish I had an answer for this, but I guess death is a powerful fear to fight.
Science is great!
