Why do some people find it hard to believe in God?

[MosEisley]

I believe in God.

However, I am attending an adult confirmation class and we have been asked to consider why some people do not believe in God. DH and I came up with:

• there is no absolute proof of God's existence
• they are rebelling against a strict organised religion that they can't accept as literallly true

If you know someone who doesn't believe in God, why don't they?

Betrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian" would give you a fairly good grounding on atheism. I would follow it up with Sam Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation" for further discourse.

I think most atheists have one or two arguments they find particularly compelling, and for me it is Sam Harris' point that if God really had dictated the Bible, why doesn't it contain one single thing that wasn't known to the people who wrote it at the time it was written? As he says, if it really were divinely dictated, it could have contained mathmatics or medicine that it's taken us 2,000 years to come up with ourselves. Even a single mention of New Zealand, llamas or pineapples might have swung it

Mmm...pineapples.

Your post reminded me of a bit from Anne Lamott's book Operating Instructions: "Last night I decided it was totally nuts to believe in Christ, that it is as crazy as being a Scientologist or a Jehovah's Witness. But a priest friend said solemnly, 'Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are crazier than they have to be."

:o

I was brought up in a church-going family but from the age of about 4 was sceptical. Like others I cannot see that a merciful deity who is all-knowing and all-powerful would enable the cruelty, strife and illness in the world. I object to the authoritarian atmosphere engendered by belief systems. I just cannot make the leap of faith made by Mos and other believers. I do not wish to be bored stiff on Sunday mornings (that from my own experience of being required to attend church and Sunday school). When I left home to go to college I discovered that the Minister at our home church had written to the local Minister near the college and given him my name. I was furious as it compromised my new-found feeling of freedom (although the intentions may have been good) and ever since have only attended church when invited to a wedding or attending a funeral or Christening.

What people believe in thir private lives is of course none of my business. However, it becomes my business when it impacts on public life. It is obviously outrageous that any particular faith should have, as Christianity does in the UK, an influence on education, law and policy making and any other part of the public sphere.

I wonder if there is a genetic factor. I come from a family of four, brought up by two quite religious parents. My big sister is an ordained priest, my middle sister is I'd say a non practicing waverer, and my brother probably more on the agnostic side. I am an atheist. I've always felt that my big sister got the religious genes. For myself I just haven't got faith, there is no god shaped hole in my life and all the religious stuff just seems very hollow and meaningless. Not much point in religion without faith in my mind, although my mother did try persuading me I could approach religion from an academic theological view point.

back at cheerful yank.

'I think I feel what religious people feel when they 'feel God' - for me I call it feeling wonder, love, beauty, strength, the complexity of the universe. Maybe all that is God. But when people start claiming that God is an all-powerful all-knowing all-good being who is personally interested in our lives, then it starts to cause contradictions because then there would be no pointless suffering.'

spot on,MMMarmite. i certainly feel those sentiments stood on a mountainside here in NZ looking out at the stunning landscape or watching the ocean waves crash on the beach in a storm or even getting my head round the beauty of natural selection. nature is a wonderful, awesome thing - but certainly not attributable to a 'God' as far as I'm concerned.

I agree Scroubious. I've never really understood the need to say anything more than 'wow' and feel appreciative of my good fortune when I see, hear or feel something amazing (to me). My mother thinks I should also feel the need to 'praise god' at this point, but it just feels a bit well superfluous to me.

Ok, so the wonder and awe at the beauty of the planet we live on and the universe can make you 'feel' god, what about all the horrific things? What about famine, disease, and nematode worms that blind people?

Oh, that's not god, right?

not in my book, rational.

Rational - quite right... I don't respect all views - respecting people if they've earned respect is more what I meant.

Cheerful: 'Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are crazier than they have to be." - that was what I thought when I was a 'normal' Christian. Now I'm inclined to think all religious people are 'crazier than they have to be'. If you look at standard christian doctrine from the outside its weird.

Its perfectly possible to have a 'sense of the numinous' without attributing it to anything supernatural. While there may indeed be 'more things in heaven and earth..' that's just a limitation of our current state of knowledge and human minds. There may be realms of physics our minds can never fathom in the same way a dog is never going to 'get' calculus. That's fine by me - we just take exploring what is really there as far as humanly possible.

I'd rather look at a rainbow and simply understand about raindrops refracting light than take it as a reminder that God has promised not to use the weather to kill off nearly every human and terrestrial animal again.

Because of the amount of evil, hate, destruction, ill fortune, sickness, suffering and sadism we see all around us. Because when I was younger and believed in God, I watched my 13 year old friend die a slow and very painful death from cancer, despite my praying my hardest for her to recover. Why would a god do that to a kid? Because all the evidence points to scientific arguments rather than anything else.

My mum died 6 years ago today.

I don't believe. I have brought my children up in knowledge of Christianity, its beliefs and culture and had never said to them that I didn't believe in god- always said 'well people believe that', 'the bible says that...'. But they are intelligent kids and made up their own minds.

Anyway, the day I had to tell my children that their much loved grandma had died totally unexpectedly my youngest, then 12, said 'at school today we had to say if we believed in heaven or not. I said I didn't but now I kind of wish I had'.

That for me summed up a lot about why some people believe. The need to believe that all is not lost when someone dies, the need to make sense of all the amazing things in the world - good and bad. It's simpler if there is a god.

Sorry, meant to add

Simpler but doesn't mean it's true.

its not something i struggle with
there is no god
end of
am aware a critical mass convince themselves of god existence and its associated paraphernalia - well thats there belief not mine

I don't think it is simpler - more emotionally consoling perhaps. Provided you're sure your loved one is headed the right way. I had a friends, very much of the 'born again' persuasion who was extremely upset when her unbelieving dad died. I think our minister probably fed her some nice waffle but, going by The Book, she'd have been right.

Interesting thread.

I don't believe in a god for the same reasons that you don't believe in a benevolent, omnipotent, flying, pink, invisible, spaghetti unicorn, I imagine.

I think it is simpler. The difficult questions in life can be hand-waved past by simply saying "God moves in mysterious ways" or "the pot does not ask the potter".

How do you know I don't, Silent?

I know Grimma. I just thought it was funny. :)

CY - well, so long as you know you're nearly as crazy too, I can still respect you

Snorbs - well yes, if you're willing to ignore or wave aside difficult questions then its easier. But if you're not - then God (particularly the omnipotent benevolent model) creates a lot of complexities - e.g. 'the problem of pain'. Believers who engage with such issues tie themselves into a Gordian knot which is sliced neatly apart by (to mix my metaphors) the Occams razor of removing god - pouf, what problem?

Belief in a supreme being just flies in the face of all logic. It's up there with the tooth fairy for me.

If you don't replace God with politics, are you left with nihilism?

If you don't replace God with politics, are you left with nihilism?
No (not any of the definitions of nihilism I know of anyway - which did you have in mind?)

Anyway, that is a fallacious question - what do you mean, replace God? That presupposes he exists. Replace an figment of the human mind with nothing and what you're left with is a less delusional state.

Grimma, I see your point. I suppose the mental gymnastics and semantic hoop-jumping that I have seen some Christians go through to explain the trinity is, indeed, very complex.

Rapturousapplause, I don't see there is any real connection between politics and god that means that one could somehow replace the other. Anyway, atheism isn't the same thing as nihilism.