Yesterday I saw this bullshit on my feed:
I’ve written on this subject before, so I won’t go into this too much… rather I’d like to use it as a starting point for a post.
But briefly, atheism is about the rejection of god claims… It’s like this: You claim a god created the universe. I see that as no different to claiming a wizard created it by waving his magic wand, and atheism is me saying, “I don’t believe you”. That’s all. I don’t know how the universe came about, and my disbelief in your god claims doesn’t imply some kind of alternate claim.
What puzzles me is this… Why do creationists make this kind of argument over and over again? I’ve seen it too many times now and it has never made any sense. I can remember the moment I stopped believing in religion… I was sixteen years old when I realized that I rejected the concept of a creator, and it left me very confused at the time. But I didn’t go, like… “Oh no, I can’t claim to be an atheist because I don’t have an alternative explanation to creationism”. I didn’t fully understand science and/or evolution. It’s not about that and never was. I just don’t accept your magical thinking.
I went home and told my mother. Actually she was the only family member I told in the early stages of my religious disbelief. Her response was quite surprising to me – she accepted my disbelief right away, but asked me to promise her that I would not join some other religion, anything other than the Roman Catholic church. And I accepted right away. She missed the entire point. It’s not about Jesus, or Mary, or resurrection, or any of that shit… That doesn’t even come into it. In fact, even as a child I thought the Jesus bits of the religion were nuts… I reject the creator, the god concept entirely. No, mommy! It’s not like I’m suddenly gonna become a fucking Presbyterian or whatever.
So, why do creationists assume atheists have some alternate claim to creation? I don’t know… but maybe they’re just projecting. But when they do make these silly arguments trying to refute science (or some misunderstanding of it), they get very confused at my response – so I’ll share it again here, without any attempted answer: OK then! Indulge me with a little thought experiment: Assume all of science is false. Now, tell me why I should believe in your god.
The fact is, we humans have been inventing gods as magical explanations for what we don’t understand. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Just because you were taught to believe in a particular one of them, and you are indoctrinated to accept this without question, doesn’t make it any different to any of the others. They’re all myths.