Raymond Tallis wrote a short piece for Philosophy Now describing the reasons why he is an atheist. In the essay he lists three “bad” reasons for being an atheist:

1) The worst reason for not believing in God (though the least obviously bad), is that there is no evidence for His existence. Raymond contends that there is ‘evidence’ for God’s existence – the point is that such evidence is inconclusive at best. My feeling is that when most atheists say that there is no evidence for God’s existence they really mean (myself included) that there is no compelling evidence for God’s existence that would support such a belief. Should we be more explicit about this point even when we are not talking to a philosopher?

2) Another bad reason for being an atheist is hostility to religious institutions because of the delinquent behaviour of believers, and more generally, on account of the evils that organised religion has inflicted on the world. I agree that the behavior of theists is not evidence againstthe existence of a god. This is more appropriately a sopcial reason for the dissolution of organized religion.

3) Another bad reason for being an atheist is that religious beliefs scare people witless, particularly children, with their doctrines of salvation and damnation. Once again I agree that this is not a reason for being an atheist per se, rather, it is a reason for working towards diminishing the influence of religion in social life.

An intelligent defence of atheism should separate religious institutions, with their protean prescriptions and the powers for good or ill that result, from sets of propositions about the origin and nature of the universe and the bit of it we live in.

So why is Raymond an atheist?

The God who merges the power that slew thousands to avenge the slights felt by other thousands, or to lift a righteous person up, with the power to bring the boundless totality of things into being, is an ontological monstrosity – like a chimera uniting the front end of a whale with the back end of a microbe…To be a sincere agnostic you would have to be able to entertain the notion of a God who is infinite but has specific characteristics; unbounded, but distinct in some sense from His creation; who is a Being that has not been brought into being; who is omniscient, omnipotent and good and yet so constrained as to be unable or unwilling to create a world without evil; who is intelligent and yet has little in common with intelligent beings as we understand them; and so on. The ‘apophatic’ God, defined in terms of what God is not, of the Greek philosopher Xenophanes and some strands of Orthodox Christianity, is some acknowledgement of this unthinkability of the deity. But agnosticism requires one to keep in play the notion of a square circle. Not, I would think, worth the effort.

So, whatever my actual reasons for being an atheist, intellectually the case does not rest on the lack of evidence for God, or the bad behaviour of believers and religious institutions, but on the idea of God itself, which insofar as it is not entirely empty, is self-contradictory, and makes less sense than that which it purports to explain.

As far as I am concerned, this eloquently explains my own thinking on the matter. Conceptually, God is an intellectual black hole. What about you? What are your reasons for being (if you are) an atheist? If you are not an atheist, then why not?

You can read the complete essay here.