Why I don’t believe in God.

Sadie Lou has set me a challenge – to actually show my reasoned argument for my non-belief in God. So here goes with a bit of background first:

I grew up in a non-believing household so had nobody to teach me to believe in God from an early age. Being the people they are, my parents (despite being Catholics themselves) sent me to Church of England schools all my life where religion was very much a side issue – so I only picked up the barest of religious education from my school days. I was exposed to the stories, both from the Old and New Testament, but they never really meant much to me. So for the first half of my life I admit that I was largely ignorant about the whole idea of God.

The stories in the Bible have always been just that to me – stories, myths and morality tales. It was certainly not anything to ‘believe’ in, nothing to be part of or to change my life for. It was an old book considered by many to be important. But it was still just a book. I never considered it to be of any relevance to me.

I never needed to fill gaps in my knowledge or in human knowledge with anything else other than ignorance. I never felt that there was anything wrong with saying “I/we don’t know – yet”. I’m not sure if you could describe it as an ‘instinct’ as such but I’ve never felt the need to add extra layers of complications to things. To me I automatically assume a natural explanation. I never thought that God or angels or anything else supernatural for that matter moved the planets, or made the tides work or the wind blow. I never assumed that life was somehow ‘designed’ by an actual ‘designer’ even before I learnt about evolution and the rest of science. God, to me, was never part of the equation. Like Laplace, I never had a need of that hypothesis.

Can I actually prove beyond reasonable doubt that God does not exist? No, I can’t – at least not here and not now, though maybe someday.

Why then don’t I believe in Him?

I see no need for Him to exist. He is not a necessary/needed part of the Universe.
Everything that exists either has a natural explanation or will have – I see no God in the ‘gaps’.
There’s the classic ‘Problem of Evil’ issue. How can a loving God preside over a place like Earth? (This question really confounds me).
As far as I can tell there is no single piece of evidence to point to the existence of God, none that I have come across myself or any convincing argument provided by people who actually believe in Him. To make myself clear, I don’t mean insufficient evidence I mean NONE.
The Bible certainly isn’t proof of any kind. It’s an old book written, edited and compiled by many people about during the last 2 millennia. It’s the history, mythology & morality tales of a mainly illiterate desert people in the Middle East. There are many such works from all over the world. Why is the Bible the ‘right’ one? That just doesn’t make sense.

Taking all of the above – Why should I believe in God? Why should I even entertain the possibility of His existence? Is absence of proof a proof of absence? No it isn’t. But how much lack of proof do we need to consider the existence of something to be so unlikely as to, in effect, not exist? I think I have enough lack of proof.