>>11421233Used to be a very self-assured atheist circa. 10 years ago. I agreed completely with Hitchens' argument that PERHAPS we MAY concede to a kind of deism but that the step to theism is not supported by any of evidence. In the absence of direct evidence for a prime mover, chalking it up to coincidence may be the most logically consistent. But, when I have thought about it over the last few years, I've been sympathetic the the theists and their appeals to there being some prime mover. Although I appreciate that complexity can arise spontaneously from simplicity, I can't help but think of life as being anything short of miraculous, in what I suppose amounts the the watchmaker argument if you want to trivialise it. Sometimes I think about whether there is some kind of afterlife or not, although it is of course naive and self-centred perhaps to suspect that there might be some special space reserved for my particular bundle of cells. Unlike the prime mover suspicion however, I find it very easy to dismiss notions of an afterlife, and think that there not being one is the most logical and compelling. Although I am essentially a kind of deist-lite and very open-minded to their being a kind of primary force, I am deeply skeptical of any conclusive statements and would concede that perhaps no such statements can ever be definitive. In conversation though, I maintain that I am an atheist, and I don't take anyone seriously that attests to having held a conversation with God or seen him in the flesh.
