Not entirely for me. I just found religion oppressive and tedious. When I stopped performing the rituals (such as attending Mass), and found that there were no consequences, the role of religion in my life slipped away. To be honest, it was for me more about laziness and apathy than science – religion was too much of a bore, requiring too much time.

Science probably did help with my final break from religion, as I was left with vague feelings that “there might be something”, but with no evidence to support those feelings, and with increasing knowledge of the importance of evidence and testing ideas against reality that came with being a scientist in my job, religion (at least theistic religion) could no longer make sense to me.

It is only recently that I have discovered the problems with the concept of the supernatural, but that has been more to do with philosophy rather than science.

Posted: December 27th 2008

See all questions answered by Steve Zara

By age 10 or so I was enjoying science books, including one I remember called The Exploding Universe by Nigel Henbest, which had lots of pictures of galaxies, supernovas and black holes. I was in to Maths too, in what I now know to be a very primitive form. There was some science fiction, too.

But that doesn’t answer your question, since your question’s phrasing presupposes that every atheist made a conscious decision to become an atheist. That is not true in my case, as my answer to this question illustrates. You should not presume that religion is “true” or “normal”, and that those who aren’t religious explicitly chose to deny it.

I do think science and science fiction have helped make it trivial for me to resist the siren song of religion in later years. If you try and look at religions objectively, they look a lot like the bizarre cults and sects you find in SF books, and TV shows like Star Trek. I now know that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was actually thinking in those terms when he imagined a mostly secular future (though the author of that piece thinks he was wrong).

Posted: December 27th 2008

See all questions answered by brian thomson

Not science. Science fiction.

I discovered SF as an adolescent, with Heinlein’s “Have Space Suit, Will Travel.” I was hooked. I started consuming it voraciously, without realizing I was reading the classics of SF. This happened under the watchful eye of my parents, who didn’t realize how many wonderful apostate ideas I was exploring.

My cult taught that everyone outside of it was going to be destroyed at Armageddon, which was always coming Any Minute Now. I couldn’t understand how God could kill people like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. They were my heroes!

My love of SF fueled my interest in, and later love of, science, but I still rejected any science that conflicted with my religion until after I escaped and grew a brain. It was the worlds created by the masters of SF that really expanded my vistas and encouraged me to consider something bigger than the cloistered existence I was trapped in. It let me see I was trapped. Until SF, I was only vaguely aware of the cage.

Posted: December 26th 2008

See all questions answered by Dave Hitt

For me, it wasn’t science. It was mathematics, and not even complicated mathematics.

I used to think that whatever higher power passed for a god showed itself in the coincidences that happen to us all every day, large and small. Anything from meeting someone I hadn’t seen in years after thinking of them the day before to saying a number and immediately drawing it from a pack of cards. The chances of these events happening, I reasoned, were so miniscule that they couldn’t all be happening by chance.

Then I realised I hadn’t actually considered the sample space, the sum total of all possible occurrences. In the usual probability exercises this would be quite small, for instance 1-6 from rolling one die. In a lottery it’s quite large, usually tens of millions of combinations. In the real world, it’s infinite.

Sure, the probability of meeting this particular person after five years is small, but how many other people haven’t you seen in five years? How many books might you suddenly see in a window which you haven’t read since you were a child? How many people have walked over the same spot you’re standing on, and might have dropped a coin?

In general, how many different possible coincidences could happen to you at any moment? An infinite number. Therefore the chances of at least one coincidence happening in a given day are not just large, they might almost approach certainty. It’s actually prudent to expect coincidences to happen, all the time.

Thus I got over the idea that the occurrences in my life are regularly too improbable to be undirected, and there was no longer any need to imagine a guiding force. My last, best justification for theist belief had gone. Atheism soon followed.

Posted: December 26th 2008

See all questions answered by SmartLX

When I rejected theism as a young child, I had no solid grasp of science. However, I enjoyed many aspects of what I did not know constitute aspects of the scientific approach—acute observation, appreciation of process and relationship, gathering and labeling items (I was an avid rock, plant, and insect collector from earliest memory), etc.

Though I consider no advantages to atheism in itself because it is just the lack of god belief, I do attribute enormous, crucial, essential advantages to having the kind of mind that appreciates science and can profess lack of god belief. And it is a mind that I suspect is open to all, as long as our family, social, and educational environments encourage such a mental development.

For answers to similar questions, go here and here.

Posted: December 26th 2008

See all questions answered by logicel