I was also an agnostic/atheist in my 20s and early 30s. In my experience atheists are primarily made up of two groups. The first are those that are angry at God. They were abused or molested, parents died, etc. They tend to be the insufferable ones that want everyone to be atheist. The other are what I call the intellectual atheist. High IQ and usually very learned either on their own or through college. Sometimes know the bible better than some “Christians”.
I went to a debate between the vice president of American Atheists and a college professor at a local Christian college. I’ll never forget the atheist’s opening remarks. He said, “Like all of you, I am an atheist.” You could almost hear the whole audience think what the heck is he talking about? He went on, “Like all of you I don’t believe in Ra, Thor, Zeus, etc. Like all of you I don’t believe in 99% of the gods humans have believed in our history. But unlike all of you I also don’t believe in Jehovah, Jesus. So you and I are only separated by a 1% difference.”
Thought it was an incredible way for him to start.
…Well, as I say, this should not be all that difficult to grasp. And yet any speaker at one of those atheist revivalist meetings need only trot out either of two reliable witticisms—“I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden” or “Everyone today is a disbeliever in Thor or Zeus, but we simply believe in one god less”—to elicit warmly rippling palpitations of self-congratulatory laughter from the congregation. Admittedly, one ought not judge a movement by its jokes, but neither should one be overly patient with those who delight in their own ignorance of elementary conceptual categories. I suppose, though, that the charitable course is to state the obvious as clearly as possible.So: Beliefs regarding fairies concern a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional and rational shape as beliefs regarding the neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found.
God, by contrast, is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for photons and (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be “investigated” only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or spiritual experiences. Belief or disbelief in fairies or gods could never be validated by philosophical arguments made from first principles; the existence or nonexistence of Zeus is not a matter that can be intelligibly discussed in the categories of modal logic or metaphysics, any more than the existence of tree frogs could be; if he is there at all, one must go on an expedition to find him.
The question of God, by contrast, is one that must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, act and potency, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence. Evidence for or against the existence of Thor or King Oberon would consist only in local facts, not universal truths of reason; it would be entirely empirical, episodic, psychological, personal, and hence elusive. Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, pervades every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.
God, Gods, and Fairies - David Bently Hart