Theism and atheism: a personal view

Preamble

I was born into a devoted Christian family whose cultural and religious heritage is dominated in many respects by my maternal grandparents. Their young, passionate but forbidden love affair yielded a child born out of wedlock. This took place in a rural Maltese-Sicilian Christian community in northern Queensland in the 1920's. Their fall from social and religious grace coupled with enduring hard times led to an intense devotion to Christianity that prevails to this day among their decedents, the de Brincat-Cavallaro fundamentalist Christians.

But by the age of 19 years I had become an atheist. As might be expected, discussions and arguments about the theism-atheism debate led nowhere. It was easier, and more peaceful, to simply avoid such interactions. Some 30 years later, I reached a point were I needed to express, once and for all, my own view. This essay is the result.

I have no intention of persuading anyone to become an atheist and I expect that theists will reject my analysis outright. This essay is simply a representation of my personal view of the Theism-Atheism debate. I am posting it here for the benefit of people who might take comfort in finding views that are similar to their own.

I presume that the reader has a similar understanding of the language and concepts involved. However, specific meanings and definitions will be highlighted when they are crucial to the main argument.

Oxford Dictionary:
theism, belief in a God, or Gods;
atheism, disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God.

This essay analyses the nature of the things which we experience, know or believe. These things will be referred to collectively as ideas.

Oxford dictionary:
idea, a picture or notion of anything conceived by the mind; a conception.
All of our ideas rest on fundamental assumptions. This applies to ideas that represent scientific knowledge and religious and cultural beliefs. Moreover, the status of any idea is no greater than the status of the assumptions upon which it rests.
  • A simple example is the course of streets you should take to get to a certain building in an unfamiliar city. If your knowledge of the course is based on what a person has told you, then that knowledge rests on the assumption that the person knows the area and is being honest. The status of your knowledge is equivalent to the status of the person's knowledge and integrity.
In order to develop a meaningful perspective of what our ideas represent we need to carefully explore the assumptions upon which those ideas rest. This analysis leads naturally to a categorisation of our ideas as being either subjective or objective. Only by making this distinction can we fully appreciate the value of our ideas and the experiences, knowledge and beliefs they represent.