I choose to believe, or at least hope

Without God, or some creative intelligence or purposeful plan behind the universe, life is simply too bleak.

I suppose I started there (I plan to write more at my own blog). Death stares us in the face, and without God, there is no hope to overcome it.

I don't see any clear evidence (yet) that we survive death (though I do see evidence that there is something strange about existence that atheism can never explain). I wish it was otherwise, but as others have said, knowing for sure that "Heaven" is real might make us too anxious to get there.

G.K. Chesterton wrote: "The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything."

I choose to believe, or at least hope. More later, Ilion, on where I'm at (I'm certainly not a Christian, though I've thought, not too seriously, about returning to the family religion both my parents were brought up in, Roman Catholicism). My girlfriend was Catholic, became a Buddhist years ago, and has sort of returned to the Church.

The truth is my dad died a few weeks ago, and the grief has overwhelmed me. We were very close, and each day is a struggle for me to get through. Dad believed death was just a gateway to what he called "the other side" and he wrote in his will that he'd be waiting there for us.

I can say that I believe with near certainty that atheism is a false view of reality (I will write soon about why I think that, one reason being the failure of neo-darwinism to fully explain life, complexity and consciousness), but not much more so far.

All of this has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but my dad's passing has now brought it to the surface.-from the comments here: http://iliocentrism.blogspot.com/2015/03/finding-oneself-agreeing-with-richard.html