What Happens to Your Brain When You Stop Believing in God
A great deal of speculation in that article. Sounds more like psycotherapy ideas than real psychology&#x2F;neuroscience.<p>Meanwhile, let&#x27;s look at the (paraphrased) claims:<p>&quot;Science is not compatible with religion.&quot;<p>Yet the Big Bang theory was invented by a physicist who went on to become a Catholic priest, George Lemaitre. And the father of modern genetics is not Darwin but a catholic monk, Gregor Mendel. hmmm. Both had google doodles recently.<p>&quot;Evolution and creationism are not reconcileable.&quot;<p>But Christianity has never had a formal dogma that the Bible is literally true as a historical document (but neither any reason prior to modern science to think otherwise, but that misses the point). 3&#x2F;4 of Christianity is fine with evolution and the Big Bang, and 14 billion years, and for Catholics even the existence of aliens. It&#x27;s arguable that the rest are just reacting to Atheist claims, clutching to a dogma that doesn&#x27;t exist because they are simple and uneducated Christians who don&#x27;t know better.<p>&quot;There is no evidence of a god.&quot;<p>But this claim has to discount those who claim to personally know a god as deluded. That&#x27;s clearly a fallacy. Sure, spiritual &#x27;contact&#x27; doesn&#x27;t give 3rd party verification (the 3rd party being an agnostic who hasn&#x27;t had such contact), and will not satisfy the determinedly materialistic who will only accept physical evidence, but what evidence of a spiritual God can we expect in the material universe?<p>More importantly, wouldn&#x27;t a god be able to give proof of itself? And wouldn&#x27;t that proof, if it were a personal god as claimed, be person to person communing? The author evidently did not actually personally know the god she eventually rejected and by a Christian standard never had faith.<p>Faith &quot;Belief without evidence&quot;. Thanks for that presumptious redefinition, Bertrand Russell, but that is not a Christian or religious definition and has no etymological roots. Sure makes them look silly, though. The real definition of faith is more to do with direct personal knowledge of a god.<p>Or let&#x27;s take Dawkins favourite argument &quot;Who made God?&quot;. But this was answered by Thomas Aquinas centuries ago. A thing whose nature&#x2F;essence is existence, to exist, self-evidently exists. Since it must also self-evidently exist of itself, and is therefore self-referencing, the real question is not &quot;Is there a god&quot; but &quot;Is this self-referencing fundamental thing also self-aware?&quot;. Either Dawkins is ignorant or he&#x27;s lying by ommission (which he already does with evolution).<p>But here&#x27;s the kicker: an atheist beleives that there is no god - which is why they quite outrageously call religious persons deluded as no agnostic would - yet there is no proof of the non-existence of a supreme being.<p>So while atheists are always irrational whether or not there is a god, religious persons are only irrational if there isn&#x27;t a god.<p>The irony is wonderful. Faith as &quot;Belief without evidence&quot; applies to atheists more than religious persons.<p>What&#x27;s your best atheist argument? I can pretty much defeat any atheist argument.