Asklemmy

Ignorance and indoctrination. Especially back then people that don't understand science needed an excuse of why certain things worked that way in the world. Is easier to say that everything happens thanks to a big guy above us.

Because it can't truly be proven that there either is or isn't a god / gods.

You can laugh at people for believing in a god, but at the same time I'm willing to bet you can't prove that there there isn't one.

In my mind, atheism makes just as much sense as religion - they are both total assumptions based on incomplete data. Agnosticism is the only sensible way.

For me its a combination of learning it since childhood and experiencing minor things that i can't explain differently.

For example once i had a thought in my mind that i should go home that evening when i see the clouds. Later at the bbq i remembered that and looked into the sky and saw some clouds in the distance and just knew that these were the clouds. But it didn't looked like it should rain, and the weather forecast was also clear. So i stayed. Later when i went to the train, a huge number of people from a heavy metal concert that just finished came, and enough people wanted to take the last train that day that some didn't make it inside. If i had gone home when i saw the clouds, i wouldn't have been in that overcrowded train.

Also for me my faith looks consistent internally and with other stuff that i see.

This is a young person's question.

Why isn't it possible for a creator to exist?

Since here the answers are split between edgy kids and people repeating a bland, stale narrative about comfort and fear of death, I will try to bring a different perspective.

For context: I grew up in a Catholic country but in a very secular family and in a very secular region. I've had an edgy atheist phase that lasted between 8yo and probably around 30yo.

I studied a STEM discipline and have always been surrounded by mostly atheist or agnostic people.

I was afraid of death up until I was 27/28yo, but the cope was gnostic transhumanism, not Abrahamitic religions. At some point I took acid, my gf at the time told me I was going to die, I cried my eyes out for a few minutes and then I was fine and I'm still fine. I had a near-death experience in the hospital that further consolidated the idea that I'm going to die, and it's chill: if you're sick, you have a bunch of people looking after you, everybody gives you attention, you spend all your day chilling in bed on drugs. Dream ~~life~~ death.

I was still agnostic at that point. I started approaching spirituality later on, not much because of an emotional need, but because further studies both in STEM disciplines and Philosophy highlighted the limit of reason to explain and understand the world. Reason is a tool among others, with its limits. Limits that can be reasoned about using reason itself. You cannot investigate or explain what lies outside though, let alone change it, something for which you need different tools: faith, spirituality, trust. I got closer to what Erik Davis calls "Cyborg Spiritualism", but it doesn't mean much since it's not an organized movement, but more of a shared intuition and meaning-making process to which, in the last 60 years, more and more people arrived. Especially people dealing with disciplines like system theory, cybernetics, system design, and information theory, but also people disillusioned with the New Age movement or other Western Gnostic practices. Mixed in it there's plenty of animism.

Atheists believe that all religions are about speaking to God, and hoping for an answer, while many religions are about listening to God because they are already talking to us all the time.

Because there is no downside. I mean, the only thing that atheist think is appealing is that they can reason themselves out of religion. What makes you think that 'reasoning yourself out of religion' is attractive, desirable or a worthy goal? It just isn't. It leads to existential crisis in most if not all cases. And then atheist take pride in surviving that crisis. Which, sure, admirable... But attractive? Of course not.

You can be religious and do anything in the world. Literally. I know that atheist love to focus on dumb fucks and literalists, and on how religions are being abused. But the truth is that religion is deeply personal and peoples relation with religion is completely their own. It's extremely simple to pick and choose from the myriad of options within religion. Most religious people are not literalists.

And then you get connection with people, see them regularly, participate in rituals, celebration days, rules for engagement with life.

Plus, don't forget, an extremely old and mystic piece of human history. The attempts of people to live in a world that has a God. Their struggles, their victories. In essence a reflection on the human condition. And you get to be part of that. Atheist are often too fast to explain religion as a sort of 'failed science', while it's absolutely not. And of course if you can't figure that out you're going to ask why people want to believe in something like that.

There will never be a rational reason for the human condition. Religion will never ever not be part of humanity. As the only way in which the human condition can be contextualised is in a world that is created, and religions are the keepers of that knowledge.