A conversation

Atheist and Christian:

A: " Why do you believe in something you have no credible evidence exists?"
C: " Because I have plenty of evidence of what I believe in."

A: " Such as....?"
C: " Such as my soul, my sense of morality, my very faith. All of these are the evidence you seem to think doesn't exist. But for sure, faith by itself is enough proof that god exists, because without god, there would be nothing to have faith in, therefore faith would be uneccessary and would have never come into existence. Since it exists, god exists."

A: " Is it safe to say that if you didn't exist, bodily, that all of your evidence, your soul, your morality, your faith would also not exist?"
C: " Only for me personally, nothing about my non-existence has an affect on the existence at large of those concepts, morality, the soul, etc..., but yes, I think it's safe to say that, when referring only to me."

C: " Ask yourself this, If there is no god, then why do we exist?"
A: " Okay."

A: " If there is no god, then why do I exist?"
A: " The question is faulty to begin with, it should be if there is no god, then HOW do I exist. By using the word why, I imply the existence of some reasoning being that can and does impose it's reasoning ability onto the issue of existence, a reasoning being is a god, even if it's not a creator god, such as the Judaic version is said to be. But, if I change the question to "How do I exist", I can answer as such: I exist because my parents joined an egg and sperm together. My DNA enabled my proteins to replicate and diversify, eventually into me. It just so happens that my parents had non-detrimental genes which successfully got passed down to me as the representative of a new generation, because they mated. And it happens that their parents were also as fortunate, and their parents' parents were also, and so on and so forth. That is how I exist, but I would ask you to ask yourself the very same question you posed to me."

C: "Okay."
C: "If there is no god, then why do we exist? I don't know why. It seems to me, there would be no reason for us to exist, no real explanation for our intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness, morality, sense of right and wrong, and so on and so forth. My heart tells me these things, my mind doesn't. My mind might tell me the answer to an arithmetic question or whether or not to buy a certain stock (certainly not GM), but my heart is what leads me to not lie to my friends, my heart is what tells me I love my family. There is no biological explanation for what I feel in my heart, but there is a perfectly acceptable supernatural explanation. Without a god having created these things, they simply wouldn't exist."

A: "So when you ask yourself this question, are you questioning the existence of god, or yourself? It seems to me, that although this seems, on the surface, to be an exercise in questioning god's existence, it is really questioning humanity's."

A: "Postulate that there is no god as we do at the beginning of the question" If there is no god", then follow that with the remainder of the question " then why do we exist". Being in existence but without a god, is not possible for you to imagine, so really you are questioning your own existence, if you posit god's inexistence. Since you obviously exist, you have every reason to think god does as well, because, it is impossible for you to contemplate that humanity could exist as it does, with all of our "uniquely" human attributes, without our having been designed by a higher power. But that is the chink in your armour. You see, it is only the incurious who accept things at face value. It may be impossible for you to see existence seperate from a god, but such a view is narrow, and allows for no room to err. Frought with conceivable doubt, such a tunnelled opinion tends to lead it's adherents toward evermore compact doctrines, always refining until the point at which, the refinement, the honing eventually melds the original material into such a hard, compact almost projectile weapon, metaphorically speaking. In this case, the original material humanity began with was uncertainty itself. Unsure of what the noise of thunder was, we were curious but afraid, so we assigned it a divine position. But our unsurity continued, as it did with other primitively thought about phenomenon. As we grew more intelligent, we dug further into the fields, and uncovered more of the answers about those things which concerned us. Disease became, if not universally controllable, at least more containable and treatable, through wholly natural means. Same with crop propagation, inclement weather avoidance, etc... but the divine status we earlier had apportioned to many misunderstood phenomenon, remained more or less intact. This original material of uncertainty first began to be welded and compacted by superstition. Time moved on and the compaction continued with the advent of organized religion. Uncertainty of anything was not alleviated by religion, it never has been. Religion only soothed the savage beast, it has never done anything to clear up misconceptions. It provided no answer to our questions, it has only ever made us forget our questions altogether (although, notoriously, questions tend to have plagued us throughout history long after we swallowed our false medicine, popping up again and again, ). The sheer inability of someone who believes in god, to acknowledge the possibility that everything we see could very well have come about without a god is what makes the gap between the atheist and the christian. It really is a simple thing, if you think about it, on the one side, a person thinks it is possible for the world to have come into existence through means that are part and parcel of it as it is today. On the other side is someone who cannot think such a thing. Christianity, or religion as a whole (those religions which postulate a version of creation) is simply a result of uncreativity. If you can't imagine something, that certainly doesn't mean that such a thing is impossible, it only points reveals a lack of imagination. I, as an atheist, can absolutely imagine a world having been created by a god, but it is only imaginary. I don't bear the burden of questioning my own existence, because I am not hung up on whether or not god exists, I know he does not. You, a christian, have to square that, because it is you who have accepted as inexplicable that which has already been explained by the world. It is you who have relegated incuriosity to the realm of being faithful, and thusly have helped to build our world systems around social foundations based on the non-existent. These world systems are now beginning to crumble, because of the lack of sure foundational reality-based support. God is not on his throne, all will not be solved by him, America will not be saved because it is a country of the faithful. God does not bless America. We are not one nation under god, we are only one nation under nothing, all on the same level. For sure, we exist, but god does not, nor did he ever need to. It's high time you accept that what you believe is simply incorrect."

C: "I pity you, and will continue to pray for you."
A: "Thanks, but please spend your efforts more wisely."