This article is an excerpt from Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (2019) where Richard Dawkins explores the foundations of religious belief, particularly focusing on whether religion is necessary for morality and understanding the world.
How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church.
The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief that looked very different in the fourth century than it did in the first.
A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.
Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.
Bart D. Ehrman is the author of more than twenty books, including the New York Times bestselling Misquoting Jesus and God's Problem. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus. He has been featured in Time and has appeared on Dateline NBC, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, the History Channel, major NPR shows, and other top media outlets. He lives in Durham, N.C.
Richard, as a biologist you are no doubt familiar with how many large scale patterns are comprised of small scale patterns. You have the large scale 🐸 frog, who is composed of systems like the immune system and the nervous system, which are autonomous systems in their space of differentiation. But each of those are comprised of functional units that map to organs, and those organs are, amazingly, comprised of cells, which are autopoietic little machines, living in their evolutionary milieu.
As above, so below, my friend. We are part of larger structures, including lineages, economies, biospheres, etc. Just as in the animal body, we may be a part of different structures on different scales, some orthogonal to one another. This interplay of factors, JUST IS THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. It is far from supernatural. It's the most natural thing in the world, considering that our universe possesses this amazing ability to admit of interlocking autonomous systems at increasing scales (a very underappreciated feature of our universe).
The specific stories, rituals and symbolism may vary from culture to culture, and religion itself has been used as a vehicle of cultural stability and sometimes tyrannical control, but the mythologies are an expression of an attempt to know these patterns that interfere in our lives in ways that can't be immediately sensed. To that end, a religious frameworks can be better or worse than one another. But it's not the only dimension along which religion can be judged. Also its "stickiness". A couple thousand years of persistence is impressive.
The poetic appeal of systems theory—recognizing nested layers of organization from cells to organs to organisms—is undeniable. But identifying hierarchical or networked structures in nature does not logically validate the existence of a "spiritual world." Logically, that's an extrapolation fallacy: projecting valid patterns from one domain (biology) onto an unrelated or insufficiently connected domain (spiritual metaphysics) without empirical justification.
Yes, organisms are built from interlocking systems, and yes, those systems emerge from lower levels of organization. But there is a difference between describing structure and inferring purpose or essence. The leap from "systems are layered" to "this layering is the spiritual world" is unsupported. You are mapping a metaphor (“as above, so below”) onto a mechanism — and confusing metaphor with mechanism is not scientific. (Lasagna is layered, too.)
To assert that these nested systems are the spiritual world mistakes emergent complexity for conscious intention or spiritual significance. In science, emergent phenomena (like consciousness, weather, or ecosystems) are well-documented. They are not evidence of an underlying "spirit realm" any more than a traffic jam is evidence of a divine transportation deity. Complexity doesn't imply agency.
The argument that religion’s long-term persistence proves its validity has no merit. Just because religious myths have endured doesn’t mean they’re true, any more than the centuries-long belief in geocentrism validated that model of the universe. Cultural “stickiness” measures transmissibility, not truth.
A claim about "the spiritual world" that cannot be tested, observed, or falsified falls outside the realm of empirical inquiry. It's not necessarily "wrong" — it’s just not science. Spiritual or metaphysical interpretations may offer subjective meaning, but they cannot be bolstered by pointing to the layered nature of frogs, cells, or biospheres unless you present testable, predictive mechanisms linking the two.
The idea that layered biological and social systems suggest the existence of a spiritual world might be philosophically interesting but scientifically it's unsupported. It mistakes pattern recognition for metaphysical proof, confuses metaphor with mechanism, and leans heavily on logical fallacies like extrapolation and tradition.
I was actually taking a delfationary approach to "spirit world", so a kind of redefinition. I think you read me as taking the mythological implications of "spirit" and trying to project those downward. Rather, as a deflationary tack, I'm trying to say that the spiritual world is nothing more than high level patterns continuous with those we see everywhere else, and that certain mythologizations are probably inaccurate - but that some mythologizations are just trying to capture the high level dynamics, but often in a way that's too anthropomorphic. My view is that there can be a science of the spiritual insofar as there are sciences of complexity and emergence. However, I also want to retain whatever is useful about the anthropomorphic mythologization, insofar as they are good heuristics for tracking the causal tendencies of these patterns. YMM still V, but hopefully this clarifies.
You're right about the stickiness not implying truth. However, there is a certain pragmatic argument that stickiness implies usefulness. I think the best argument against my position is that if stickiness implies usefulness, it doesn't guarantee in which domain it will be useful. I have assumed something like usefulness in terms of recognizing large-scale casual patterns, but something could be sticky because it enables power dynamics and those in power have an incentive to keep the mythology going. Surely this DOES happen. So good points all around. Thank you for engaging.
I was raised without religion, only child in the whole school sent off to the library for Religous Instruction lessons. When I was about 13 or 14 my parents said I should investigate all religions. Make my own choice. I got right into it; Bahai, Catholic, Anglican, Buddhist, Hari Krishna at that time were wandering about with their bells which had appeal. It took a while but I decided they all seemed a bit ridiculous; hadn't been brainwashed from childhood and I've remained an atheist and am happy.
How can you NOT make this a free article for everyone to read?
Do you not have enough? I have nothing and this is the first thing I WANT to read from you, in a long time... Please make it possible. I'll share it everywhere.
Jesus lived but he is NOT my god. The only God I can believe in is this incredible universe that this planet inhabits - you can see it and you can research it. It’s majestic and unbelievable in itself.
Joe Biden believes in God devoutly and still Joe Biden has suffered the most horrendous losses a human can bear repeatedly. Now he receives maybe the final blow for his devotion.
And in the face of all JBs suffering an evil clown walks the earth free as a bird inflicting pain and suffering everywhere as if he has a teflon coating.
That observation certainly makes me question the existence of a God.
Well, belief is irrelevant. The Moon exists whether I believe in it and if I don't believe in it, it doesn't disappear. As for a creator God, God does not exist.
Is it ironic that one guy said "no, fuck that, "god" is inside each and every one of us, not inside a church. Carry my name forward so no other man has to." Even as an atheist myself, I still see how powerful and exact this human's message was to the world and how, if people carry his name forward, and nurture INNOCENCE and LIGHT in future generations, no one needs any more gods or god stories than that. Like it gives one the freedom to just live and stop dwelling on anything. It's a real freedom. I support it in anyone who sees the light in this manner. Accepting salvation is as valid a world view as seeking enlightenment. No one should coerce anyone into any beliefs and the most enlightened parents don't program their children anymore than they let their children program them. Make babies and support innocence. Screw cynicism.
The good Brothers of the Sacred Heart spelled it out clearly for us in high school religion class. Faith is belief in God’s existence. Atheism is belief that god does not exist. The Agnostic - recognizing that both the above are unproven, untestable and not falsifiable - makes only hypothesis. <RIP Karl Popper>. This is liberating, even fun. I can equally test beliefs, speculate, engage, on literally ANY configuration of (to us) god-like entities. I can use any tools - Jung’s archetypes? How did we imprint them? Where do they reside and function now.? What about modern theories of everything? Fun. https://youtu.be/zLPT-0K0osU?si=RF3SnutOWEkMgOvz
Really? Ok. I think that’s agnosticism in my terms. Words - can’t live with them, can’t live without them. But if you insist that god does not exist- that too is based on belief, because it simply can’t be prove.
It’s no more “belief that can’t be proven” than is the scientist’s “belief” that the hypothesis is null until it has been. That’s all we atheists are saying: “Prove it”. Given the demonstrably human origin of both religion as a phenomenon and of individual religions, and given that convincing histories of both have been written that satisfactorily explain them in purely human terms with no supernatural remainder, I see no reason to “believe” that the god(s) hypothesis does not remain null, any more than the Santa Claus hypothesis. Note the “a-” in “atheist”. Belief, whether in the supernatural or its absence, doesn’t begin to figure in my world view. In fact, I find the whole god(s) issue as a viable proposition both variously tedious and funny. What’s endlessly fascinating is why our species should come up with such a raft of obvious nonsense to start with. Buddhists, (on my understanding) Taoists and the ancient Greeks recognised it for the absurdity it was, and each in their own way tried to figure out what was verifiably real. That’s always the way forward.
No worries. I agree with you that most religion is pure myth making. I would even say that it’s perhaps a major impediment to human evolution. But humans need their spirituality, some meaningful connection with the universe. I would like to see spirituality put on a more scientific basis.
As for scientific theories- they are not really ever fully proven - only supported as far as they are not falsified. Quantum theory, the most accurate theory in all science, is still considered incomplete. But I will take science over religion any day.
The joke is - the existence of God really can’t be disproven. The faithful think this is a strength. Logically, it is just an empty tautology.
No. Agnosticism or Gnosticism is about knowledge and theism or atheism are about belief. “I don’t believe in a god” and “I believe there are no gods” are two different statements
I understand that I cannot know whether or not Gods exist. Therefore, I don’t hold or assert that gods do or do not exist. I allow both possibilities, and shades in between. I am a … ?
I get it. Happy to move on. But there is also a “strong form” of atheism that does believe (assert) that there is no god. My point: that is also a form of faith.
I don't understand why you don't get it. I lack any belief that God, the easter Bunny, Santa Claus, a toaster orbiting the sun, that there is someone out there who has five willies..... exists. My absence of belief is just that. An. absence. of. belief. There is NO belief. None. Belief is not present in my brain. The list of things that I do not believe is extremely long. I also do not believe that I will turn into a shrimp at 3:30 this afternoon. Can we move on now? Please?
My father identified as an atheist during my formative years, primarily influenced by his education in the West. Despite holding unique views, I successfully engaged him in theological discussions that led to his conversion by the time I turned sixteen. He passed away twenty years ago, but before that, he discovered your work in the late 1970s and developed a keen interest in it.
How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church.
The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief that looked very different in the fourth century than it did in the first.
A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.
Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.
https://a.co/d/1jxypWr
Your Post was left in Reply to Richard Dawkins’ on God
I left this in reply to him and wanted to be sure you saw as well.
https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/do-you-believe-in-god/comment/118182366?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4bdzfc
Read John 10 verses 22-33.
Neither you or Ehrman, whoever he is, has actually read the source book for the topic in question.
Learn the difference between historicity and faith.
"How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee"
Try reading your own posts
Bart D. Ehrman is the author of more than twenty books, including the New York Times bestselling Misquoting Jesus and God's Problem. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus. He has been featured in Time and has appeared on Dateline NBC, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, the History Channel, major NPR shows, and other top media outlets. He lives in Durham, N.C.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001I9RR7G/about
Bart D. Ehrman - YouTube Channel
https://youtube.com/@bartdehrman?si=UZtYglM883XBtqIT
Wow he’s written TWENTY books and SAYS he’s a leading authority on the Bible, that must make him right.
Both fallacies, Appeal to Authority and Appeal to Masses.
FFS man, either you can read or you can’t.
Ehrman is either a liar or a fool.
Those are facts.
Ehrman is a historian.
Sounds like, “You can’t handle the truth!”
Appeal to authority.
Are all your arguments fallacies?
What evidence does he provide that Jesus never said he was God?
Recommend watching these three videos:
How Jesus Became God:
Lecture 1 of 3
https://youtu.be/7IPAKsGbqcg?si=tkobvX03DLN0_-8w
Lecture 2 of 3
https://youtu.be/kbLm_Xiqih8?si=K6xpvcGpurtXBSSx
Lecture 3 of 3
https://youtu.be/SdSievHrris?si=UYLwCT5uzGdVihXs
Bart Ehrman’s Great Courses lectures are also available via streaming:
https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/catalogsearch/result/?search_param=all&catid=&q=Bart+Ehrman+
For a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of Ehrman’s historicity, I also recommend his detailed lectures on The Great Courses:
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/professors/bart-d-ehrman
Read his book(s) and watch his videos.
It’s all in there.
I'm sure he has read it.
And I'm sure you have not read his book
So your opinion has no value
Did Jesus Call Himself God?
The Bart Ehrman Blog: The History & Literature of Early Christianity
https://ehrmanblog.org/did-jesus-call-himself-god/
Richard, as a biologist you are no doubt familiar with how many large scale patterns are comprised of small scale patterns. You have the large scale 🐸 frog, who is composed of systems like the immune system and the nervous system, which are autonomous systems in their space of differentiation. But each of those are comprised of functional units that map to organs, and those organs are, amazingly, comprised of cells, which are autopoietic little machines, living in their evolutionary milieu.
As above, so below, my friend. We are part of larger structures, including lineages, economies, biospheres, etc. Just as in the animal body, we may be a part of different structures on different scales, some orthogonal to one another. This interplay of factors, JUST IS THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. It is far from supernatural. It's the most natural thing in the world, considering that our universe possesses this amazing ability to admit of interlocking autonomous systems at increasing scales (a very underappreciated feature of our universe).
The specific stories, rituals and symbolism may vary from culture to culture, and religion itself has been used as a vehicle of cultural stability and sometimes tyrannical control, but the mythologies are an expression of an attempt to know these patterns that interfere in our lives in ways that can't be immediately sensed. To that end, a religious frameworks can be better or worse than one another. But it's not the only dimension along which religion can be judged. Also its "stickiness". A couple thousand years of persistence is impressive.
The poetic appeal of systems theory—recognizing nested layers of organization from cells to organs to organisms—is undeniable. But identifying hierarchical or networked structures in nature does not logically validate the existence of a "spiritual world." Logically, that's an extrapolation fallacy: projecting valid patterns from one domain (biology) onto an unrelated or insufficiently connected domain (spiritual metaphysics) without empirical justification.
Yes, organisms are built from interlocking systems, and yes, those systems emerge from lower levels of organization. But there is a difference between describing structure and inferring purpose or essence. The leap from "systems are layered" to "this layering is the spiritual world" is unsupported. You are mapping a metaphor (“as above, so below”) onto a mechanism — and confusing metaphor with mechanism is not scientific. (Lasagna is layered, too.)
To assert that these nested systems are the spiritual world mistakes emergent complexity for conscious intention or spiritual significance. In science, emergent phenomena (like consciousness, weather, or ecosystems) are well-documented. They are not evidence of an underlying "spirit realm" any more than a traffic jam is evidence of a divine transportation deity. Complexity doesn't imply agency.
The argument that religion’s long-term persistence proves its validity has no merit. Just because religious myths have endured doesn’t mean they’re true, any more than the centuries-long belief in geocentrism validated that model of the universe. Cultural “stickiness” measures transmissibility, not truth.
A claim about "the spiritual world" that cannot be tested, observed, or falsified falls outside the realm of empirical inquiry. It's not necessarily "wrong" — it’s just not science. Spiritual or metaphysical interpretations may offer subjective meaning, but they cannot be bolstered by pointing to the layered nature of frogs, cells, or biospheres unless you present testable, predictive mechanisms linking the two.
The idea that layered biological and social systems suggest the existence of a spiritual world might be philosophically interesting but scientifically it's unsupported. It mistakes pattern recognition for metaphysical proof, confuses metaphor with mechanism, and leans heavily on logical fallacies like extrapolation and tradition.
This is a fantastic comment. So good.
I was actually taking a delfationary approach to "spirit world", so a kind of redefinition. I think you read me as taking the mythological implications of "spirit" and trying to project those downward. Rather, as a deflationary tack, I'm trying to say that the spiritual world is nothing more than high level patterns continuous with those we see everywhere else, and that certain mythologizations are probably inaccurate - but that some mythologizations are just trying to capture the high level dynamics, but often in a way that's too anthropomorphic. My view is that there can be a science of the spiritual insofar as there are sciences of complexity and emergence. However, I also want to retain whatever is useful about the anthropomorphic mythologization, insofar as they are good heuristics for tracking the causal tendencies of these patterns. YMM still V, but hopefully this clarifies.
You're right about the stickiness not implying truth. However, there is a certain pragmatic argument that stickiness implies usefulness. I think the best argument against my position is that if stickiness implies usefulness, it doesn't guarantee in which domain it will be useful. I have assumed something like usefulness in terms of recognizing large-scale casual patterns, but something could be sticky because it enables power dynamics and those in power have an incentive to keep the mythology going. Surely this DOES happen. So good points all around. Thank you for engaging.
Babel
I was raised without religion, only child in the whole school sent off to the library for Religous Instruction lessons. When I was about 13 or 14 my parents said I should investigate all religions. Make my own choice. I got right into it; Bahai, Catholic, Anglican, Buddhist, Hari Krishna at that time were wandering about with their bells which had appeal. It took a while but I decided they all seemed a bit ridiculous; hadn't been brainwashed from childhood and I've remained an atheist and am happy.
Jesus Christ I did not realize there were that many gods.
I believe in gosh
How can you NOT make this a free article for everyone to read?
Do you not have enough? I have nothing and this is the first thing I WANT to read from you, in a long time... Please make it possible. I'll share it everywhere.
I'm a free subscriber and I always receive everything from The Poetry of Reality and it is so inspiring.
Jesus lived but he is NOT my god. The only God I can believe in is this incredible universe that this planet inhabits - you can see it and you can research it. It’s majestic and unbelievable in itself.
Yes. I believe in nature. I believe in science. There’s grandeur in this way of life.
Joe Biden believes in God devoutly and still Joe Biden has suffered the most horrendous losses a human can bear repeatedly. Now he receives maybe the final blow for his devotion.
And in the face of all JBs suffering an evil clown walks the earth free as a bird inflicting pain and suffering everywhere as if he has a teflon coating.
That observation certainly makes me question the existence of a God.
thanks for the interesting read, including the comments!
I grew up in a Christian family with Christian traditional beliefs, and I have never once believed in any god
Well, belief is irrelevant. The Moon exists whether I believe in it and if I don't believe in it, it doesn't disappear. As for a creator God, God does not exist.
Is it ironic that one guy said "no, fuck that, "god" is inside each and every one of us, not inside a church. Carry my name forward so no other man has to." Even as an atheist myself, I still see how powerful and exact this human's message was to the world and how, if people carry his name forward, and nurture INNOCENCE and LIGHT in future generations, no one needs any more gods or god stories than that. Like it gives one the freedom to just live and stop dwelling on anything. It's a real freedom. I support it in anyone who sees the light in this manner. Accepting salvation is as valid a world view as seeking enlightenment. No one should coerce anyone into any beliefs and the most enlightened parents don't program their children anymore than they let their children program them. Make babies and support innocence. Screw cynicism.
> Do you believe in God?
> Which god?
> Thousands of gods [...]
Hey, that’s cheating—in real life, people don’t let you reply that long.
Seriously, if people always could afford to and were willing to reason with you, would there be any religion?
> Do you believe a scientific theory?
> Which scientific theory?
> All of them, there are thousands.
Hey, that's cheating etc
The good Brothers of the Sacred Heart spelled it out clearly for us in high school religion class. Faith is belief in God’s existence. Atheism is belief that god does not exist. The Agnostic - recognizing that both the above are unproven, untestable and not falsifiable - makes only hypothesis. <RIP Karl Popper>. This is liberating, even fun. I can equally test beliefs, speculate, engage, on literally ANY configuration of (to us) god-like entities. I can use any tools - Jung’s archetypes? How did we imprint them? Where do they reside and function now.? What about modern theories of everything? Fun. https://youtu.be/zLPT-0K0osU?si=RF3SnutOWEkMgOvz
Atheism isn’t the belief god does not exist, it’s the lack of a belief that a god does exist
Really? Ok. I think that’s agnosticism in my terms. Words - can’t live with them, can’t live without them. But if you insist that god does not exist- that too is based on belief, because it simply can’t be prove.
Like Bertrand Russell, most believers are hedging their bets just in case there is a God.
It’s no more “belief that can’t be proven” than is the scientist’s “belief” that the hypothesis is null until it has been. That’s all we atheists are saying: “Prove it”. Given the demonstrably human origin of both religion as a phenomenon and of individual religions, and given that convincing histories of both have been written that satisfactorily explain them in purely human terms with no supernatural remainder, I see no reason to “believe” that the god(s) hypothesis does not remain null, any more than the Santa Claus hypothesis. Note the “a-” in “atheist”. Belief, whether in the supernatural or its absence, doesn’t begin to figure in my world view. In fact, I find the whole god(s) issue as a viable proposition both variously tedious and funny. What’s endlessly fascinating is why our species should come up with such a raft of obvious nonsense to start with. Buddhists, (on my understanding) Taoists and the ancient Greeks recognised it for the absurdity it was, and each in their own way tried to figure out what was verifiably real. That’s always the way forward.
No worries. I agree with you that most religion is pure myth making. I would even say that it’s perhaps a major impediment to human evolution. But humans need their spirituality, some meaningful connection with the universe. I would like to see spirituality put on a more scientific basis.
As for scientific theories- they are not really ever fully proven - only supported as far as they are not falsified. Quantum theory, the most accurate theory in all science, is still considered incomplete. But I will take science over religion any day.
The joke is - the existence of God really can’t be disproven. The faithful think this is a strength. Logically, it is just an empty tautology.
No. Agnosticism or Gnosticism is about knowledge and theism or atheism are about belief. “I don’t believe in a god” and “I believe there are no gods” are two different statements
I understand that I cannot know whether or not Gods exist. Therefore, I don’t hold or assert that gods do or do not exist. I allow both possibilities, and shades in between. I am a … ?
That means that the term “agnostic” is redundant. If you don’t believe a god exists you’re an atheist
Do people here just hear something and believe it without checking their facts? Not very scientific.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/atheism
I’ve been saying exactly this for 30 years and everyone looks at me like I have two heads.
I get it. Happy to move on. But there is also a “strong form” of atheism that does believe (assert) that there is no god. My point: that is also a form of faith.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_and_explicit_atheism
So atheists believe that god might exist?
I don't understand why you don't get it. I lack any belief that God, the easter Bunny, Santa Claus, a toaster orbiting the sun, that there is someone out there who has five willies..... exists. My absence of belief is just that. An. absence. of. belief. There is NO belief. None. Belief is not present in my brain. The list of things that I do not believe is extremely long. I also do not believe that I will turn into a shrimp at 3:30 this afternoon. Can we move on now? Please?
We reject the claim that god does exist. If sufficient evidence is provided beyond reasonable doubt then yes
Again, try actually looking the word up rather than "knowing what it means in your heart" or whatever phrase you use for "knowing"
Are you talking to me?
My father identified as an atheist during my formative years, primarily influenced by his education in the West. Despite holding unique views, I successfully engaged him in theological discussions that led to his conversion by the time I turned sixteen. He passed away twenty years ago, but before that, he discovered your work in the late 1970s and developed a keen interest in it.
Not yet.