As an complementary explanation of the atheism that I adopted between the late '70s and mid-90s, I offer the following.
Sometime in the last decade, my nightime-just-before-falling-asleep revery became imagining the conditions of the early universe. That, or Jennifer Lawrence. One of the two.
When a non-believer like me starts to outline their reasons for non-belief, in my case, at least, it centers on the apparent fact that this is a physical universe consisting of physical things. That notional ontology can take you from considering that a wood table is real;
...back though the table's stages of manufacture;
...back through the wood's parent plant's stages of physical growth;
...back through the plant's evolution from a eukaryote;
...back through the eukaryote's evolution from archaea;
...back through the appearance of self-replicating molecules and metabolism and lipid vesicles that precede the appearance of "whole" living things;
...back through the creation of the chemical (multi-molecular) precursors of these, both on earth, and previously in the universe as some of the hundreds of molecules that form in clouds between the stars;
...back to the creation of the first heavier elements in the hearts of supernovas;
...back prior to the time of last scattering (recombination) where the CMB emerges;
...back through initial "big bang" nucleosynthesis that created hydrogen, helium and lithium in the very first few minutes.
Back and back and back and back ... almost ad infinitum.
And all of it is on extremely firm observational and experimental ground.
That's a lot of detail supporting the idea that this is a physical universe based on protons and neutrons and electrons - and their constituents.
When you compare the above to arguments for the various supernatural world views, one wonders where these supernatural components fit in the universe.
All of the physical bits can be verified in most elementary and secondary schools, and most colleges and universities. But Thor can't, and there's the problem. Where is Asgard? Where did Odin come from? Why does a universe need Asgard and the Norse Gods for earth to exist? And Yahweh? Yeah, right.
I should leave this piece as-is, except that what got me started today, was considering the formation of the solar system and the planets. So we turn the clock in the other direction and go forward from big bang and creation of the earliest stars to the pre-solar nebula; to the spinning presolar disk; to that first fusion of hydrogen in Sol; then on to the accretion of the planets.
From CE (Current Era) to 4.6 GYA, to 13.8 GYA. And back again. Assuming that between the time of last scattering (370k years after the big bang) to the creation of the first stars (100M years???) to the earliest supernovas and creation of heavier elements (110M years???) ... it may have been a billion years before there was sufficient quantities of heavier elements for the widespread production of the precursors to life. But that still leaves 8.2 billion years between then and the creation of the solar system. It may be that self-replicators and metabolism arose quadrillions of times in the universe before our planet formed. And its conceivable that protobionts arise anywhere in the universe where red and yellow dwarf stars have rock planets orbiting them stably. Several hundreds of million years appears to be what's required for the simplest organisms - bacteria and the like. If our world is any indication, it could take 1 or 2 billion years to go from bacteria to prokaryote to eukaryote, and then on to multicellular life, most places in the universe where worlds like ours exist.
Thought-provoking.
