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Originally Posted by Johnny Rotten
Well, atheism is not a leap of faith. It's a conclusion of logic based on a complete absence of verifiable data, independent corroboration, or repeatability of a given phenomenon. It is the opposite of faith.
The debate of divine existence, and its degrees and nature of intercession, goes around in circles like this because some people simply want to or need to believe. The world is already cruel enough without the distinct possibility that you will not, in fact, enter eternal paradise if you are a good Christian; that suffering and misery is not a Jobian test of spiritual resolve, but just the way life is; that the Devil didn't make them do it, nor was it God's will.
While formalized mysticism runs counter to Occam's Razor, so do we in general. Unlike scientific methods, slide rules and Bunsen burners, we possess the infection of hope -- hope that we individually or at least collectively belong to a higher purpose that is worth the gauntlet we run from the cradle to the grave.
So there is no explanation based in logic, because faith is a psychological attribute.
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I don't know that atheism needs to have anything to do with a commitment to logic. I've spoken with quite a few atheists who didn't really seem like they were all that concerned with framing their atheism in a logically rigorous way. On the other side, there are plenty of logical reasons to believe in a god. I don't think
logic is necessarily relevant in any kind of general way. Certainly you might be an atheist (I'm not sure if you are) out of a commitment to logic, but then one might wonder how such a commitment to logic can be reconciled with the fact that it is very difficult to make a sound logical argument that the universe behaves absolutely logically. At some point in any organized system of ideas, usually near the base, logical arguments evaporate and all we are left with are assumptions. Logic says nothing about the verifiability of these assumptions, just what they must mean if they are true.