Just a question - please don't answer straight away but have a think...
Do you;
Wish you could believe in a creator but sadly find the current scientific establishment in favour of "evolution"* i.e. Biological evolution, Big Bang, multiple universes etc
Or;
Feel glad you are not "accountable" to a creator, do not wish one to exist and find the approval of that view by the scientific establishment reassuring.
That's a tough sort of question, and I don't really think I fit into the either/or of it, given my feelings on religion/creationism aren't quite so deeply rooted in science as one might think, given the way I talk on this forum.
While I'll certainly make no grand claims about my own intelligence or insight, not overly confident in either, I'm not ashamed to claim I've always been a fairly astute observer, and as a child I had a very keen interest in learning everything I could about the world. My family wasn't religious, but they weren't atheist either, and made no active efforts to 'turn me off' religion. Thus, in my youth, I was very willing to consider the Supernatural, to toe the waters of religion, and contemplate belief in a creator.
I attended church, bible studies, and youth activities many times with my more religious friends, watched their strange religious cartoons portraying the story of David and Goliath, Moses, etc., and saw the appeal of belief to the extent an outsider could. I had questions though, lots and lots of questions, and when I put these questions to my religious friends, their religious parents, the preachers and teachers and authority figures of their religious meetings/activities, the general response was annoyance, and the insistence that these things weren't to be questioned.
As a highly curious kid that was a big turn-off, and what was more, I couldn't help but notice an emptiness to rituals they all suggested should be full and enriching. Often I heard people talking about prayer as a conversation with God, often I heard people claim that God spoke to them, that they felt God, knew God, and if I prayed with them, or ate the piece of bread, or sang along, or took a knee, I too would know/hear/feel God. Alas, every time I tried- and tried I did- I felt every bit as alone with my thoughts as I had previously, and a strong pressure from the others to pretend otherwise. This actually upset me quite a bit, and I remember tearfully confessing to one of these authorities that it wasn't working for me, that I wasn't feeling it, and that it felt wrong and bad to pretend, his response to my memory being to the tune of: 'Just keep trying, and eventually you will.', a sort of 'fake it till you make it' suggestion that I just couldn't maintain.
It was around that time that I became a fan of two new (to me) television programs, the WWF, and Benny Hinn's televangelism program. I loved both these shows for generally the same reason: massive crowds, crazy theatrics, people getting smacked and falling down (albeit for very different reasons), colorful costumes, and all with total conviction. It didn't take an astute observer to soon realize both these productions were fakes however. They were both using the same techniques and same tactics to tell generally the same lie; each portraying 'contact' that never actually takes place. The more Benny Hinn I watched, the more ridiculous it became, and the more people- massive crowds of people- seemed to believe it in spite of its obvious falsehoods, the more critical I became of religion in general, as I increasingly saw the reflection of his method present in all of it.
More and more it seemed to me that religion was a scam... every bit as amusing, distracting and in the end hollow of truth as The Undertaker's choke-slam, as Benny Hinn's tears, and the feeling I was supposed to feel but didn't when I prayed was the same feeling that the crowds of wrestling fans got when they chose to believe that choke-slam was real, that the match isn't rigged, that the cancer has been healed. I began to associate religion with self-deception.
Again, this was as a child, long before I had any real conception of what evolution was, what the big bang was, or how those theories conflicted or clashed with religious beliefs. While science has absolutely informed my atheism, it's by no means the source of it. As I've grown up and gotten older my skepticism has spread over much of the supernatural, some of that having to do with science, but a lot of it admittedly informed by my own experience and observations.
Work, for example, with the victims of serious brain-trauma, seeing the dramatic effect brain-injury has on a person's memory, personality, emotions, behaviors and beliefs, has made it extremely difficult for me to consider any kind of afterlife where those aspects of self remain intact. If a bump on the noggin can completely obliterate the person you were prior too it, that same person isn't going to survive the outright death of the brain.
Honestly, I'd like to be proven wrong. Preferably not with some apocalyptic scenario if it can be helped, but if Jesus came floating down from the heavens one day and said "Yo guys, totally real.", I'd be down. If a booming God-Voice echoed across the earth saying 'You guys need to chill out.' for all to hear, I'd be totally down. If a ghost introduced himself to me/the world, if a priest slapped a demon out of my sister, I'd be down. If ghosts and Gods and magic suddenly revealed themselves as real and didn't instantly go all Hellraiser on us, I'd likely be happier for it.
I just don't have it in me to pretend.