I first started to realise in an overt way that I was an atheist around eleven or twelve years of age. I can ascribe my being an atheist to three main factors, the first of which is by far the most important. This first factor is SCIENCE. I was (and am) blessed with parents who fostered my interest in science, engineering and technology from a very early age. When I was four or five, I got a wonderful children's science encyclopaedia. My mother, in a move that would probably have her burnt as a witch these days but then (late 60's, early 70's) was fairly ordinary, gave up her career to look after her children when they were born. She also committed the cardinal crime in the educationally progressive days of the 70's of teaching me to read as soon as was feasible. I could read reasonably well by the time I was 3 1/2. This caused ructions when I eventually went to school as the teacher felt her role had been usurped, and also the fact I was about four years ahead of the other children in reading and maths (arithmetic, really) might make them feel inadequate. But that's another story...

Anyway, I got this wonderful encyclopaedia, which had sections on anything and everything to do with science in language a small boy could understand, from Why The Sky Is Blue, through How A Petrol Engine Works to areas which, looking back, were decidedly odd for a so-called child's encyclopaedia. I particularly recall the section on the electronic shell configuration of the elements and the discussion of quarks. But, and this is a big BUT, there was no mention of God. He was simply absent from any discussion.

Then, for Christmas 1978, I got one of the most fabulous books I have ever read. It was The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, edited By Simon and Jacqueline Mitton. This was a very serious book, hundreds of pages and aimed, in reality, at an adult audience and not a nine-year old astronomy nut like me. But the one thing that would get my parents to go ballistic was to suggest that a book was 'too old' for me. They realised that if a book was genuinely beyond me then I would find that out that for myself. Incidentally, this encyclopaedia in no small way got me where I am today: I had a 'viva voce' oral examination for my finals for my Physics BSc and one of the things the examiner asked me to do was draw a 'Hertzsprung-Russell' diagram of luminosity of stars vs. temperature. He practically had to beg me to shut up. I went up a whole degree grade, which let me do a PhD, which meant I met so-and-so, and that led to a job offer in Costa Rica...but I digress once more.

In all of the scientific education I received and gave myself, God was absent. As Bernoulli said, I had no need of that hypothesis. Science taught me the principle of Occam's razor. If you can remove a cog from the machine and it keeps on running then the cog was redundant. No-one could demonstrate to me how a universe with their god in it differed from one without it.

The second factor was again due to my parents. My mother was raised in a family of fairly devout Methodists. She was inculcated (in the true sense of the word) to be religious. My father was raised as a very strict Irish/Scottish Catholic, and educated by Jesuit priests. He took many, many years to throw off the shackles of his religion and come to terms with the damage it had cause him. For a time, however, we attended church (Catholic, naturally - my mother had to be converted to marry my father) every Sunday. If there is a more effective way of creating little atheists than make them sit for two hours on a sunny Sunday in a smelly, dank Abbey when they would rather be playing with their Lego or watching TV, I don't know what it is. I found all of the ritual simply baffling. Why would God need a little bell to be rung at the high point of the service, or some crusty old buffer to be swinging a thurible around? Did God like the smell of incense?

The third factor was school. I went to a prep school and afterwards public school (note for non-UK readers: 'public' here means private). I met here for the first time other children who doubted the existence of God, and could argue their case. My doubts really started to emerge, and were finally cemented, I guess, at the age of around thirteen.

After that came university (where I studied Physics, with its insistence on empirical observation), my discovery of 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins, and my interest in evolutionary biology and cosmology. I also acquired a desire to be an argumentative S.O.B. and there was no more fertile territory for causing raised blood pressure than religious believers. I never get angry when I argue (I prefer to think of it as 'debate') and it was in discussions with some otherwise apparently rational people that I became more fully aware of the controversies surrounding, for example, the teaching of evolution in American schools. It was here that my atheism, which before had been rather inchoate, started to become more fully rationalised, and I started to invent, acquire and rehearse some of the arguments for atheism.

I never really followed the whole line of 'if God is so good, then why does He: let little children starve/cause earthquakes/permit the existence of boy bands' and other sundry evils. If God created the universe, then He can do what the hell (!) he likes with it. I was only really concerned with the *necessity* of God. Everything I read and studied for many years of very hard work explicitly rejected God as an explanation of anything. I didn't become an atheist because of some terrible life experience, or because my life has been one big bowl of roses. I intellectualised away my religion as having no bearing on my existence or behaviour, and as having no discernible effects on the existence or behaviour of the Universe. A God that you can't see, hear, touch or taste and that has no effect on the universe is identical empirically to one that doesn't exist. And then there's all the knock-down arguments like Dawkins' refutation of Paley's Watchmaker (if the existence of complexity requires a designer, then the existence of the designer requires the same explanation). It's theology's dirty little secret that in ten thousand years of God-bothering no-one has come up with an answer to the question, "Mummy, who made God?" I became an atheist because it fits the observations better. Any religiosity that I might have had must have been fairly poorly embedded because it certainly evaporated without too much trauma. Maybe I was just lucky.

Anyway, sorry to ramble on at such length.

Best wishes,

David Gillies