Why I am not an atheist. And also: Why I am not a believer.
An atheist does not believe in the existence of God; s/he denies His existence.
A believer believes in the existence of God; it is a matter of faith.
Both beliefs (or convictions) presuppose somehow the meaning of existence itself. 'To exist' is synonymous with 'to be', but what does 'being' itself mean? Does 'being' have several or even many meanings? And if God were to be, which mode of being would pertain to His being? For a believer or a non-believer, such questions have no weight for pondering because it is only a matter of believing or negating a certain belief.
What modern science ascertains as true, in the sense of its hypothetical models being verified as correct, so far, by empirical scientific methodology, is contraposed to belief in God. For modern science there is no convincing empirical evidence for God's existence, and it also claims to have better, scientifically tested explanations for how the world came about (it seems always to be a question of origins in linear time). This amounts to a tacit assertion that the mode of being with which the modern sciences, starting with physics, deal is the one pertinent also to the question whether God exists. But the modern sciences apply, either directly or indirectly, only to physical kinds of movement of physical, material beings. They are unaware of the ontology of productive-efficient movement on which they are implicitly founded.
In eschewing the philosophical psychology of an Aristotle in his De Anima, even the psyche of modern psychology has had to be broken down to consciousness, and this consciousness somehow, without further investigation as to what it is (its essence), reduced (literally: led back) to a material base for it to be taken seriously from a modern scientific viewpoint. In this way, since it lacks 'material substance' in itself, the reduced psyche's movements becomes materially manipulable, which is what all modern science is about, culminating in psycho-pharmaceutics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Something called the 'psyche' or 'soul' in the traditional sense is useless for scientific purposes; its study an unprofitable line of research amounting, seemingly, to mere speculation. It is tacitly (or not so tacitly) assumed that the human psyche is an epiphenomenon of some kind of physical — say, neuronal-cerebral — movement, as we read in the OED on one of the significations of 'epiphenomenon': "Applied to consciousness regarded as a by-product of the material activities of the brain and nerve-system."
This way of thinking, however, skips over and suppresses the question concerning what the psyche is as a phenomenon in its own right, i.e. without material reduction to the status of an epiphenomenon. How is the human psyche itself to be conceived, not as a kind of being, but as a mode of being? And if it turns out, employing phenomenological methodology (cf. On Human Temporality), that the meaning of being itself is temporal and, in turn, time itself a three-dimensionally temporal openness, then the question concerning the mode of being of any entity at all becomes one concerning its mode of presencing and absencing in three-dimensional time, to which the psyche belongs. The psyche's openness to the world is precisely its 3D-temporality (and not solely its temporally one-dimensional sense-perception, as it has been traditionally). Both three-dimensional time and the psyche are pre-spatial and pre-material, and as such not amenable to treatment by modern science with its narrow-minded, empiricist methodology. For us mortal humans, who are the ones prone to asking whether God exists, and prior to any debates between modern science and religious belief, the question becomes one concerning a mode of 3D-temporal essencing.
The more fundamental, encompassing and liberating question, however, is that concerning three-dimensional time itself and how this temporal openness is passed through a fourth dimension to reach the human psyche. We belong to time.
Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
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