Reply #21: Why?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

I'm an agnostic in theory but an atheist in practice - in the absence of any evidence for a God or gods or an afterlife it seems reasonable to *act* as though they do not exist, and certainly not reasonable to act as though they do (the average over all possible gods and afterlifes is very much like atheism, I think), but there's no evidence that such a thing *doesn't* exist, and as such total certainty that it doesn't isn't justified.

I certainly worry about life after death, but it's not something I worry about much on the grounds that even if it does exist there's nothing I can do about it.

There's no reason there *should* be, but that doesn't mean one can be sure there isn't.