Atheism and Imagination

Perhaps the biggest problem with trying to argue against atheism is that it seems like each atheist has to be taken on an individual basis. There don't seem to be particularly well-defined schools of atheism in popular culture...just individuals who develop pet theories as to why God shouldn't exist who grab snippets from their favorite crankcase authors.
At least that's my experience of the matter.
Maybe some one can point me towards a good book that offers a taxonomy of different species of God-deniers.

For instance, is there a reasonable generalization that can be made about atheism and imagination?

Do atheists simply lack sufficient imagination to really understand what us believers are trying to articulate? Or do atheists become so attached to their own imagined cosmologies that they can't shake the thought out of their own heads? That is, do atheists suffer from a lack of imagination or too much of it?

Listening to various atheists on Youtube, one often hears the phrase "I can't imagine an all-loving God who would..."
Do they just use the phrase "I can't imagine" as a common figure of speech, or does it hit something deeper?

For my part, I find it extremely easy to imagine a world in which God does not exist.

I haven't actually perceived God in any directly physical way. Even when I encounter Christ's physical presence, he doesn't look very much like himself.

Thus, it is very easy for me to imagine that nothing has happened at Mass. I have no problem myself imagining a universe that is moving like a big, randomly self-assembled machine. I have no problem mulling over the thought that I might just be a very sophisticated product of evolution, that consciousness and free will are illusions that developed out of a process of selection, and that love is nothing more than a man-made construct that yields favorable conditions for a society's perpetuation.

I can imagine all of these things. They all seem perfectly reasonable positions to hold in light of science.

But I don't believe them.

Comments

[Samuel Skinner]

Kinds of atheists...?

Evidential.
Rejects due to lack of evidence.

Existance of evil.
Also known as "angry" atheists.

Scientific.
Naturalist and materialists. Reject God because of Occum's Razor.

Religious.
Reject Gods because their religion excludes Gods or out of faith.

Implicit.
Never heard of religion.

"But I don't believe them."

Your belief is not required. Reality cares not- it is.

[PeterTerp]

Hi, Sam,

I can certainly see how all of those things can contribute to atheism, but I have a hard time separating them in practice.
From reading and listening to atheists, I get the impression that they usually have a personal gripe with particular Christians they encountered in life that set them on a path to discount and distrust religious authority or philosophic reason.
I think of the vitriol that Dawkins and Hitchins spew...and the way that Dawkins finds the most repellent thing about God that He might be a being that actually deserves our submission.
No amount of evidence or reasoning will ever convince such a person of God's existence because his atheism stems not from a scientific worldview, but a personal conviction that makes him hate the notion of a Great Chain of Being. I rather imagine that even if God did come in a glorious triumph, Dawkins would still reject His existence on principle. He'd probably think God was an imperialist alien.