What an atheist wrote before he dropped dead when he was almost 21 years old.

Allan Glenn (December 6, 1984 - November 4, 2005.)

Allan died of complications resulting from cystic fibrosis on November 4, 2005.

He helped write part of a book (which I own):

"God's Word or Human Reason? An Inside Perspective on Creationism" by Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby, and Michael Keesey.

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I looked it up.

"Cystic fibrosis can't be prevented."

"A defect in the CFTR gene causes cystic fibrosis (CF). This gene makes a protein that controls the movement of salt and water in and out of your body's cells. In people who have CF, the gene makes a protein that doesn't work well. This causes thick, sticky mucus and very salty sweat."

The victims usually die at about age 37. Mr. Glenn died before he was 21 years old.

What he wrote shows how brilliant he was. I read it 3 times.

Allan Glenn wrote this to be read after his death.

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https://aintnogod.com/ipb/blog/2/entry-48-allan-glenn-aka-winace/

I was quite attracted to science. In addition to being utterly fascinating, I hoped it would help explain some of these questions. Surely, it would show that God must exist and perhaps confirm enough of the other material that it would be prudent to accept the rest. What I found, however, did not bode well for my beliefs. The world was a staggeringly bigger place, both in sheer size and age, than the Bible's genealogies from Adam and ancient cosmology (as state-of-the-art as it was in Babylonian times) suggested. The Noachic global deluge was unanimously rejected by Christian geologists as incompatible with evidence more than a century ago. And apparently, life was no longer as compelling an argument for a designer as it was in William Paley's time.

The last especially intrigued me. These scientists were saying complexity could arise without design (!), merely by virtue of simple patterns slowly culling order from chaos--evolution. I had a hard time believing it at first. So I began looking at the evidence, especially noting creationist "rebuttals."

The data spoke for itself. In every area I looked into in depth, from fossils to genetics, the only reasonable conclusion, one that elegantly accounted for the data in many disparate fields using one coherent explanation, was devastatingly obvious. Opposition arguments were, at best, unparsimonious or speculative compared with the mainstream view, and at worst, with even a little study, easily exposed as outdated and often blatantly dishonest, ideologically motivated nonsense rather than a sincere attempt to find the truth.

What was left? Hold out hope that the advance of science would be stemmed at some undetermined future point, reserving a privileged gap or two for the gods to hide in? Accept that life developed naturally, but nevertheless believe that God built the universe as some sort of humanity breeding ground? While others could no doubt live with these options, to me they seemed almost disingenuous, more an attempt to rationalize away damaging observations inside a particular worldview than adopting the one best supported by evidence in the first place. It seemed that the gods were nowhere to be found, and our ancestors were as wrong in postulating them to account for life as they were postulating them to explain thunderstorms or that blinding white ball in the sky. I officially became an agnostic.

But it wasn't over just yet. I continued voraciously reading everything on related subjects I could get my hands on: Apologetics and counter-apologetics; the social, psychological and historical aspects of religion; science and its relation to vindicating (or rather, contradicting) assorted views on the origin of reality and the afterlife; the epistemology of skepticism towards other things, including alien visitations and cryptozoology (i.e., the Loch Ness monster); and so on. Eventually, after trying to deny it for a while, I could no longer, in good conscience, even give lip service to the concept of theism.

Nowadays, I unambiguously believed, and was strongly confident that, the gods were made in our own image and nothing more. I'm proud to say I was an atheist in a (metaphorical) foxhole. And while lack of oxygen to the brain can impair good judgment, I nevertheless hope I remained true to my ideals to the bitter end.