About Me
Who
My name is Matthew Wilkes and I’m a 23 year old software developer living in Edinburgh (United Kingdom) and for the last 2 years I have been quite a passionate Atheist.
About My Atheism
I have never been that religious. My parents didn’t go to church and even though we sang Hymns and were told Bible stories at my primary school it was never really forced down our throats. There were a few periods in my life where I believed in the Christian God and went to church with friends on my own accord but it always seemed silly to me. Up until 2 years ago I classed my self as Agnostic believing that Science couldn’t explain everything at the moment, therefore God must have intervened or had something to do with this universe that we live in. I started watching debates between Atheists and the Organised Religious and got seriously drawn in to them siding with the Atheists and Science supporters on every occasion. I didn’t realise how ignorant people were to what I had always considered basic scientific facts and common sense. This made me question many of my own irrational beliefs and realised the errors in the almost “God Of The Gaps” ideas that I held. From there I started listening to Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris, I gained an appreciation and better understanding of the Theory of Evolution and the current Hypotheses being put forward to explain Abiogenesis (the origin of life) and the Beginnings of the Universe. At this point I remember leaving the office and calling my girlfriend and told her that I was no longer agnostic. I don’t know why but it felt like a big deal for me. I then turned to the legends of YouTube, people like Thunderf00t, donexodus, Aronra and potholer54. My Atheism became a big part of my life. I started to sceptically analyse everything. I felt happier and more confident. I always hated being wrong and would always argue what I felt was true, I now know, “Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts”. A good understanding of the scientific method and Logical Fallacies, the world would be a better place if it were mandatory to teach skepticism and critical thinking from a young age.
My Interests
I didn’t do brilliantly in school though I would say I have always been a geek. Science fascinated me as well as computers, I loved working with logical systems and the more I learnt about computers, the more I applied that form of logic to real life, it gave me a different kind of appreciation for the world. Through my love of trying to understand the world I became fascinated with the human mind. For a long time I was a dualist, I couldn’t get my head around the idea that the mind was just a bunch of simple biological processing nodes which conformed to the laws of physics. I thought that there must be something deeper to it. I started reading about psychology and psychiatry to get a better understanding of things which made me start to realise that there is nothing metaphysical about our brains and thanks to my interest in computing I started to understand how logical systems can behave in an intelligent manor. Artificial Intelligence and Cognative sciences became my new favourite area of study. I believe that one thing I can really help with in the new Atheist community on YouTube, and that is an understanding of Intelligent systems. There are many excellent videos being made addressing quiestions from Creationists and the likes on all levels but there have been few mentions of how the mind really works. It never seems to be a focal point of videos or responses and I know from my experience of believing in the supernatural that the mind was the last thing that convinced me there was something more to reality.
