Well, if the anecdote my mother tells is accurate, then my atheism is a theism fail. The claim is that when I was somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6 (I don't know exactly, but the story is attached to us living in a particular place, and those are the ages between which I lived there) I proudly declared to her that I didn't believe in God. She acknowledged this with a maternal "that's nice, dear" kind of response. Later she was talking to a friend of the family who was a Rabbi and repeated what I'd said in a "kids say the darndest things" kind of way. The Rabbi told her that I'd gone to see him without her knowledge and had grilled him about the existence or non-existence of God. He said that I'd asked deeper, more thoughtful, and more probing questions than the majority of adults he'd spoken to on the subject, including fellow Rabbis. "If that child," so the story goes he said, "tells you he doesn't believe in God - you believe him".
I have no memory of this whatsoever, and I take it with a huge pinch of salt, personally, given that it's being told from the perspective of a proud mother but it's the only account of its kind that I have, and I have no memory of ever being anything other than an atheist. Well, except for a vague memory of one afternoon in the same place and therefore around the same age when a fellow kid told me about hell and scared me enough to Pascal's Wager myself into belief for a couple of hours until I told my mother (again), and she asked me whether that's what I really believed, to which the obvious and immediate answer was "no".
Again, take that anecdote with a pinch of salt, as it's from the perspective of a very young child from longer ago than I'd care to admit, and I know how tricky memory can be and therefore how likely it is for even major details of that memory being wrong.
I suppose the science success aspect comes in a little later in life. When I was a teenager I had a very vague belief in some New-Age stuff like reading runes, doing Tarot, crystals, the existence of auras, and that kind of nonsense. But it was only vague, and I never really gave it much thought - I didn't really think of any of that as more than a kind of game, I don't think. And there was plenty of that kind of stuff I just simply didn't find even remotely credible even then - like ghosts, or ouija boards, to give two examples I remember off the top of my head. I don't even know when I stopped even that vague belief, but I'd wager it likely coincided with learning more about logic and empiricism. Since those beliefs don't stand up to any even slight scrutiny, it's not a stretch to think that the increase of the one led to the decrease in the other, even if I didn't actually put much conscious thought into it and instead they just sort of vaguely faded from the background of my mind.
So that's me. Not very interesting, and with no big moments of any kind, just a sort of bunch of stuff.
