Not bad! I routinely shoot down arguments for God, spirit, etc… but mostly because they pretend to objective validity. This approach looks inherently subjective to me and I think that is much better. I think dealing with the subjective necessities of our life is the whole point.
My reasons for belief… perhaps it is time for me to post these again…
- As a physicist I have to ask myself as other physicists have asked themselves whether life as we experience really can be summed up in the mathematical equations of physics. My necessarily subjective conclusion, the same as many others, is that the very idea is absurd. Science puts our experience through the filter of mathematical glasses and to be sure this methodology has proven marvelously successful at not only explaining many things but discovering new things about the world that we never expected. But this is just looking at life in one particular way and I think it is quite foolish to confuse this way of looking at things with the reality itself.
- It was through existentialism that I made a connection that first gave some meaning to the word “God” for me (I was not raised in a religion unless it is the “religions” of liberalism and psychology). I came to the conclusion that the most fundamental existentialist faith was the faith that life was worth living. I also concluded that for theists their faith in God played the same role for them in their lives, suggesting that the two kinds of faith were really the same thing in different words. That equivalence basically became my working definition for “God”, and from there it was a matter of judging what understanding of God best served that purpose.
- Physicists experience shock and cognitive dissonance when they first understand what quantum physics is saying for it seems to contradict the logical premises of physics and scientific inquiry itself. But there is one thing that makes sense of it to me at least. If the universe was the creation of a deity who wanted keep his fingers in events then these facts of quantum physics would provide a back door in the laws of nature through which He could do so without disturbing the laws of nature. I am not saying that any such conclusion is necessitated by the scientific facts; only that on this subjective level where quantum physics created such cognitive dissonance for so many physicists, that this idea would make sense of it – to me
- I have considerable sympathy with the sentiments of the eastern mystics that logic is stultifying trap for human thought and consciousness. The result is that even if I found no other reasons to believe in a God or a spiritual side to reality and human existence I would very much see the need to fabricate them for the sake of our own liberty of thought. We need a belief in something transcendent in order for us transcend the limitations of logic and mundane (or material) reasons to give our uniquely human ability for abstraction more substance and life.
- I feel there are profound pragmatic reasons to reject the idea that reality is exclusively objective because it immediately takes any conviction about reality to a conclusion that the people who disagree with you are detached from reality and delusional or in some other way defective, I don’t believe that this is at all conducive to the values and ideals of a free society. The plain fact is that our direct contact with reality is wholly subjective and it is the objective which is the abstraction that has to be fabricated. Now I certainly think there is very good evidence that there is an objective aspect to reality but I see nothing to support taking this to the extreme of presuming that reality is exclusively objective.
And here is link1 and link2 to explanations of how these connect up to what I believe.
But are these actually biological? Or are they something which has risen in quite a separate part of our existence with its own process of development and inheritance apart from the biological one? Again I think the highly subjective nature of these are the greatest hint for them being on the right track. IOW skeptics can simply doubt the reality these feeling apart from more physical experiences – dismissing them as imaginary (and they have done so many times). Sounds like the right category of existence to me.
Now if you were talking about morality I would totally agree with an evolutionary origin. I think morality is a necessity for all organisms which participate in any kind of community. And if what we have is different from other animals it is only because we have this non-biological aspect of our existence in language and the human mind by which we give a conceptual dimension to morality which animals do not have (at least not yet as far as we can tell).
I grew up mostly outside religion, unless you characterize psychology and liberalism as such. Though I did go to a Catholic school for one year (sixth grade, last year of elementary school). And I did get introduced the Narnia series (as well as Tolkein) at that time. So I was coming much from the opposite direction, starting with science and then peeking into religion to decide if any of that stuff was worth my time and consideration.