Why do people believe God is real?

Opinions

• As a young adult, I was trapped by the logical fallacy of a false dilemma, caught between the cold hard oblivion of Atheism and the the contradictory, wrathful and counternatural scriptures of Christianity. I had an epiphany, possibly even from on high, that no matter the number of conceptions of God (and Her nature) that humankind has forged, there are a vastly greater number of possibilities that remain unimagined. It is significantly more likely the truth of God is in the latter category than the former.

• There is a higher purpose in life. I don't know what that purpose is...But many things we know and experience indicate that something of "higher essence" is part of our existence - that we are partly made of something more than dust...Science may never understand why we come to tears when we listen to an old favorite song, why we laugh, why we may love someone so much that we may give our life to save theirs. Understanding how the human brain works will not answer the big question "why it works that way"...

• Lets make a distinction here between God and a creator. There is an entity referred to in the Bible as God. This is simply a fictitious character to whom all things great and wonderful are ascribed. This God in the Bible can walk on water and part seas. This fable God never did anything except fire up the imaginations of gullible people. While there is, in my opinion, a creator, this does, in no way, resemble the man made fairy tale in the Bible.

• God is real because He is and always has been! That's hard for us to comprehend in our limited minds, but He is real and made everything, including us! The only way to overcome that is to choose to believe that God is God and that He loves us and sent His son, Jesus, to come and die on a cross a long time ago to take away the bad things we as humans chose (our sin)! If we accept Jesus and believe in Him we can be right with God and He can help us be good. Someday when our bodies die we get to be in perfect heaven with Him!

• Everywhere you look you see God's handiwork. God created everything in the universe. Man is not his own god. Nor does he actually control things that are beyond his own comprehension. Real isn't just want you see it's also what you know. Even common sense tells you that something or someone created the universe with a grand design. You cannot prove feelings exist because feelings are not tangible. Feelings come from the human soul. Unlike your body, your soul is hidden from view, but it is just as real. It is the effects of God we see as real. Everything that has life in it comes from a life giving God. Can you create a human being from the dirt of the ground and breathe life into it and call it a living soul? You are the greatest proof that God exists. Study the human body and then come and tell me that it all just "happened" in the most perfect and complicated way without intelligent design.

• Considering the sheer size of our universe, we represent within it a smaller factor than what would be to the Earth, a specific patch of Spanish moss under the bark of a given Sequoia just northeast of Bodega Bay, California. It would be extremely anthropocentric to imagine the human race, or even the planet Earth is somehow significant to a grand purpose of the universe, let alone to assign relevance to each of the six-billion-plus individuals that reside here. Richard Dawkins (father of the meme) borrowed the term "Tooth Fairy Agnostic" or "Teapot Agnostic" (from Bertrand Russel's Teapot thought experiment) to better recognize those of us who cannot rule out the Christian god, but comprehend the severe improbability of His existence.

• I think God is real because [many of those who, in dire times, call to God for aid, receive it. Cancers go into remission. Lost children are found. Natural disasters are survived.] When I was bitten by a dog I called to God [and escaped peril]. When I have nightmares [God comforts me.] This why I believe God watches over us all.

• Why do people believe that God is real? Loneliness, a need to make sense out of what we cannot explain or understand, and a fear of death, I personally believe that the idea of God was created by powerful people to keep people under control and obedient, to strike fear into them to establish order and social control.

• People need to believe in something, or we go crazy from the horrors of modern life. But he doesn't exist, at least not as a conscious entity that controls the cosmos.

• All big philosophical questions cannot be answered via science, in the context of physical laws affecting matter. Great philosophers have tried to answer them but with no success. There are many logical arguments in favor of the existence of God (e.g. the teleological argument, the First Cause argument etc - see other related questions in WikiAnswers for arguments for/against God's existence), as well as against the existence of God. The bottom line is that we cannot prove or disprove God only with the scientific tools we have today. That is why a leap of faith is finally required to believe in the existence of God, or to believe in the non-existence of God.

• It amazes me the degree to which some of us extrapolate recklessly from a given indication that God exists. Sophisticated eye? Yahweh. Finely tuned universe? Yahweh. The standard model requires a theoretical boson that remains undetected? Yahweh. [We should] apply the principle of Occam's Razor: if there was a watchmaker, if we are designed by intelligence, would it not make more sense that the designer was a natural thing, rather than supernatural? If we were engineered, would it not be more prudent to seek out our engineer within the universe we live than without? We are far more likely to have been designed by three-legged invertebrate alien vampires who traverse space-time in spinning flying saucers than an omnipotent being that exists beyond the eleventh dimension. And this is still on the dubious presumption that we were designed.

• The world is so amazing and complex that people tend to assume a mastermind, or masterminds, must have designed it. People then figure that maybe, if they ask the God, or Gods for help or favors, they may get them.

• The need to search for and to be like God is embedded in each superconscious mind along with the plan for completing that goal. Most people at this point in our progression do not know where the desire comes from but always feel it. For those who must know what this is and why, these begin their search in earnest and will not be satisfied with what religion or school has to say about it. For me, I knew there was more, no doubt, but I had to find the means to understand it which I did.

• This question is actually two questions.

Q1: Why are humans driven to believe in [an abstract] God?

A: God as a notion emerges from the questions that arose from humans since the dawn of sapience: Who am I? From whence did I come? What is the purpose behind my existence? Even though science looks for "how" the world works, it does not look for the "why".

Notional God can be defined as the first cause from which the universe spawned, on the presumption that the past is finite. A point of beginning has made some sense since science took to the Big Bang theory, solidified by Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest. The universe is expanding, hence it was once smaller, perhaps infinitely so. His full concept was a "primeval atom" from which the universe spawned. A big bang at the beginning of the universe implies a start. The start of the universe implies a first cause, ergo: God.

Furthermore, we are social creatures, and are hence driven to seek a niche that defines how we participate in society, and this instinct translates easily to existance at large: what is my role in nature? What is my ultimate purpose? Our inherent desire to be part of a greater whole (civilization) has the side effect of creating a desire for absolute inclusion (divine purpose). Maybe that sense of purpose means that a purpose actally exists - that sounds logical to many people. Maybe that 'purpose' is something we want to exist, but does not.

This philosophical belief, called teleology (Greek 'telos' = end / purpose), is a very attractive proposition; we would rather imagine we are princes of the universe than incidental to its nature, and this drives us to make presumptions about God that are not evidenced by observations of nature, such as:

• God is sentient and aware.
• God is all powerful.
• We are God's intentional creations.
• We are modeled after God.
• God has a specific plan for each of us, and for humankind.
• God is benevolent, and wishes us health and happiness.
• God watches each of us, and intervenes on our behalf, especially when we find ourselves in dire straits.

And thus, we have the foundations of the archetypal human concepts of God.

Whether such a 'divine creator' exists cannot be proved or disproved via hard scientific evidence. Scientists axiomatically believe that the world consists of particles and physical laws governing their behaviour. Taking that for a starting point, it is logical that no hard evidence can be found for the existence of anything spiritual in the cosmos. Any indications (like the ones mentioned above: First Cause, Teleology) are more a matter of philosophical debate rather than something LHC will answer...

Q2: Why do humans believe in [a given] God (In this case, specifically Jesus or Yahweh?)

A: The most common reason people believe in the Biblical god is because they were dictated Him in their childhood. As Homo Sapiens is extremely adaptable to clime and circumstance, one of the mechanisms that improves our survival is the open-architecture nature of our minds. We are born with very few instincts, and hence must be taught much by our nurturers (usually, our parents) about how to survive in the specific environment in which we live. Much of Christian dogma is framed in the context of survival: those who toe the line of the Christian faith gain immortality and salvation, where those who do not face the eternal wrath of a vengeful deity. So hereditary religious faith can be explained as a side effect of one of our principal survival mechanisms: our inclination to learn non-critically when we are children. (But note the afterthought, below.)

Humans are also inclined to stay faithful to the religion of their upbringing. In psychology, this is due to a psychological phenomenon called attitude polarization; once humans establish for themselves a specific belief, they seek out and strongly regard new data that confirms this belief, and avoid and disregard new data that is contrary to it. We actually get a mild endorphin rush from hearing someone agree with us, or express an opinion that supports what we already believe. We can see the consequences of this in the wedge partisanship that runs rampant in US politics.

There's a Jesuit saying (either from St. Ignatius of Loyola or St. Francis Xavier) "Give me a child for for his first seven years and I'll give you the man." It usually takes a significant amount of effort and thought or an identity crisis (such as one's sexual orientation being condemned by one's ministry, or a personal betrayal that is not acknowledged by the religious community) to propel a human to change their hereditary belief system at a root level. This is why missionary efforts even to this day seek out children, the downtrodden and the desperate to mine for new converts.

First answer by ID0081826611. Last edit by Tarkin. Contributor trust: 13 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 67 [recommend question]