Do you wish there's a god?

[pocaracas]

And how do you suppose you come to hold a belief?
What is the mental mechanism that leads to a particular belief?

How biological creatures like ourselves form beliefs, and our perceptions of reality, is quite messy if anything, and not really the product of surgical precision. “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man”.

If you grew up with terrible parents, an absent father, it’s going affect your perception of reality itself, just as if one was raised by loving and kind parents. Just as it would be for a man in a happy and committed marriage, and a man whose been divorced multiple times.

Also many of things we believe are not the result of any real rational deduction on our part, but a result of seeing, of having something shown to us, that we might struggle to adequately articulate or express, but believe as result of seeing, more so than hearing.

Messy indeed... and that is why belief systems seem to have a regional component, at least, prior to easy worldwide travel.

Why is it important to you to be part of a created order? What if there's no order?
Why is it important to you to have a life with a narrative arc? Time does flow forward, and that's enough. The end comes to us all, each at our time.
Why is it important to you to have a moral order, and recognize right from wrong? Perhaps because you live in a society and such a trait has been bred into you by "evolution”?

I don’t see my beliefs in these things as result of ascribing importance to them. Anymore so than I believe I have two hands because I think it’s important to believe I do. 

It’s how I see the world, it’s the way the world appears to me. The arguments otherwise seems quite unconvincing. It’s hard for me to see those who try and make the counter argument as being honest with themselves. They seem to reject these things more so because they don’t want to believe it, rather than because it’s not true.

If you see the world with a "created order", then I'd say you're assuming a lot about the world. Mainly the created bit.
From my point of view, the "moral order" which you mentioned is simply related to general agreed upon behaviors among a social population that lead to the survival of that population. along with the betterment of the population as a whole. I'm using betterment here to mean, less suffering, easier access to food and mates, more protection against threats, etc...

I think many of the things you're taking on faith are the product of evolution within a social species, one that has found that if all elements of the population to behave in a particular way, the result is better for the population. It's probably been a very long series of trial and error, coupled with some introspection... and I see no need to believe that some external entity bestowed these features upon our species.

Life appears to point to something. Our desire for truth, meaning, goodness, a sense of the sacred, the basis of which we created religions in the first place, because man is under the impression that there’s something behind the curtain. Now perhaps this is mirage, yet we seem to posses an innate desire to chase it, as if it’s there.

I'd wager that the drive to believe in the transcendent is also an evolved trait. One that is also quite recent and that can be why we have a large part of the global population that finds such belief baffling, the atheists.

Why evolve such a drive towards belief? Perhaps, initially, to keep the mind from pondering questions for which society was not equipped to provide an answer, and keep the people dedicated to their "jobs", producing food and tools and practical stuff. Eventually, it would have taken over a majority of the population and then disbelief would have been selected against, as believers would find it easier to breed and survive. At some threshold in the ratio of believers/disbelievers, the disbelievers would have started to be banned from society, shunned, mocked.... barred from producing offspring. And belief got selected for even further.
And, nowadays, you have this innate "impression that there's something behind the curtain". You've been selected to think like that... a selection typically reinforced by indoctrination. While I don't have that impression, unless you mean physics is behind the curtain.

Truth and goodness are, again, societal traits. Only meaningful when the individual practicing them in embedded in a society. Again, they are evolved traits that most of us share, although most of us are also capable of bending these... hinting at them being relatively recent in the evolutionary chain.





They could all be evolved traits, but in order for trait to be evolved, there has to have been the potential for such traits to have evolved. Consciousness is not going to ever arise from legos, because legos lack the potential to produce consciousness, no matter what combinations are formed. 

Secondly goodness and truth, aren’t reducible to evolved traits, just the recognition of them. We couldn’t evolve to recognize truth, unless truth exists in the first place, as part of reality. And the same with goodness. We perceived goodness as we do truth, only because goodness exist in reality itself. When we see the wrongness of the holocaust, we recognizing an objective truth about reality, just as when we recognize a round ball, or a yellow dress.

Are you wanting to argue that metaphysics comes before physics?
I would counter with metaphysics possibly being the product of our pattern seeking brains observing and classifying apparent patterns in reality.


Truth then becomes an aspect of a statement. We can even call it metadata. Any particular statement has a truth value.
I would argue that such a value would be as closer to absolutely true, let's say 100%, as the statement accurately portrays reality. And it would be as close to false, 0%, as it fails to portray reality.
As such, the truth metadata (and, indeed, any metadata pertaining to a particular statement) only begins to exist as the statement is made.

You can say that there's a generalized truth notion, or concept, which is the actual definition of the statement's truth metadata I gave above, so that any and all statements carry that truth metadata. But then this truth concept would only have begun to exist when the first statement was made, when language of some sort was invented for communication among individuals.

Language of some sort and communication come prior to truth.
Not necessarily communication as we intuitively think of, with words and stuff.... we evolved from apes and we know that apes have an array of non-verbal communication skills... many mammals use smell for communication... even our stomachs somehow communicate with our brains to let upper management know that it's full. Sometimes, the stomach is full, but the "full signal" is not going... the stomach is lying. Some sort of society is in operation among the different parts of the body, and society requires communication.
In the absence of society, however, with no communication, the concept of truth is meaningless... which is to say, doesn't exist. It's a pattern that doesn't appear in a reality without communication.
But what I was saying above is that metaphysics itself is probably a product of the human brain. We would classify the stomach incorrectly communicating with the brain as producing a not true "statement". But would such truth value exist in the absence of our classification? Is it that what exists is just the signal that the stomach can send and we then ascribe a classification on top?


The same sort of argument holds for goodness, wrongness, yellowness, roundness, etc... these are all classifications produced by humans upon recognizing certain patterns in reality and then extrapolating them to produce a generalized conceptual pattern which can be applied to similar parts of reality.
Similar, because while we may say that the sun has yellowness and roundness, I can't associate goodness or truthfulness with it.