Why do you believe in a God?

[ChildOfReason]

And the paranoid schizophrenic thinks that he's riding a unicorn.

I should go and add a fourth parameter to eliminate arguments from insanity.

I'm not quite sure, call it gut instinct or intuition or whatever you like. I may have lost a great deal of confidence in the faith I was born into but I've never really found myself questioning the existence of a deity per say.

I feel there have been several occasions in my life where my prayers were answered, and while I'm sure that could be attributed to sheer dumb luck I personally do not make that conclusion. Perhaps that might be superstition but I can't help sometimes but feel that everything happens for a reason, even the worst things that have happened in my life have (eventually) resulted in a positive of some form.

I also personally hold a belief in an afterlife, and I feel this belief has been empowered by my studies of world religions. No matter where you go in the world, men have formed some concept, no matter how strained or abstract of some sort of divine force and afterlife. Placed side by side, many of the ideas bear surprising similarities to one another; they believe in a realm of the dead, some sort of soul/presence and the unifying power of a divinity(s) or holy spirit(s).

I don't doubt humans have made many countless mistakes in the past, but when civilizations which can't possibly have had contact with one another for several thousands of years begin formulating concepts such as the soul entirely independent of one another yet remarkably similar in concept I cannot help but wonder if there is something in it. We know today that fish contains omega-3 which is good for the brain but the ancient Egyptians knew little of chemistry but were aware of this more than six thousand years ago. I don't know how they worked that out, but they knew somehow.

I'm sure this all sounds like the ramblings of a madman, but they're just my first thoughts on the topic.

I respect that you're being civil, but you're violating parameter four. You're not really saying anything that would make sense to anyone else. I have a request for you, and that request is that when you're in the shower or on the toilet or can't go to sleep, sit down, and force yourself to question these things. Just think about how science has taught us so many things, and opened our eyes up to how our universe was formed over so many years, without any evidence of some consciousness driving it. I find it so hard in this age of information, to look up at the stars, know how stars are formed naturally, as weak interaction takes place between atoms and create fusion, creating more elements, elements which then spewed out into the rest of our universe and formed planets and other stars in this massive chain, and still say that god did it.