What is God?

[Mudhammam]

I do agree that any theism involving gods is an incorrect attribution. I'm just saying there is something intrinsic to our subjective experience which naturally lends itself to being understood as the presence of gods. The more controversial part of what I'm saying is that this something intrinsic represents something real about us which is best not ignored. Theism has an advantage over nothing-but atheism by virtue of at least providing a handle for this aspect of our consciousness. But atheists need no more be shackled to a nothing-but-rational-calculation understanding of consciousness than theists need be shackled to a literal understanding of religion.

The something intrinsic to our experience for which gods are such a natural fit can be even more adequately accounted for without gods. But it isn't something science can put in a pill for you. It involves dancing with an internal otherness which is with you but not narrowly you. It isn't about schizophrenia or split personalities or any sort of pathology for that matter. It is about reaching for wholeness by letting in more without immediately squeezing it to death with an overly controlling grip. It is about integration, not conquest. Anyhow, that is the way I see it.

Sorry to quote from Dan Dennett's Breaking the Spell at such length, but I think he offers a pretty plausible explanation that exceeds any notion of a "God center" in the brain:

Sweet-tooth theories: First, consider the variety of things we like to ingest or otherwise insert into our bodies: sugar, fat, alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, nicotine, marijuana, and opium for a start. In each case, there is an evolved receptor system in the body designed to detect substances (either ingested or constructed within the body, such as the endorphins or endogenously created morphine analogues) that these favorites have in high concentration. Over the ages, our clever species has gone prospecting, sampling just about everything in the environment, and after millennia of trial and error has managed to discover ways of gathering and concentrating these special substances so that we can use them to (over) stimulate our innate systems. The Martians may wonder if there are also genetically evolved systems in our bodies that are designed to respond to something that religions provide in intensified form. Many have thought so. Karl Marx may have been more right than he knew when he called religion the opiate of the masses. Might we have a god center in our brains along with our sweet tooth? What would it be for? What would pay for it? As Richard Dawkins puts it, "If neuroscientists find a 'god center' in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me want to know why the god center evolved. Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god center survive better than rivals who did not?" (2004b, p. 14).
If any such evolutionary account is correct, then those with a god center not only survived better than those without one; they tended to have more offspring. But we should carefully set aside the anachronism involved in thinking of this hypothesized innate system as a "god center," since its original target may have been quite unlike the intense stuff that turns it on today — we don't have an innate chocolate-ice-cream center in the brain, after all, or a nicotine center. God may just be the latest and most intense confection that triggers the whatsis center in so many people. What benefit accrued to those who satisfied their whatsis craving? It could even be that there isn't and never has been any actual target in the world to obtain, but just an imaginary or virtual target, in effect: it's been the seeking, not the getting, that has had a fitness advantage.

(Bold mine

Basically, our brains have evolved with an insatiable desire to seek and ask questions, part in parcel to our ability to organize and transmit thoughts via complex languages. God is a meme, perhaps a virus, that our species is just beginning to overcome now that tangible answers to our questions have proven themselves available by ever-improving methods.

As to the mysterious quality one feels when pondering the apparent duality of the self...a product of trillions of nerve cells with no locus or center of identification in the brain...this might naturally lead to conversations with dead ancestors.. or a guy in the sky...or a tree...or a teddy bear...but I don't find that very compelling for God's existence.