Logic tells me God doesn't exist but my heart says otherwise.

[bennyboy]

First off your heart does not do the thinking, your brain is the organ that does the thinking.

Your brain does all the feeling, too. Just because something isn't accessible at the conscious level, or isn't comprehensible as a logical argument, doesn't mean it isn't of the brain, or that it isn't something important to the human experience.

I'm not so sure what causes religious feelings. I'm not sure I can see the evolutionary value of having them. But certainly, they are a big part of the human experience (though not all would call them "religious"). Maybe if we could better understand what the brain is doing when we have religious feelings, we could figure out the evolutionary value, and turn a counterproductive superstitious impulse into a superpowerful subconscious assistant.

One of the problems with science and atheism is that feelings sometimes get disregarded as unimportant or unsignificant, in place of logic exclusively as a way of processing the world. To me, that's not a good thing.