From atheism to tentative agnosticism

[Inigo]

And so it would take the existence of such an agent to vindicate those sensations and beliefs. Atheism is the view that there is no god or gods and thus that all such sensations are hallucinations and that all beliefs in god are false.

There is no specific atheist belief regarding feelings that there is a god, I personally think the feelings of spirituality are bullshit but not because of hallucinations or falseness, I just think the body can feel ecstatic, deep and/or emotional and that this is misinterpreted as being something supernatural or religious. So i would agree with you when you use the word false but not when you say the feelings must be hallucinations, I believe the feelings are real but just that they aren't from god, they are biological.

You may be right about sensations of a god. I do not have any such sensations and so I cannot directly attest to their existence. But the point is that the existence of a sensation does not entail the existence of the thing the sensation gives the impression of. Sometimes it does. For instance, if you sense that you are in pain, you are in pain (you can't really have the hallucination of pain). But if I see a pig it does not follow that there is a pig in front of me, for I may be hallucinating (I may just be dreaming).

So if - if - there is something like a 'sense of god' this would not show a god to exist. It would just show that sensations that give the impression of the existence of a god exist. If atheism is true then these sensations would constitute hallucinations.

My point - my worry - is that if atheism is true then our moral sensations constitute hallucinations too. They are hallucinations of external instructions that have rational authority. No such things exist, it seems to me, if atheism is true. The sensations exist - that's not in any doubt at all. But moral sensations are not like pain sensations. Moral sensations give us the impression of external instructions that have rational authority. There would need to be such things 'out there' so to speak for those sensations to be anything other than hallucinations that helped our ancestors make more babies.