Thank for your comments. I'll try to respond to some of them, just for interest, but bear in mind I'm not trying to convince you of anything, so please just tak

Thank for your comments. I'll try to respond to some of them, just for interest, but bear in mind I'm not trying to convince you of anything, so please just take them as intended - a hopefully friendly and stimulating exchange of points of view. > I'm not sure that what you describe as "reasons" actually qualify as reasons. I'm assuming you don't believe in God, so I'd be surprised if you did think my reasons qualified as reasons! But they do for me. I wasn't trying to put forward my best arguments in order to try and convince someone. > This is a variant of a common creationist argument, often promoted by those who prefer the term "intelligent design" to "creationism." But so-called "intelligent design" is just a variant of hard-core creationism. I'm not exactly sure what your point is. To be clear, I don't think that God made things with a wave of a wand. There seems to be good evidence for the physical mechanism for the creation of lots of things. I think these mechanisms might be thought of as the tools of whoever created (and presumably architects) the universe. But who knows, I'm just speculating. To be honest, the details of the mechanism of creation don't seem very important to me right now. > This conflates two very different senses of the words "feel" and "feelings." Hunger is a biological sensation; your "feeling" that there is a God is not and is a very, very different kind of "feeling." Assuming you are an atheist, then I'm surprised you think there is any kind of feeling _other_ than biological ones. What type of feeling is my sense that there is a God, if not biological? Personally I have no clear opinion on what the origins of this feeling are, but all I know is I have it. > Consider this: if you had been left alone on a desert island as a child ... But you almost certainly would not have the "feeling" you have now that there is a God I don't know if there is any evidence to back this up, but I'd be interested to hear it. > and even if you did, that God would even more certainly not have the characteristics you ascribe to it now. I don't think I really ascribed any characteristics to God. But I do think it's interesting that different and unconnected people across the world, and through time, very often come to the conclusion that something/someone created the universe. > This is not really even intelligible. "I feel like there is a God, so I go and eat." was meant as a metaphor. People often say they "hunger" for things that are not food. Similarly, if one believes that there is a God to hunger for, then God is the food, and to accept this is to eat from God.