God is what people made of him. An explanation that attempts to fill a void full of ignorance that in reality explains nothing, but it satisfies you.

I don't believe in god, but I believe he can exist. I am agnostic.

God is a broad subject but I would disagree with how every world religion defines "god". I don't think that if there is a creator, he has any impact on humanity

I am not going to believe in something that someone else told me to (My parents as an example.)

I have heard many of the bible stories, many of which I am skeptical. Splitting the sea, talking snakes, supernatural occurrences. I don't believe any of that to be possible.

I also don't to devote my life to a religion, along with allowing it to control how I live. What if I ended up following something in hopes of a afterlife, only for it not to happen?

Everything that was supposedly created by God can be fully explained by science.

I have never heard or found enough credible evidence to believe in anything paranormal. I’d believe evolution has produced life on other planets or universes and there are aliens out there before I’d believe in a creator. The God of the Bible is so immoral that if he truly exists I would never worship him. The Bible advocates women as chattel and not worth much, it advocates the owning of people as property that can be willed to your kids and you can beat them as long as they don’t die within a day or two. If a man rapes a young woman he can pay her father 50 sheckles and she has to marry her rapist.
All nonsense.
Fairy Tales, Noah’s Flood. Archeologists have proven there was no flood. And there’s no evidence a great number of people wondered the desert for 40 years.
The Genesis 1 story of creation couldn’t have happened the way it says, we know this .
Same issues with the Koran.
If you were born in India, you would be Hindu. WTH?
God didn’t make man, Man made God.

No I do not believe in any god or any sort of "supernatural" things. Empty claims that appeals to a magic being that "creates" things out of nothing by magic is impossible by definition. "supernatural magic" is never an explanation because it does not and can not explain anything, that also means (of course) that it can not be the answer to any question. They (believers) claim you can`t get something from nothing, at the same time they call this world and us a "creation". Well, "creation" if there even could be such a thing, would have to be from nothing by definition, in clear violation of the law of conservation of energy I might add. Every claim they make in an attempt to support their empty supernatural claim is just magic, magic, magic and more magic with no support in anything they can show to be real. The more time I spend listening to them trying to explain themselves the dumber their explanations become, in the end they even confuse themselves to such a degree that they have to end it all with the classic "well...you just gotta have faith". No, I do not have to believe blindly in empty claims of magic, you`re making no sense at all. I choose to think rationally, or at least try to

I was raised Protestant CofE Christian, but personally I find it impossible to believe as an adult now. The older I got, and the more I learnt about Christianity, other religions, and science, the harder I found it.

I read a Bible cover to cover for the first time when I was 10, and I remember being told off for it. It wasn't the Good News Bible my church had given me; it was just a standard Bible. And there were passages in the Old Testament about God commanding the death of people, and the authors explaining the proper ways to keep slaves, among other things.

I was confused. That was God. My God. The God. The God that made us all with love and wants nothing but the best for us. Commanding the death, and teaching the enslavement, of those He made and loves.

I couldn't understand it, and when I asked my teachers and my pastor, they told me I was too young to have read those passages, and I shouldn't worry about them. That I was in the wrong for reading the Bible.

I'm not sure that that's the right way to teach Christianity, but that disconnect was the beginning of my loss of faith. That disconnect between an unchanging, prime mover of a God who is full of love and compassion, and a God who condemns the humans He created to death because they annoy Him. The two cannot exist together, yet they do. How could a God that loves me and created me by hand, like He did all my peers, create some of us so that they end up on a path that forces him to smite them?

There were many other reasons I fell out of Christianity, but that was the main one.

In my desperation, I turned to other religions, trying to steady my free-falling worldview. Islam, Hinduiusm, Judaism, the Church of the Latter Day Saints... everywhere I could think of. My main takeway from that was everyone, especially the different Abrahamic religions, believed only their specific denomination was correct, and everyone else was wrong. Only their specific version of their God existed, and they could neither prove that their specific God did, nor that the others did not. I found that hard.

At the same time, I was getting older. I was learning more and more complex scientific theories and experiments. I remember struggling a great deal with the idea of evolution---how can we all have a common ancestor? Why are there still apes, if we evolved from them? That kind of thing.

Like I had done with religion, I spent some time trying to understand science. I learnt that we believe we had a common ancestor due to the massive similarities in our DNA with everything else we have record of, alive or extinct. I learnt about the many different mechanisms of evolution and speciation, which explained how two separated groups of the same species, like apes, could evolve into different apes, like humans and modern chimpanzees. We could evolve from apes, and apes could still exist. The new genetic information was built slowly over time, from genetic mutations that caused portions of our DNA to duplicate themselves and insert themselves back into our genome, with anything disadvantageous being weeded out via natural selection.

The problem I hit with that understanding was irreducible complexity. So much of the body relies on other parts of itself to function. If the photoreceptor cells at the back of the eye require the front of the eye to get light, how did they evolve? If cells require all their machinery to function, how could they gradually come into being? What I learnt looking into that is, they don't.

The cells at the back of your eye evolved first. It's called a simple eye, with just some receptor cells on the surface of an animal. There are plenty of animals alive today and in the fossil record with that. Then, we can track how, over time, a cup develops around that eye, making it more effective, meaning via natural selection it becomes more prevalent. That eventually forms an eyeball---and has done many different time in many separate species. In fact, the octopus did it much better than us.

As for cells, they only need all their machinery to function in the purpose they're in right now. There are much simplier single cell organisms than the single cells in us. And even then, we know single cells haven't always been as complex as some of the modern ones.

We don't know exactly how they got started, yes, but we do know that like all life they've been iterating on themselves. Not consciously, but because that's just the nature of life's mechanisms.

Something that blew my mind was learning about how we can track mitochondrial DNA at all, as a marker of family relation, if mitochondria are just one machine within human cells. Turns out, mitochondria evolved as a fully separate cell to the early ancestor of modern animal and plant cells.

The current theory, supported by ideas like these, is that the mitochondria, being a completely separate cell, ended up inside our ancestor cell, one way or another. We aren't sure how, but we have seen other cells live inside another before. The theory goes this relationship was beneficial, as our cell protected the mitochondria, and it could feed our cell the excess energy it produced. Thus, when they reproduced in future, they reproduced together, one always inside another. That's how we have mitochondria inside out own cells today. How cool is that?

I think the real kicker for me and evolution was seeing micro-evolution in practice. The mutation of the zoonotic Covid-19 virus being a recent example. Because, I could see it now. Micro-evoltion and macro-evolution were the same thing across two different timescales. If enough small changes happen to an isolated population over enough time, they'd be unrecognisable as the species they started out as. They would be a new species. That's it. That's evolution.

So then I turned to the universe. How could it be so fine-tuned to life existing? How was it even made in the first place? I was surprised that science's answer was we don't know how the universe was made. We know as much as we can glean from the current evidence, but our current understanding of space-time breaks down to any point before what is usually called the big bang. I can live with that personally, because I know that science will only claim to have an answer when it's sure. It was only 100 years or so ago that we had no concept of a gene at all.

As for fine-tuning, well, I quickly realised that was a myth. The universe is not fine-tuned for life at all. Most of it is empty, uninhabitable space. Most planets are completely uninhabitable to us. Even most places on Earth struggle to support life as we know it. It's too cold, too hot, too dark, too pressured, too unpressured, etc. Any place life has cropped up, it is wildly different in its adaptations to do so in that specific place only. Deep-sea fish die when taken to the surface. Some bacteria live on sulfur in volcanoes, rather than oxygen. Desert lizards would freeze to death in the arctic. But still, all of these animals share a base amount of DNA with us. You could explain that through a God, or through the fact that we are, very distantly, related to them. The only issue I found is God doesn't fit into anywhere else.

The more I found science could explain, or could at least promise an eventual explanation to my worries, the more I struggled to fit any kind of God in. There was just, and still isn't, anything I can see in existence that requires a God to exist, and anything that could but doesn't necessarily have to be caused by a God faces the problem of the fact there is no consistent idea of a God or religion in human society.

Some people have then argued to me about the soul, or the feeling one gets in a house of God, or a prayer group, or the fact that people see God in near-death experiences. They ask why we have consciousness and free will at all, if not as the result of a God.

I thought about that for a while. I didn't have a revelation until my first concert. I felt something I hadn't felt since being in choir at my church's summer camp. An excitement and a connection with everyone in the room, as we were singing our heart out as a collective about something we loved. I had thought that feeling was God, but I now had the possibility to content with that it was a social feeling. So I looked into it.

As you would have, psychologists and anthropologists believe that an inclination to religion and superstition actually evolved in the minds of early tribal civilisations, not only as a way to promote social interaction and support, but to keep the group together and opposed to other rival groups. They posit, based on historical evidence and the beginnings of modern neurology, that such connections over common ground feel so good because those connections kept us competitive in the wild against other tribes. It's almost something you can see today, with fandoms gatekeeping and religions/politicans/whatever calling each other wrong.

As for near-death experiences, they way they explain it is the brain trying to comfort itself in times of extreme stress. So it creates something comforting. Be that God, Bigfoot, or your nan talking to you. It's not concretely proven, but it is a potential theory that doesn't require the extra reaches an unproven higher being, or a particular God from a religion does. Which to me, makes it more convincing.

As for the problem of free will, it was another thing that makes God and higher powers very hard for me. If they made us with free will, how can they have a plan for us? How can our prayers affect anything about our world if the gods can't intervene to change our free will? Why make us with free will, if that could mean us hurting each other and ourselves, if we're so loved? And regardless of free will, why is nothing done about all the pain and suffering in the world? Does God not care, or does God not have the power?

That's also what made the popular idea of Satan difficult for me. If all the abrahamic versions of God are all-powerful, why can Satan and demons do anything? Why do they still exist? Either God can't stop them, or doesn't want to. I'm not sure which is worse.

But, back to free will. There is a growing body of scientific research suggesting our will is not as free as we think. People tend to act on their feelings and their perceptions of the world. Both can be controlled, through chemicals and through communication. Some of it is even genetic. The example given to me is you have free will to eat whatever food you want. You could even eat the food you don't like because of how your brain interprets the flavour/what bad memories it associates with it, but you probably won't. So do you actually have free will to eat that food? And now, if you go to eat it anyway, are you eating it because you have the free will to eat it, or are you feeling compelled to do it because I told you you didn't have the free will to do so? Are you ever acting on your own accord, or just according to the influence of your internal and external experiences? Technically we can do anything, but there are some things we will never do. Most of us won't eat people. We could physically, but because of the morals we hold personally, we won't. It's the same outcome as never having the option.

I'm not sure what that has to do with God, but I found it interesting.

Overall, I don't know if some people are more "attuned to God" than others, or if some people are just neurologically and biologically more wired to religious beliefs than others. I know that there is a lot that I don't know. But no matter which way I try, I cannot make an intelligent higher power convincingly fit into my worldview.

There are other things I've explored---the problem of evil, the consequences of hell, the idea of a soul, miracle healers, so on and so forth---but I've not found anything in this universe that requires a God or higher power to work.

It's not that I wouldn't believe in God or a higher power, if there was reason I could see for it. I absolutely would. Part of me still yearns to. But there is nothing that makes it convincing for me, and I can't lie to myself. I don't think there is anything out there, because I cannot see its touch anywhere. I can love my family and find nature beautiful without seeing a higher power in them. Nature is a miracle whether something higher made it or not, y'know?

I've yet to find something that only a higher power could explain, and I'm not someone who can have faith the same way I had faith in God as a kid. These days, I'm comfortable sticking with what we can verify, or at least make educated guesses on, ourselves. And every time that body of knowledge grows and changes, so does my world. Personally, it's a much comfier space for me.

If we ever find that kind of evidence for God, a God, or a higher power, evidence which we can prove came from a being like that, then I'll be the first to get on board.

But for now, I'm still looking.