Dependancies

As I said in my first post, one of the things I was hoping to do on my gap year was decide whether I thought there was a God.

I've been an agnostic for a year. For a long time I was a Christian, this was partly because I spent the majority of my secondary education in a catholic school where most people were christians, and so I therefore didn't give a second thought to my religious beliefs. However, when I left at sixth form to go to a grammar school, I started hanging around with Christians and atheists and the atheists led me to question whether indeed there really was a God. This in turn led me to realise that I didn't know why I really believed in God.

But when I thought about there being no God and having no God around me, I felt weird. It's a hard feeling to explain but I felt essentially like I wasn't myself and I didn't know who I was, so I had to take the lawyers point of view and say that the case of the existence of God was innocent until proven guilty. This essentially meant that I wouldn't start to make a decision about the existence of God until I started to read literature for and against there being a god. So I didn't start to make my mind up on this issue until I'd done my A-level exams and I was free of school work.

The first book I read and am still reading is "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong. In this book Armstrong puts forward some very good arguments against the existence of God forward and this has led me to think that there probably isn't a god, although I'm trying not to say that I'm an atheist at the moment since it would be wrong to become an atheist on the basis of one piece of literature.  

But even when I could start to make an evidence based decision on the existence of God, it still felt very weird for me to feel that there was no god around me, it felt as if not believing in God took a source of my confidence away from me. I felt like I just didn't know what to do, it was as if I'd built my whole life around a God, and taking God away from it felt like taking the bricks out of a house's walls. Furthermore, I feel that despite all the evidence I've so far considered I could still go back to believing in God to return to my normal self even if it meant that I'd be deluding myself. And it would seem that I'm not the only person who feels this way, the other day when I was talking to a friend about the existence of God he said "I don't know how anyone can get by without believing in a god" and my mother doesn't like the idea of there not being a god because she thinks that there would be nothing to look forward to if she didn't believe in God. Research has also shown that most people have a gene which makes them more likely to believe that there is a god.

But why is it that we feel this way? Why is it that some of us feel the need to have a god around us? Why is the idea of there not being a possible heaven at the end of our lives so unappealing?? Surely if anything it would be better because then we'd have no chance of going to hell and suffering??

Do I have this problem because it contradicts the idea of what I've believed for so long, and it's hard to come to terms with that change? Or is it because it's hard for me to contemplate the idea of there not being anyone to share my thoughts with if I don't feel I can say them to the outside world? Or is it because it's hard for me to think of there being no one to help me when I'm in trouble?

I do half wonder if it's my ancestors though, am I genetically adapted to be this way because our ancestors created gods to explain concepts that we can now use science to explain? Was it our ancestors actions that made many of us more likely to want to cling to a god?