Emotional Reasoning

What do you say in response to the theist who simply chooses to believe in a God?  What response can you give when someone says that they feel the presence of God and have felt "watched over" and "guarded" their whole life?  This is not an intellectual position.  It is not a conclusion arrived at logically.  It is a choice after all to believe in the supernatural without evidence.  Faith claims, by necessity exist beyond reason but that is not the end of the story.  It becomes easy, when one adopts and atheist worldview (if such a thing exists) to reject claims based on the lack of empirical evidence.  This of course is the rejection of the thought; the cognitive conclusion.  It does not take into account the emotional conviction.

Now, I am fond of arguing the dualism of thoughts and feelings as a false dichotomy.  At the chemical level, emotions are really just thoughts of a different nature.  The metaphorical "heart" and "mind" are both products of the brain and represent converging brain states.  To say that emotions get in the way of thoughts is to misunderstand both.  A great many decisions and actions stem from emotions, or more specifically the interplay between reason and the internal shoves that we colloquially cram into boxes labeled fear, sadness or love.  These are brain states that should not be ignored in understanding the conscious or unconscious makeup of belief.

What am I getting at here?  Many believers claim to "know God" or claim to have felt his presence at specific moments in their life.  These statements should not be dismissed as unenlightened or worse delusional.  It is not a delusion to have a sensation of agency when unusual coincidences occur.  That sense of someone or something else plucks very primal  strings.  Those internal, animal instincts are the backbone of the cascade of emotional states that we are still beginning to understand at the neurological level.  Believing a claim that is harmonious with your emotional constitution is an ancient and evolutionally reliable way to understand the world.  It pains me to say this, but there is wisdom in the "Trust Your Gut" culture if only because your gut is your animal instinct.  The warning of danger, the drive to procreate, the HEY DON'T EAT THAT signal from somewhere inside your Limbic system.  Those instinctual needs are the ones that need to be met for most people to feel (and be) safe and healthy.  The intellectual pursuit; the quest for existential meaning, these are relatively new for our species.  In some ways they the luxuries of those without empty stomachs.

This is what those new age types call "emotional intelligence."  It has served mankind at least as much as it has held us back from cultural and societal progress.  Condescension is not the way to address this when talking to a believer.  We, as atheists often say that you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.  It's about time we recognize that we probably didn't arrive at non-belief strictly by reason.  For almost all of us there was a time when the conclusion of a godless universe simply felt right.