‘But that’s a position of faith.’
I stated it a a belief; all beliefs rely on internal impulses for philosophical support, otherwise there would be no abstract thought at all...your statement is a non sequetur...
‘The existence of differing opinions doesn’t mean that there isn’t an underlying truth or mean that one of those opinions might not actually be correct’
I explicitly stated that my plausability does not derive from certainty; I cannot explain existence, either from a religious view or natural...I said nothing whatsoever about being ‘correct...’
‘A thing cannot create itself.’
except your god, apparantly; if you believe that God is a thing, than how do you explain it’s existence, if not created by some other thing as per your viewpoint...you might answer that God is eternal, I can answer likewise with natural forces...
‘If there were a deity, there’s no reason to assume it would think or act like you would expect it to’
does that statement not negate the entire validity of divining a god in the first place, that of seeking to bring order, harmony and meaning to life...? the Bible expends thousands of words in telling us what God thinks and does and how He expects us to act; do you think the authors thought God would not react to their actions as they would have expected him to in return...?
“your statement is a non sequetur...”
I don’t think so. If your reasoning boils down to “I believe what I want to believe”, then it isn’t really reasoning at all, it’s just rationalization.
“I said nothing whatsoever about being ‘correct...’”
Come now, you explicitly argued that the number of deities people worship leads you to conclude that they are just “hardwired” to invent supernatural explanations. If they are simply invented by our imaginations, then they are not “correct”, or at least, they could only be “correct” by accident.
“except your god, apparantly;”
No, my God is eternal and uncreated.
“you might answer that God is eternal, I can answer likewise with natural forces...”
But you cannot, because natural forces are, by definition, part of the natural world, which means the observable universe. And we have demonstrated scientifically that the universe has a beginning, so those natural forces also have a beginning and cannot be eternal.
“does that statement not negate the entire validity of divining a god in the first place, that of seeking to bring order, harmony and meaning to life...?”
I’m not sure what you mean by “divining a god” there.
“the Bible expends thousands of words in telling us what God thinks and does and how He expects us to act; do you think the authors thought God would not react to their actions as they would have expected him to in return...?”
Yet this is, if we take the Bible at its word, a revelation from God. There’s no logical reason to think a deity wouldn’t comprehend himself and be able to at least partially describe some of his qualities to us. The problem arises when you go in the opposite direction, thinking that we can intuit the nature of God on our own, while ignoring the fact that our knowledge and faculties are limited and biased.
To use an example, a dog might look at their owner and try to interpret the actions of their owner according to “dog logic”, and come to some strange and wrong conclusions. Yet that doesn’t mean that the owner is also unable to teach the dog some true things about himself in a way that the dog might be able to understand.