Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.
I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.
And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.
One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."
This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.
There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.
The biggest thing I can think of would be my beliefs that were involved into me going back to the Christian faith, I guess. I was left at an impasse for a long time as I figured out what to believe, having concluded that there must be an uncaused cause at the beginning of the universe, and that this cause could reasonably be called "God". That wasn't very useful though, because it didn't tell me much about the nature of this deity that set everything into motion. So I was at an impasse.
Eventually, I was reflecting on a couple of experiences that my dad had shared with me which seemed to be clear evidence that the god he believed in (the Christian god) was real and made himself available to us. One time, he said that when he was internally despairing about his life and asking God why he still had to endure its trials and tribulations, time came to a complete stop (from his perspective) and he heard the voice of God clearly say "you're here for [my mom]". On another occasion, he said he was doing a reading at his church, and when he looked up he saw the loft above the congregation filled with angels. I thought about these things, and concluded that I believe these two points to be true:
Taken together, these two things logically mean that my dad must have truly experienced the things he did (cue CS Lewis: "if she's not mad, and she's not lying, then logically she must be telling the truth!"). Which quite neatly solved the dilemma I was having with trying to determine what I thought the nature of God was. My dad is a Christian, and his god is real, therefore God must be like the Christian god (though I can't rule out other views of God as being inaccurate). Based on that I started pursuing the Christian faith again. Needless to say these beliefs I have about my dad and his experiences are pretty damn load bearing. I have since found other reasons to believe in my faith, but nothing quite so stark and compelling* as what I outlined here, so it would be quite a crisis for my worldview if someone were to prove those things wrong.
* Compelling to me. I realize that to someone who doesn't know my dad, these experiences he had have absolutely no evidential value, which is why I have never tried to use them to persuade someone else to believe (nor do I plan to).
Very interesting.
Me I had almost the opposite course. I kinda left the church as a result of:
A) Seeing my fellow 'christians' make absolute messes of their lives and generally ignore biblical teachings when they were inconvenient (these two facts were probably related)
B) Never having one of those "encounter with God" moments despite being very, very open to receiving one. My inherent skepticism grew simply because it was hard to feel God's intervention in my life when I didn't seem to be getting any noticeable input from 'beyond' baseline reality. It sure seemed like what you see is what you get, and all your decisionmaking is almost entirely local to your brain, aside from the bare handful of things we haven't explained.
And I'm not a fan of the "God of the gaps" approach to faith.
I had experiences which could be described as that "still, small voice" talking to me and guiding decisions, but that was easily explained as my internal dialogue.
Another factor was engaging in 'sinful' activities but seeing that this didn't immediately result in my life combusting and didn't lead me down a path to more grievous sins. Turns out I just have a solid amount of discipline and self-control just inherently.
But over time, as you notice, there's still a need for some 'initial cause' to this whole universe. Science isn't getting us any closer to explaining it, and ultimately having some kind of God behind the scenes is still a completely viable possibility, even if atheism is the 'rational' choice. And if you gotta choose one God to be behind the scenes, the Christian God does appear as the leading contender.
Still haven't had my own personal 'miracle' to restore my faith, but it also seems like rational atheism has gone and blown itself up (Effective Altruism was an interesting fad, wasn't it?), and the huge irony is there are actually good secular reasons for accepting religious teachings. If they've survived this long, they must be adaptive!!!
Yeah, I think your complaints (perhaps the wrong word but hopefully you know what I mean) are quite valid. In fairness on the first, a good church will never pretend that its members are perfect or anything, but many Christians possess a level of self righteousness and hypocrisy that is truly galling. And I certainly understand the frustration of feeling as though God is just leaving you to do your own thing, rather than being a friend who actually helps you in your life. I myself have never had a direct experience with the divine, though I have (since returning to the faith) had things happen that I find difficult to explain by way of anything other than "God must have helped me out there".
But my experiences (such as they are) and the ones I related from my dad ultimately aren't proof, which is something I don't expect I'll ever get. It seems like God, for whatever reason, never really reveals himself to people so strongly that any reasonable person would believe that he must be at work. Lots of people (smarter people than I) have tried to explain why, so I doubt I can add anything of value to that discussion, except to agree that it does seem to be true regardless of what the reasons might be. I think that this is why faith tends to be of the "God of the gaps" nature which you find unsatisfying (and I can't blame you): it seems like God always requires people to take some leap of faith from "this seems true but I can't prove it" to "I'm going to believe in it anyway".
For what it's worth, I would say that the struggle (my own journey of faith took me something like 10-12 years with insights coming only occasionally), does seem worth it in hindsight. It sucked at the time. But having gone through it, I was able to arrive at a position which I feel much more strongly certain of than if a mysterious stranger had appeared to give me the answers. I hope that it will be the same for you, if it isn't already - not per se that you will come back to the faith, but that whatever answer you do arrive/have arrived at feels right to you because you came by it as the result of trying really hard to seek the truth.
Yes, I suspect that he works in 'mysterious ways' in the sense that his intervention might just seem like a literal one-in-a-billion chance that happens to fall your way, and the entire situation works out for your benefit, even if there completely non-divine explanations.
Me, I like solid cause-effect relationships. So it'd be really nice to have an experience where I ardently pray for [outcome], and then see [outcome] occur without my direct intervention. I've had a lot of 'experimental' results where the outcome of the situation appears completely uncorrelated with whether I prayed for it or not. Obviously there could be greater plans at work that I don't see.
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