Rather than "Do you believe in god?" I think the question "what God means to you?" Would have been even more appropriate.
The fact that you asked me that question is either born out of your desire to know or your assumption that there must be something bigger operating this whole universe.
Please indulge me, I will try to provide you with a fairly satisfying intellectual explanation.
Here I'm not going to take any sides rather I would immerse myself in contrasting views.
I'm trying to picture a larger landscape of possibilities.
I may be colossally wrong about what I'm going to say, so please don't take my words for granted. I will present my arguments from both my theist and my atheist perspectives.
From my theist perspective::
I think there more than 4000 recognized religions in the world of which at least 20 accomodating most of the populace and every religion tries to define God based on their own theological interpretations.
So let's not get into that misconstrued information about God which is totally based upon on our religion we were born. Let's investigate the question as if we are free from all the pre-acquired knowledge about god. So for some time being, act as if you have no idea about god. Now how would you proceed and investigate further into this nameless thing of a thousand names?
The first question you have to ask yourselves is where did all this creation come from?
The second question is if there is a designer of this creation/universe where did he come from ??
The science clearly states that "energy/mass can neither be created nor be destroyed then if it cannot be created, where did all this mass/energy come from?".
How can all this universe just pop into existence out of nothing? Is it an inherent property of the universe to just pop into existence out of thin air??
Let's talk about laws of the universe we live in, Newton didn't invent gravity, he discovered it which is already there.
Now my question is, why should gravity exist the way it exists, why not the other way?
I mean how did all this information and the laws of physics and nature come into being? Who told the universe to come up with its own laws?
And why are they the way they are?
Well, let's assume there is a creator or omnipotent God who created this universe and set some laws on a cosmic scale,now the bigger challenge is to find his origins, I mean even he can't pop out of nothing just like the universe can't, so where did he come from?
This is going in circles, isn't it?
The question where did god come from presupposes that God is bounded by causation because that's all we know of in this universe. If there is something that exists there must be cause for it to come into existence but it necessarily doesn't have to be the case with everything.
We live in an age of scientific rationalism now we are trying to understand and comprehend the unknown with the known.
Every scientific discovery starts with a question and then comes along assumptions, so basically here in science we are trying to discover the 'unknown' with the help of the 'known'. Well, it works all fine if the entity that we are trying to find is bounded by our nature of reality but my question is what if the creator isn't bounded by what we call time, space, and matter.what if he is beyond creation? Then there is no way we can find the traces of the creator even with the highest possible technology.
Let me put it this way,
Let's say we build a computer, now that computer at its core can only understand things in its realm in terms of bits and zeroes (0,1), now if that computer wants to perceive the nature of its creator(Man) its never gonna come up with a plausible explanation. Becoz it's only designed to understand 0,1 and the nature of Man is something beyond (0,1).
The same applies to us, here we humans always trying to find and interpret the nature of the creator (unknown) in our known terms and presuppositions which is the 'thought'.
There could be things beyond the thought but we would never know cuz we never experienced anything beyond the thought.
Idol worship of God is a classic example. Because that's the best we can do in order to perceive god through our limited senses and to perceive something beyond our thoughts is almost imperceptible.
Even with all the scientific advancements, we aren't able to come up with the life of a single-celled organism, let alone complex beings like us. That's how pathetic we are. That's why the origin of life still remains a mystery. Who could have done it? is it god? or is it just a probability?
We simply don't know yet.
From my atheist perspective::
In the beginning men created God and associated religion with him. For most religious people god is real because they want him to be.
Religion is based on faiths, beliefs, and miserable myths. Even if there is a creator who lives in uncharted realms of reality, there's isn't any single shred of evidence that proves that the creator cares about our existence.
Our God is irrelevant. God is irrelevant because your god is just your assertion of faith and belief and as far as truth is concerned belief has no place in it. I believe beliefs are temporary and can always be replaced with other beliefs, but it just isn't the case with facts. Facts once observed cannot be replaced by beliefs.
People derive values from their beliefs,
a lot many people are convinced that there is a God whether or not it's useful to them and everyone is convinced somehow that what they believe is right. They are firmly committed to their beliefs and unknowingly consumed by them.
If you believe something just cuz it feels good to believe.If your base your beliefs on your impulses, emotions, and irrational evidence it will inevitably breed conflict.
One might say let people have their beliefs, what's wrong with those godly beliefs? but beliefs are always associated with actions. One's beliefs shape out one's actions and the way one thinks and perceives life.
Believing in something is literally giving up on our freedom of inquiry and other critical faculties, Once we have a belief in something we incessantly try to fit everything in compliance with those parameters of that belief. We will try to protect, preserve, and fight for our beliefs.
For instance, if I'm a Hindu and if believe in Hindu gods, I will provide all reasons why I'm a Hindu and why I feel my religion and my gods are sacred regardless of they being any relevance or of any use to me. A moron can never realize that he is a moron Because of the very fact that he is a moron and so is the case with a believer who is consumed by his own beliefs.
Most people I come across they readily discard and disregard my personal representation of beliefs in god when it doesn't match with theirs, without considering wider consensus.
Do I mean to say not to have any beliefs??
No, The idea is to simply withhold your belief until you find compelling evidence to validate that belief.
We don't say we believe in Newton so gravity must be true rather we question it, we understand it with substantial evidence to back it up.
I'm sure all the scientific progress we have made over the centuries is done without any divine intervention.
This whole idea of belief in God seems absurd in the highest possible degree.
The very nature of humans is that we always sort of speculating, make stories of the "unknown" than that of the "known". There are probably more stories and speculations about the unknown Gods, Ghosts, Aliens, Heavens, and Hells than that of any 'known' thing, and then we pass them on to our children and coming generations. The religious indoctrination of children is a form of brainwashing, I consider it as child abuse. I think religion has become a commercial enterprise.
In search of God, I started reading Religious books like the Bible, Quran, Bhagavadgeeta but it further elevated my doubts in the existence of God. It raised more questions than answers. The more I read them the more I came closer to being an atheist.
Let's say God is a divine metaphysical entity beyond our human comprehension then why even bother comprehending such an entity??
Let's comprehend what we can, let's leave god to himself.
Why worship a thing far greater than our imagination can conceive?
Why worship an invisible mass murderer of innocent people?
If I say I worship a particular god what exactly am I doing?
I'm worshipping a thought about God, and what is worshiping? It's also a thought process, it's no different than thought. Therefore a thought interacting with other thoughts purely out of your own delusions. There is nothing pristine and sublime about thought, our thoughts have no intrinsic values associated with it. It only actions that bear some value.
Regardless of the existence or non- existence I don't bother to give God a fuck cuz he didn't bother giving me one either.
Anything that doesn't impact, alter, or interact with you is irrelevant, that's why God is irrelevant. When God doesn't bother to give you a fuck why should you? Why go to temples and praise him, worship him and do bhajans?
Why is our God always greedy and craving for excessive praise and worship from dawn till dusk?? Only an egotistical narcissistic maniac would expect such acts from others.
There have been billions born on this planet, lived a happy life, and died peacefully just in some other continents who probably wouldn't have heard about your religious god but still pulled through life without your god's intervention. You would also fall in the same category you are no favorite kid to god.
I do agree that some people do go through self-transcending miraculous experiences and they attribute these experiences to god cuz religion is the only game in the town that claims credit for this sort of divine mystical experience.
Often one says I don't know what that experience is, so it must be God. So people seem to associate anything they don't know to god and this assumption is ridiculous.
Believing that there is a supervising intervening God entity who cares who you worship, whom you sleep with, and who cares what you eat and on what day and makes you the center of all the cosmos is idiotic in its very sense.
I mean out of all these trillions of galaxies, stars, and innumerable planets believing that the God is interested in this pitiful rotten planet like Earth and moreover believing that he is especially concerned about what humans do on a regular basis among all other animal species of which 99% is already extinct on an evolutionary scale is totally absurd.
The irony is, The one who created who governs this infinite cosmos needs recognition from these rotten pitiful beings, the almighty omnipotent God, couldn't he just take care of himself?
If hell and heaven exist, I simply don't understand why people cry at funerals rather they should celebrate it by saying "happy journey to heaven, we will get there soon" it's an insult to the dead person cuz if they cry, their cryings suggest that the person might a bad person.
So with all the chaos taking place in the world, one thing is starting to make sense, the creator himself isn't interested in his own creation.
Or maybe the creator(God) hasn't got the desired outcome from this creation so might be working on creating other universe and left this creation to rot.
Or he may be having secret affairs with other creators and deliberately cheating on his own creation. The word big bang also adds evidence to my doubt, so he may be banging other creators.
Jokes apart, I pretty much want to be wrong about everything I said from my atheistic perspective, I mean who wouldn't want a second go at life if there is an afterlife as theists claim.
If you want a straight-up answer whether or not god really exists my answer would simply be "I don't know and I would be happy to not know".
Ohh God please protect me from you and your followers.