I have argued often that scepticism is equidistance both from belief and disbelief. It is, in my view, the optimal “setting” by means of which to learn.
Vis a vis the question of the existence of God, I believe Agnosticism–literally, “I don’t know”–to be the most reasonable stance. To be an A-theist, one must be a positive believer in the doctrine of “No God”. The claim that, if there is no evidence for something, that it doesn’t exist, is simply intellectual incompetence. We had no evidence for quarks, prior to what I assume we can accurately label their “discovery”. (I have never seen one, so I have to take other peoples word for it, as is the case with most science). Yet, they existed.
The primary problem with the stance, the position of atheism is that it limits your perceptual horizons. It tends to limit you qualitatively, in my experience, in terms of your capacity to imbibe deeper qualitatively realities. I have said this often, but the hard edges of its knife seem often to sever the ties of poetry and the myths that bind us; both, after all, are on their rendering evolutionary artifacts whose only real “value” is that they facilitated survial and reproduction at some point in the distant past.
Reality is what we perceive, and what we perceive is seen through ideational filters. If our goal truly is to understand “reality”, then we would logically want filters as wide as we can make them. We would want to EXPERIENCE first, the EXPLAIN second. The alternative is to only experience what you already know you can explain, which is something very like a negative hallucination, which is where you DON’T see things that, by consensus among others, actually is there.
And of course when we speak of God, we mean many things. We mean some sort of non-physical connection between ourselves and the rest of the univese. We mean that our acts in this life matter in some way in a future life. We mean that there is some right way to live, and by contrast, ways in which we were not meant to live. It is forgotten now, but even the concept of natural “laws” partakes of a sort of assumption we get from the concept of God: that of an ordered and knowable universe.
And practically, when you look at the actual evidence in favor of things like the survival of death, or the existence of perceptual capacities beyond materialistic explanation, there are signs and hints of something larger.
Let me be clear: the Zeus knock-off we see so often mocked by dogmatic atheists is not the same as a belief in God. To the extent, actually, that the God concept has merit, it is beyond description. It is the field within which all matter and life exists, and which harmonizes and connects it; this is God’s intelligence–our forms, our consciousness.
A principle value of mine is perception, and it is, on my rendering and in my personal view, a sin to do less than we are able to understand the universe in which we live.