Ah, okay.  Well yes, I get that angle.  Indeed, the basic concept of belief in terms of being able to make decisions is vital - i.e. I believe it is okay to drink clean water, or eat that vegetable.  I think in this thread though the focus was more on belief in the religous sense - i.e. convictions without any evidence at all simply faith.  That was how I came to the discussion.  But I see you are coming at it from in terms of having to believe certain things just to get on with life.

I guess a very common one if believing a plane will fly.  Whenever I fly I do always find myself wondering how many passangers know exactly how it is possible for the plane to fly and how many simply accept it does without really knowing why.

But I think that's very different from the topic of religious belief.

I agree (although I personally don't believe in anything really, taking the wait and see approach) and I'd like to add that your purpuse of living is what you make it to be. You decide what it is. You don't need some sort of religion, spirituality or god-esse-s to have a purpuse.

I identify myself with some of the responses, in particular Reasonable's. To be brief, I thoroughly believe that God is nothing more than a concept manifested by the human mind. Wheather it’s real or not is yet to be seen. I prefer to look at is as all living organisms being a part of a supernatural body we call God much like the cells of our own body.

Well there are really two main viewpoints.

One is we were created by something with an intellectual process, or that we were just a random occurrence of physics.

The word God only applies to the first one. The first one can be explained a million ways to create a million different types of Gods, but God does not apply to the later.

To try and map "God" into the second category, it to manipulate the English language into something "clever".

There is/was a God, or there wasn't. You can change the word "God" to mean "God and not God" if you want to, but that does not change reality.

This is a ridiculous question to ask. It's obvious to any human being that an infinite amount of possibilities cannot be disproven. However, the single prevailing belief about what God is can be disproven. Saying that atheism has no logical grounds because an infinite number of hypotheses cannot be disproven is getting away from the point.

I'm not necessarily saying this directly to you, but I want to point out that it's illogical to generalize belief. No matter how much people will say that they are a part of a belief system or a school of thought, there is never complete uniformity. Just because one Christian is a racist doesn't mean they all are. And with atheists, there is far less uniformity. Just because all atheists disregard the existence of a God as defined by religious texts/preachers, doesn't mean any of their other beliefs are uniform. Pretty much the only thing that unites atheists is that they believe there is no God. Beyond that, an atheist can be a fatalist, solipsist, nihilist, humanist etc. all the way to the moon.

Most theologians are going to argue there is physical evidence for God. The best examples are inferring the existence of God from the rationality and orderliness of the universe. The main idea is that they look at some aspect of the universe and find God to be the best explanation for that characteristic. I think you might mean that God cannot be observed because God is generally described as non-physical. In this sense, there cannot be any direct physical evidence for God. Its always going to be inferential physical evidence.

As some other users mentioned though, this is not really a good route to take because there are many things of which we do not have direct physical evidence. Scientific laws are one example. You cannot point out the law of graivty, and say "there it is". The best we can do is infer the law of gravity from observation.

Yes but gravity can be measured and quantified. God cannot.

I agree that God cannot be quantified, but the orderliness and rationality of the universe can be quantified. In the same way, the law of gravity cannot be quantified because it is non-physical. However, the observations that allow us to infer gravity can be quantified. My main point is that it is asking for the impossible if you want to quantify or measure something non-physical because these things have no physical existence. I think the confusion is that I am talking about gravity as a concept while you are talking about gravity as a force. 

I am confused. Gravity as a concept is merely an explanation of gravity as a force, its effects have been explored and are described by a series of equations. There are currently attempts to explain its origin in quantum theory that look likely to be succesful in the near future. You speak of measuring the non-physical but you use gravity in your analogy which without a doubt is something physical.

It is nothing at all like looking at the universe and saying 'God did it, because its orderly' which does not have any actual measurement or explanation behind it.

I really really am confused.