First, I apologize for being so late with this response: I've been quite busy.

I'm not sure if I understand what you're getting at entirely, but I'll give it a go anyway ;-)

If you remember the second X-Files film, you'll know that the subtitle was: "I want to believe." That film (and the series) dealt with the supernatural, aliens, and UFOs. I'll open up by asking you a question: how, in light of all that you say here, which seems to me to boil down to that we want to believe rather than know for certain, is it not equally valid, useful, or gratifying to believe in a superior alien species, maybe even one that made a supercomputer in which they programmed a virtual world, the world we're living in now?

I don't want to believe, but rather can't help but believe. This is how our minds work. I don't want to believe, for example, that a water molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. A lot of thought, experiments, and proofs have been involved for us, as a species, to come to the conclusion that water is indeed H₂O. When someone's suspected of having committed a crime, we assume innocence until proven guilty, and when enough evidence is gathered one way or the other, we can't help but convict for innocence or guilt. When my child's face is covered with chocolate and the chocolate jar is also empty, I can't help but believe he emptied the jar, even though he keeps insisting that he didn't.

My confusion in your response arises from the contradiction I sense here: on the one hand, you say that man wants to remain in a state of doubt but, on the other hand, he wants answers. The thing is that it doesn't matter, for in my opinion science serves both these desires best. Life in this universe is an enigma that we want to unravel, and we do, we have done and we'll keep at it. The beauty is that with each little piece we unravel, with every answer, new questions arise; just look at the quest for fundamental particles or the quest for the Holy Grail of science, the "Theory of Everything"; we're still far, far removed from getting there, but the scientific quest has given us a much greater understanding of the world, the universe and our own position within.

We don't make this progress because of theology or faith but despite them. As for your assertion that the first observatories were erected by religious people and institutions, I agree. But that's an easy point to score. It's also said that the first people to want to abolish slavery were religious people, and again I'd have to agree. It's that in those times most, if not all people were religious; there weren't any other people to choose from, so they won that competition by default. On the other hand, the first people to have slaves were religious as well, so there's really no point in debating who came first in this particular discussion, as religion comes first by default. In other words: religion was indeed our first attempt to make sense of it all, our first and outdated attempt because everything we've discovered so far, everything we've explained, doesn't need a God.

I'm sure you're familiar with the expression "God of the Gaps"; that's the sense I get from you, that you're hanging on to that God. The God that fills the gaps in our understanding. When early man saw lightning in the sky, he imagined a superior being casting these devastating bolts from the sky. When he associated the sun with the growth of the fruits, plants, and, consequently, the animals he needed to survive, he began worshipping our local star. And since we're programmed by evolution to see our own kind everywhere (two dots and a line are enough for us to see a face, and because we're a social species we've specialized in recognizing the many different faces in our ever-increasing tribes), we anthropomorphize the lot of them. We no longer need a God to explain lightning or the sun; we've reached a point where only life and the universe are left for a God to fill in the gaps, and that's where apologists like Craig specialize with arguments like the Kalam, the fine-tuning of the (fundamental forces and constant values found in the) universe for intelligent life, the current lack of a satisfactory theory of abiogenesis (a natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter), and so on.

But I don't mind not knowing; for me, that's where the amazement of life comes from. The "knowledge" we as humans need is much more of an agreement than actual "knowledge". For us to live well together, we need a set of agreements so we can depend on each other, and much of these agreements are given to us naturally, through evolution. Or do you believe that man did not know it was wrong to kill before the Ten Commandments, the Sharia, or modern law? The "Golden Rule", treating others the way you want to be treated by others, is necessitated by our nature as social creatures and is baked into our biology through mirror neurons and a host of neurochemical processes. We can't help but treat others the way we want to be treated by others to an extent, due to our social nature. We only disregard this Golden Rule when someone steps outside of the set of previously mentioned agreements that make us live cooperatively and well together.

I'm going on a tangent again... To wrap it up I'll loop it back to the beginning: I don't want to believe but belief comes naturally to me. All our belief systems come from our ability to understand cause and effect on a conceptual level; it's what separates us from other mammals. And our ability to understand cause and effect enables us to extrapolate the presence into the future we make for ourselves. When we see the wind blowing through, and shaking the trees, and then fruit falls down from the tree, we infer that we can shake the tree ourselves to make the fruit fall down. We could not play the same game with lightning from the sky, but since we base so much of our existence and beliefs about the world on cause and effect, we could not help but imagine a cause for what we saw. That's all God is, in my opinion. On the other hand, I (and no one else) can't prove that there isn't a God. Like Craig likes to say: "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence". But that's also a rather cheap and easy point to make, for we can't prove a negative; I can't prove a pink teapot isn't orbiting Mars. So, for me, there are only beliefs, but there's a difference between reasonable and unreasonable beliefs, and I can't help but stick to reasonable beliefs.

I hope this response finds you in good health, my friend.