There is only one good reason to believe in God, as far as I can see, and it goes like this:

"(A small child thinks to himself): My parents feed me, clothe me, keep me warm and clean. And safe. So I trust them. So, I also trust whatever they tell me about anything, including what they say about "God"."

Obviously, this reason is not available to just anyone, one has to be born and raised into those particular epistemic circumstances.

However if you accept the theistic claims made by people who argue from personal experience — Tom Storm

This is my own position with respect to that specific approach of his. I (or anyone else) can argue compelling reasons not on his list because they have to be compelling to me and by my standards. If he failed to find them he failed to find them is all that can be said. The fact of his good evidence argument or standard does not itself justify or recommend the conclusion he reaches for anyone else.

I (or anyone else) can argue compelling reasons not on his list because they have to be compelling to me and by my standards. If he failed to find them he failed to find them is all that can be said. The fact of his good evidence argument or standard does not itself justify or recommend the conclusion he reaches for anyone else. — Pantagruel

Yet both religious apologists as well as their a(nti)religious counterparts tend to dismiss this approach, arguing that "compelling reasons by one's own standards" aren't good enough.

What do you have to say to them?

Well, does one have to be epistemologically sophisticated in order to assess
and hence justify the validity of one's own beliefs? If so, I wonder how many people can be said to believe anything at all?

I guess my point is, people justify their beliefs by their commitment to them, ultimately. If a belief can find positive enaction (i.e. you believe in god, so you volunteer, treat your fellow man with dignity, etc.) then that is the best reason there is to hold a belief.

I guess my point is, people justify their beliefs by their commitment to them, ultimately. — Pantagruel

This is not a stance generally held by philosophers or scientists.

no good reasons for believing — Pantagruel

Doesn't mean that there are good reasons for disbelieving either.

I'm agnostic.

@Wayfarer

What would be good reasons to believe in god? The way atheists oppose belief in the divine, ignoring multiple arguments from the theist camp, I'm left with the impression that nothing less than an one-to-one meeting with god, complete with physical contact and maybe an exchange of words, will suffice as proof of god. This kind of "close encounter of the third kind" proof I call direct evidence of the divine.

Yet, these same atheists who demand a "close encounter of the third kind" vis-à-vis god happily accept and publicly profess a lot of scientific claims, claims that contradict scripture, based on indirect evidence i.e. evidence that rely on deducing the past from the present.

This is like a person who says aliens exist because fae saw a UFO but demands that others who have the same belief have evidence of an actual encounter with aliens in flesh and blood or whatever passes for those in alien biology.

I guess my point is, people justify their beliefs by their commitment to them, ultimately.
— Pantagruel
This is not a stance generally held by philosophers or scientists. — baker

That belief is deeply embedded in action is not a generally held position? Thanks for the tip. You might want to enlighten the advocates of embodied/embedded cognition, because I'm pretty sure they are all about enactment in context. I think those guys are mostly philosophers and scientists.

I'm saying that "compelling reasons by one's own standards" aren't usually considered as good enough.

Accepting "compelling reasons by one's own standards" as a valid criterion means that we'd need to accept that pretty much anything anyone believes is justified -- from believing that Trump won the 2020 elections to beliving that human civilization on Earth was started by aliens etc. etc.
Neither philosophers nor scientists accept that. Nor do religious people or culture at large. Instead, they maintain that people must have some objective, interpersonally verifiable or agreed upon reasons for believing something, in order for those reasons to count as "good reasons".

Nor do religious people or culture at large. Instead, they maintain that people must have some objective, interpersonally verifiable or agreed upon reasons for believing something, in order for those reasons to count as "good reasons". — baker

I think the fact of a belief being validated by its actions is about the apex of intersubjective verifiability, don't you? Unless your are talking about something that is trivially measurable. As soon as value enters the picture, it becomes a matter of what constitutes proof.

What would be good reasons to believe in god? The way atheists oppose belief in the divine, ignoring multiple arguments from the theist camp, I'm left with the impression that nothing less than an one-to-one meeting with god, complete with physical contact and maybe an exchange of words, will suffice as proof of god. This kind of "close encounter of the third kind" proof I call direct evidence of the divine. — TheMadFool

Secular culture is the culture of unbelief. It's very much the age we live in, it's a mindset, a whole package.

When I was an undergrad, the view I formed at the time was that modern Western philosophy was very much a product of leaving God out of the picture. 'Anything but God' seemed to be the driver - not that this was actually stated so much as implied. There was a liberal tolerance for the fact that individuals might believe in God, but modern philosophy bracketed it out. In the Philosophy Department, the major influences were, on the one side, 'Oxbridge positivism' and on the other, the New Left and Marxist Political Economics (this was the late 70's and the full impact of post-modernism hadn't quite manifested yet, it seems to me.)

I was very much a sixties type, pursuing what I understood as 'enlightenment' rather than conventional religion; at the time I was pretty scathing about 'churchianity'. But I also studied Comparative Religion, which eventually I majored in (fat lot of use that's turned out to be). That's emphatically not 'divinity' or 'Bible studies'. It helped me make connections between the various schools concerned with enlightenment - new religious movements, as well as Eastern religions.

So, the view I formed at the time was that at the formation of Christian orthodoxy, the orientation to enlightenment was associated with the early Gnostics, and was basically suppressed or driven out by the victorious mainstream. From then on, the emphasis in Western religion was always 'believe and be saved'. This came to a head with Luther's fideism and Calvin's doctrines of predestination. You were obliged to believe - refuse, and be damned. (But then, according to Calvin, you might be damned anyway!)

The wars of religion and the stranglehold that the Church had over politics were also major factors. Western culture rebelled against that - inevitably, in my view. But the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. In other words, there is a kind of truth in religion which can't be found by other means. But how it's framed, understood, interpreted, practiced, is all important. So now we're in a one-dimensional world, where nihilism is rife (even though a lot of people don't know what the word means). Modern empiricism is irrational, in that it has banished the idea of first and final causes or any sense or Reason (capital R). It believes life arose as a result of the 'accidental collocation of atoms' (as Bertrand Russell expressed it, although I'm not suggesting creationism.) The idea of 'reason' as it was traditionally understood has been abandoned, or relativised and subjectivized. Welcome to modernity. At least it has given us the freedom to dissent!

See A Secular Age, Charles Taylor.
The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie.
The Neural Buddhists David Brooks
A Buddhist Response to Contemporary Dilemmas of Human Existence, Bhikkhu Bodhi.
Should we believe in belief? Karen Armstrong.

I submit, if it is believed possible for humans to create consciousness, why should it be any less possible for human consciousness to be created? — Pantagruel

This element is what attracts me to Spinoza. Instead of introducing "God" as something that hurts our brains to even bring up, it is the first thing you think of when reflecting upon your own conscious existence. Aristotle said he didn't know much but that he was pretty sure he didn't dream all this up for himself.

Some of the confusion comes from what having a Credo could be as a form of life. Saying what you believe as a part of a ceremony is not something all "believing" people do. Is the comparison of different liturgies equivalent to the promulgation of theological opinion?

This element is what attracts me to Spinoza. Instead of introducing "God" as something that hurts our brains to even bring up, it is the first thing you think of when reflecting upon your own conscious existence. Aristotle said he didn't know much but that he was pretty sure he didn't dream all this up for himself. — Valentinus

I'm currently reading some of Max Scheler's lesser-known works (as much of his work is). He matter-of-facts God as a correlate or adjunct of higher consciousness constantly, without reading anything else into it.