I see religion as ultimately the quest for eternal truths. Nothing we observe in the eternal world will, by itself, tell us what, if anything, will last forever. The universe might end at some point, and both physical laws and fundamental values, such as the mass on an electron or the speed of light, might change over time. So to believe that something will last forever has an element of choice. Choices are motivated, and motivation always has an emotional component.

But also science is based on a faith in the ever-lasting. In it's foundation one finds the induction principle which has to be accepted as self-evident. (Betrand Russell explained this very well in his book "Problems of philosophy".) A simple way to understand why we regard the induction principle as self-evident is that we expect reality to be rule bound. And we expect reality to be rule bound forever. But there's nothing illogical per se about a reality where every seeming rule is just an illusion.

One distinction that is very difficult to make is between wishful thinking and intuition. If I maintain faith in the existence of Santa Clause, one might have me suspected of wishful thinking. But I assume fewer would make the same claim if I assert that conscious beings have free will. And the reason is that everyone, including those who reject the existence of free will, have an introspective sense of it. I would argue that believing in free will (Which I do) has an element of choice, and hence of faith, while also being based on intuition.

Any doubt about having a thought comes after the thought, and so one is, in effect, doubting the memory of that thought. And the question of how much we can trust our memories is a complicated one. But if we start off with that not all memories are unreliable, then the memory of a thought one had a moment ago would be high up on the list of reliable memories.

Super determinism was what I was referring to in my original post.

Yes, you can preserve determinism with the many worlds interpretation, but although I respect that you have a very different view, the reason why I didn't even think of it when I wrote my original post, is that I don't take it seriously.

I doubt I fully understood what you just wrote. "QM without collapse." - Are you referring to the many worlds interpretation?

Ok. Then I misinterpreted what you originally wrote.

"If you are saying that the state of the universe, together with the laws of nature, fix some event with only 50% probability"

It may fix an event with 50% probability from the perspective of a conscious observer, but still be determined by the universe itself. It's the one refuge for determinism after quantum mechanics. The Aspect experiment ruled out hidden variables, but you may still maintain that whatever happens is determined, just not predictable with any information, hidden or not.

Acquiring insight is the main purpose of life. And if you need a reputable source for that, you only need to look at my profile.

In order to even suggest that IQ tests measure intelligence, one must define intelligence as the ability to learn, rather than the ability to problem solve. Someone can learn well throughout their entire lives without being very creative, especially when they're coached through the learning process in an educational system. To be a good problem solver, however, you need to be creative, and IQ tests do not measure creativity.

"Why didn't humans stop at atheism? What went wrong?"

There is an obvious distincition between not believing in a deity and not being religious. As unstrustworthy as wikipedia may be, here is its definition of religion:

"Religion may be defined as a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements."

If declaring oneself as an atheist means not believing in deities, metpahysics, magical thinking, superstition, or anything in that category,, then it might be that the prehistoric world didn't inhabit a single atheist.

If, however, being an atheist only means that one doesn't believe in deities, which is the standard definition, then it's fully possible to be religious and an atheist at the same time.

So instead of asking why humanity didn't stop at atheism instead of developing Christianity, it's rather a question of why not stop at earlier forms of religion. -But I can't see how Christianity was a step backwards in that sense.

As Bertrand Russell pointed out in "Problems of philosophy", the induction principle is an example of synthetic knowledge a priori.

Assumption 1:

Time is discrete.

From this follows that space must be discrete, where one unit of space equals one unit of time multiplied with the speed of light.

Assumption 2: Every physical process can be expressed mathematically.

Then it follows:

The logical framework that underpins a theory of everything must be based on natural numbers. This means, by the incompleteness theorem, that this system cannot be complete and consistent at the same time. Meaning, there are two options:

There exists phenomena in this universe that cannot be described by a theory of everything,

or

the theory of everything must produce false predictions.

Or, in other words, a theory of everything for such a universe cannot exist.

One way to narrow down what matter is, is that is has the property of existing independent of any individual's consciousness, which allows us to make a distinction between the external and introspective world. My conscious experience of an emotion doesn't exist independently from my consciousness, but the physical processes in the brain that are related to this emotion, do.

More simply put, stating that everything is matter isn't the same as stating that everything relates to matter one way or another.