Are You Religious?

[ManipulatorGeneral]

...even if you believe that there is a God, you still have the "why is there anything?" dilemma. You just have to take it back one more step...

That question should be considered, yes. The fact that anything does exist evidences that it stopped somewhere, and I find that God is the most plausible beginning because the nature of God offers the most possible reasons why He could be the first cause (such as eternality and, as sometimes argued, necessary existence); I also find God the most plausible explanation for why anything beyond the first cause both could and should begin to exist, and the more complex the course of time grows, the more I am hesitant to assign existence to mere contingency when it could simply be all intentional. Certainly it's valid to ask this about God in return, because He is an additional element, as to whether God is complex, contingent, etc, but even discounting the arguments offered by some apologetics that the concept of God is neither complex nor contingent, I am more willing to believe that the nature of God avoids these initial philosophical problems in some manner than the nature of whatever else could have been the first cause. It largely sums up the centrality of my choice for faith: that existence as it is appears markedly more plausible under theism than atheism, such that I couldn't imagine this universe arising without God, and even if it could (returning to earlier thoughts), God is more able and likely to cause this universe than anything else.