There exists a basic difference between knowledge and belief. If you had certain knowledge about your religious beliefs, that is, that you knew that they were true, then 'faith', which we might define as holding a position without the support of evidence, would have no merit. This point is made quite transparently in the New Testament story of Thomas the doubter: "blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29). You are in fact supposed to believe without evidence. Indeed there can be no evidence, and the evangelist, or whoever spoke those words, knew it.
I was raised a Catholic and went to Catholic religion classes at school. I grappled with doubt in my early adolescence and eventually made the decision to renounce my faith; but of course there are plenty of people who still hold that faith, or indeed more extreme strains of it than that with which I grew up. Surely these people, many of whom are very intelligent, have had the same doubts: what these people must be doing therefore is ignoring or suppressing those doubts: making the choice to place their faith first. This at any rate is how I tried to deal with my own doubts when I was young. I confess that sometimes I have little patience for this approach; but because I was raised to believe, and raised to believe that (baselessly) believing in this context is good, I can understand how tenacious religion can be. In that one little idea that earned Thomas his nickname, Christianity made for itself a very effective self-sustaining mechanism.
As an alternative to this, one can trust one's intelligence over one's upbringing or dogma, and follow it through to its logical conclusion: to accept that there is insufficient evidence to form a conclusion one way or the other about the existence of any god; to accept that we just do not, or perhaps cannot, know. In fact of course there's no real epistemological basis by which one can say anything at all about the universe, or for believing in the external existence of anything at all in particular (although in practical terms we perhaps have little choice when it comes to
carrying on our lives as if the external world existed more or less as
we think we perceive it). Personally, I place epistemology, the study of knowledge and what can be known, above personal habit or familiarity with a particular religion or cultural tradition; and in general I would like to encourage others to at least consider doing so in this matter.
That there might well be some kind of ultimate design to the universe is in my view a perfectly rational position, and it certainly cannot be disproved. However, one should not confuse being inclined to think that there is (or was) some sort of conscious creator with all the other things that a religion, such as Christianity, claims about that creator, based on a book of Iron Age folk-tales from Palestine. Even if there is some superhuman consciousness which created or designed
or planned the universe (which there could be, as far as any human can tell), what one
cannot do, as all religions do, is say anything about Its intentions.
Obviously you may do as you please! By all means identify as a Christian (for example) if you wish. But I must say that suspecting that deism (the belief in the existence of some sort of god or gods) might offer the best explanation for the universe is not the same as believing in the fundamentals of the Christian faith (i.e. that there is a creator-god and Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and carried his message - let alone all that other stuff in the Creed). I believe that a fair number of Christians continue to call themselves Christian for little more reason than this. But I suggest that there is little truth in calling oneself a believer in Christianity if one does not actually believe its key tenets, just because it is the religion one is used to and one thinks there probably was some sort of designer of the universe.
If you particularly want to continue calling yourself a Christian despite much of this ringing true, it may be worth trying to interrogate your reasons for doing so - I do not think that honestly examining your own doubts commits you to abandoning your faith by any means.
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