Is faith in God intuitive?

It’s an interesting question, with no clear answer.

Yet, as they are wont to do, researchers have tackled yet another study in an attempt to define how or why people believe in a higher power.

In a report on LiveScience.com, researchers say a new study indicates for many people, belief in God comes down to a gut feeling that a benevolent diety exists.

And that feeling is driven by intuition.

To determine this, researchers studied the thinking styles of a group of participants, but giving them math word problems to solve. Results showed tha tindividuals who approached the problems intutively – regardless of whether or not they solved them correctly – were more likely to believe in God. Participants who appraoched the problems using “reflective” reasoning and more concrete steps were less likely to believe in God and more likely to reach the correct answer.

So what does this prove?

Little, really. It’s just another attempt by science to study and quantify what it cannot fully understand: that is, an inherent belief in God that is pervasive among cultures and generations.

Perhaps it is part of our human nature to always seek an explanation: to want to quantify and qualify what happens or what we know or believe. And, that curiousity and desire has served us well thorughout human history, leading to some of the most remarkable and important discoveries in our history: electricity, technology, space travel, communications, vaccinations and medical procedures … and the list could go on.

And even today, physicists in France are working to create or discover the “God particle,” what they believe is the basis of matter in our universe.

Science will always question and dig deeper; that is its nature and its function.

But some things, such as why people choose to believe in God, are best left to intuition … or faith.