My understanding has always been that the persistence of belief in God or the supernatural is a simple consequence of our finitude and in particular of our epistemological finitude - if our knowledge is bounded there is always a question to be asked about what lies beyond that boundary. I grew up with the image in my mind of a high brick wall around the universe, like the wall around a back yard or a school playground, and I couldn’t help but wonder what dark impenetrable mysteries would be found on the other side. This inescapable question proves nothing about God, and one can always argue, as the existentialists did, that the whole sense of ‘beyondness’ or transcendence is simply a philosophical illusion. But the illusion won’t go away. Our finitude will never go away. The question is always there, waiting to be asked.

So, yes, I would agree with danjograss3 that ‘Religion comes out of a high density of people trying to answer questions that are not answerable’. Religion is what happens as a community over time constructs a coherent set of answers to those questions - in that sense it is made up. But just as the question about the ‘beyond’ is persistent and inescapable, so is the hope of responding to that question rightly. People will always try to find the right sort of response to that question. Of course, you could argue that the right response is agnosticism or pluralism, but you cannot rule out the possibility that there is a right or best or most hopeful response (not answer necessarily) to the question.

To my mind the biblical narrative of faith simply takes up and explores that hopeful possibility, and concludes that it is worth taking the risk of trusting in a certain set of guiding principles: that what lies beyond is a good creative God who has chosen to be defined and to become present for the world through a dedicated community. Everything else, including the story about the Christ, is a historical outworking of this premise. We could argue over the nature of the historical and personal evidence for the truth of this story, but the real justification for taking the risk of trusting as a community in this response to the question rather than any other is a sense of calling, election, vocation, which comes to our minds in much the same way as the original question. I cannot help but ask the question, I cannot help but wonder, and I cannot help but hear God invite me to trust in his goodness, to find the right sort of response in a movement defined by a crucial redemptive event of grace. It is a call precisely to be hopeful - to embody realistically in ourselves, to the point of self-giving, the conviction that God loves what he has created. But it’s a risky business. We could have got it completely wrong. That’s what faith is all about.