Let me provide a quick example. A lot of mathematicians have quite an advanced sense of intuition about how to go about mathematics. The popular conceptions of mathematics as a dry, formal and computational activity are largely wrong. Instead, it is a very human and organic activity, with a quite a deep seated tension between exploratory creative imagination and formal, rigorous culling of ideas (if you’re interested in Machine Learning, as I am, there is an interesting analogy here with simulated annealing).

What’s my point? Great mathematicians and physicists develop a very sensitive and often quite ineffable idea of what they’re doing. They are using heuristics and analogies on such a high level that they completely resist formalization, and sometimes even description. Does that stop them? Not the good ones. It is the wellspring of their creativity.

The same is true about life. As you live it, there is a clear “ground truth” – physical reality (there is a deep subtlety hiding here, which is that the apparent solidity and unambiguous reality of our human-scale world disappears at other scales, but let’s ignore this for now). But physical reality is almost the least interesting level of reality. If you just stick with objects and their immediate interrelationships, you don’t really gain much predictive power.

To make smart predictions, you have to start abstracting, and indeed you do. You abstract from a messy collection of conjoined body parts to a single “animal” or “person”, a messy collection of desires and instincts and plans to a unique “individual” with a “history”, all the way up. All the important things in life: friendship, group membership, nationality, government, competition, cooperation, love, hate, belief and so on, all of these notions are so high level it is just silly to ask what their physical correlates are.

And that’s fine. That’s what intelligence is – a hierarchy of abstraction. But we don’t deny the existence of these things. We know they are real and affect us and are worth trying to better understand. My claim would be the same can be try of even more abstract and “physically real” constructs, and perhaps, if you were so inclined, you could map these constructs back down to what ordinary, religious people call “god”.

That seems quite reasonable. I’ve been thinking about precisely how one would do this, and I have some ideas. Now, just because I’m finding the idea of ‘god’ interesting again after many years of the traditional type of strident atheism does NOT mean I’m sitting praying to some personal god about what I want to happen next, as Dawkins would claim any sense of spiritual mystery would lead one to do.

But the way life is now must depend in some ways on the nature of the first cells to survive and replicate successfully, for example, the universal nature of the genetic code.

Your second point I agree with entirely.

Now another thing i would like to say in general is that even someone could actually prove wrong the theory of evolution, the alternative explanation “God did it” isnt proven at all. you dont prove somehing by proving something else wrong.