What keeps these guys in belief?

[Twentythree]

We all construct arbitrary meaning to keep us going through the day; if some people use God as part of that process, well, fair enough. Moreover I don't think that this tells us anything about their intelligence (though it may tell us something about their emotional landscape).  

Would you say that fact is arbitrary? The more we learn about nature the more we realize it's all forces and computations, and biology is just accumulated complexity for the transmittal of genes. So if this is true and truth is my meaning then have i assigned an arbitrary meaning to my existence? Perhaps arbitrary in the sense that I made a choice to not believe in nonsense. However, in my case nothing about the meaning of my existence was constructed it just is what is real.

[Poptop]

Originally I should have asked, how can these guys keep their belief if they've skeptically assessed their own belief system with rational thought ? 
A quick summary of my understanding so far; they probably haven't deeply assessed their belief with logical reasoning because it's immediately obvious that their belief would not be supported using this method.  Yet they desperately want both an irrational unsupported world and the rational one to coexist.  If they cannot coexist they would suffer severe cognitive dissonance unless one of the conflicting thoughts were to be abandoned or the two conflicting beliefs were to be harmonized somehow.   The belief arrived at by parental predilections, emotional inclinations and so on, is so much a part of who they are that letting it go would be too painful and disorienting.  They keep both ideas and make them fit together, ironically by separating them and constructing the idea that science and religion address different questions.  So they do what people are skilled at, especially intelligent ones,  rationalizing away facts that are disconfirming. 
"When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service!" - John Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852   
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." -Shermer 

I'm interested in hearing penfold's answer to Twentythree ...

"Would you say that fact is arbitrary? The more we learn about nature the more we realize it's all forces and computations, and biology is just accumulated complexity for the transmittal of genes. So if this is true and truth is my meaning then have i assigned an arbitrary meaning to my existence? Perhaps arbitrary in the sense that I made a choice to not believe in nonsense. However, in my case nothing about the meaning of my existence was constructed it just is what is real."

[penfold]

Would you say that fact is arbitrary? The more we learn about nature the more we realize it's all forces and computations, and biology is just accumulated complexity for the transmittal of genes. So if this is true and truth is my meaning then have i assigned an arbitrary meaning to my existence? Perhaps arbitrary in the sense that I made a choice to not believe in nonsense. However, in my case nothing about the meaning of my existence was constructed it just is what is real.

Facts about the world are not arbitrary. There are correct answers to certain questions about the structure of the cosmos; empirical questions. However empirical facts about the cosmos do not provide answer to existential questions. A large part of being human is finding ways of constructing meaning from the chaos of our lives. Such structures are not empirical but necessarily private.

We fall in love, we fight and hate. We hold concepts like family and friendship. We crave food, sex and power and the craving makes us miserable. We are confronted by horrors, daily in the news, occasionally in our own lives. We all fear death.

While empirical systems can account for the 'how' of these things they cannot account for their inherent meaning to us. No matter how detailed an empirical description of love may be, it is not until we fall in love that its meaning becomes apparent to us. As the great musician Duke Ellington once said: 'Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is'.

For many, including myself, the arbitrary nature of our existence and the irrationality of the human psyche does not require God. However I can understand that for some people it would. Moreover it would be a mistake to discount turning to God as some kind of psychological weakness. For many God can be an enormous source of strength giving them certainty of purpose; something I envy as much as distrust.

[Twentythree]

I can understand that, it would be that this "meaning" is a product of both biological impulses or instinct and our personal interpretations of the meaning of these urges. So perhaps all love is born in the flood of Oxytocin that fills our brain but how we interpret the chemical sensation intellectually becomes meaning. We find personal meaning in the way we explain our own existence and the mechanics that lie therein. I do think though that there is a lot to be said about the way one perceives reality though. If we all build existential towers of meaning through behavior interpretation then those of faith are working with a different set of blocks. I have to disagree with the notion that there is no weakness in faith. Faith removes accountability from personal decisions. The atheist realizes the impact of each choice and fully bears the burden of any consequence, personally in this existence, now. Ideas of an afterlife, and the rewards or pains to be earned there, remove responsibility from the decisions in this life and in this reality. If you make a bad choice you can ask for forgiveness by some made up entity in the sky. If an evil befalls the world it was god's plan. Not how did we humans make decisions that brought us to this outcome. Being godless is being accountable, taking responsibility for the reality that our decisions create and that takes a lot more courage than blaming a ghost.

[Gawen]

What keeps these guys in belief?

I would wager....fear.

[dgmort19]

There's always the human capacity for assigning spiritual significance to random correlation, or even fully, rationally explainable phenomena. For instance, a woman  wakes up in cold sweats with a pain in her chest and a strong suspicion that her daughter is misbehaving in a very specific way. Turns out, the daughter IS misbehaving in that particular way. This was obviously a message from God, right?

Well, in fact, the woman has been dealing with a disobedient daughter for years now. In fact, given the constant and tenacious nature of the daughter's deviant behavior, it would be a discredit to the mother if she DIDN'T suspect that her daughter was misbehaving at a given time. This should cause any parent to lose sleep. As for the specificity of the woman's suspicion, with a little investigation, we find that the daughter has acted out in this precise way before. She has a record.

Oh, and the cold sweats? Menopause.

I don't think a lot of "faithful" types really take the time to analyze scenarios and seek rational explanations. They fall prey to the ignorance of our ancestors and make assumptions about spirits to fill gaps left by a misunderstanding of reality. Even otherwise brilliant minds.

[Nimzo]

John Polkinhorne is a respected theoretical physicist.  He is also an Angelican preacher. 
Another guy, a college professor, has heard all the arguments for atheism and read Dawkins, Harris etc., has extremely liberal social views and yet believes, not all of the Bible but just 'the important parts'.  God is a large part of who he is and how he raises his family. 
Why don't they use their brilliant minds when they think about their god?

Seeing as Polkinghorn has written several books on the interplay between reason and faith, maybe you could look there for an answer.

There are also some of Polkinghorne's talks on science and religion online: at the Faraday Institute site (type in "Polkinghorne" into the search - note the 'e' at the end!) and at Robert Lawrence Kuhn's Closer to Truth site (there are doubtless other places as well, but these are the two I'm aware of).

The best way to find out why someone thinks something is to engage with what they've said publicly in word and on the page rather than ask a bunch of people who've not met him why he believes what he does.