You have the ability to sense and know a higher truth.
Someone once asked me what I thought faith was. I said that to me faith is the obsessive compulsion to believe in something despite a complete lack of evidence or preponderance of evidence to the contrary. He asked me if I had faith enough to believe in God. I told him that beliving in God was not nearly as important as understanding why. I believe that when you boil down all of existence, remove all of the irrelevancies of living, and get right to the center of it there has to be something, because the opposite of something is nothing and I am not willing to accept that. The fact that we're here considering it at all guarantees us a non-zero significance, no matter small. And if there's something at the center upon which everything else draws significance, then that's the why. That's what's important. That's what God is.
God is also a man. He has to be. When we look to the Almighty we don't look to Him for nurturing or care. We look to Him to for guidance and limits. We look to Him to be omniscient and omnipotent. We want to know that somewhere, somehow, someone is in control of this haphazard mess we call reality. We call him Father because that is what we want him to be.
That's why I think any boy raised by a single mother is destined to be fucked up. The woman can be a veritable saint, but it won't matter. Without the looming presence of an Alpha Male boys are destined to inadequacy. Call him a role model, father figure, whatever. If you grow up without one, you're going to feel the sting of incompleteness your whole life because there is no upper level to which you can aspire. There's no place you can go where you can feel like you've made it. You're always going to have either a god complex or little man syndrome. You're going to constantly push against every insurmountable barrier you can find trying to prove that you can do it. And no matter how successful you are, you will always fail. When you finally get to the top of that mountain, or finally get to end of your umpteenth degree, or finally fucking push your way through a solid rock wall, you're not going to find your dad standing there waiting to shake your hand and say "I'm proud of you, son." You know what you'll find when you get there? Yourself. And if that's not enough, then you're fucked because there is no mountain tall enough to hold salvation from feeling insignificant.
If there was, you can bet your ass there'd be millions of guys struggling up that motherfucker like they were going to find God himself at the top. And if you were to ask any one of them why he was doing it he would invariably give you the same answer. "I don't know." But he'd know. He may not know how to express it, but he'd know the lack of foundation he feels in himself. Every person has the basic need to feel like somewhere deep down they are anchored to something strong. They need that structure at the core of it all from which to stand and reach forever upward. We all feel the need to have come from somewhere.
I don't know how it works for girls, but for boys that concrete, that steel, that bedrock comes from your father. There's no harsher punishment he can give you than saying "You have disappointed me, son. Get out of my sight." And no matter how much you want it to be untrue, no matter how many times you've told yourself that it doesn't matter, the bitter slash of your father's disapproval cuts all the way to your soul. It has the power to move mountains, to split asunder the heavens, to rend the earth. It's godlike.
"I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it."
The idea that we were created in God's image is not an accident. The concept of original sin is merely the playing out of our worst fear: that our Father is disappointed in us and wants us out of his face for a while. We put faith in that idea because that's what we want the truth to be. What is faith? Faith is a rationalization. We all have a basic need to feel like there's something out there bigger than ourselves. After all, if we're already at the top why do we keep striving to be better and faster and smarter? Why do we keep moving forward? Faith is the framework we use to give our lives meaning and God is the keystone that keeps the whole damn thing from falling over. Atheists would disagree and yet their moral architecture certainly contains a foundation or they would live in anarchy. They attribute it a rational belief in society and community. I call it faith in the higher power of your choice. The details are immaterial.
Does God exist? Absolutely. He has to. Just ask any father.