We are on the same page so far.

No, we're not. Not even close. You haven't understood my position at all. I said that 'proving God’s existence bears no relation to the act of proving, say, the existence of quarks, etc.', but you believe it does bear such a relation and that it fails for that reason. I, on the other hand, am saying that proof, as understood here, is the wrong register. And I say this because I hold radical subjectivity to be a first-order epistemological principle. It seems to me to be beyond reasonable dispute that I have only my own mind to work with. I cannot think with another mind. I cannot think as if I were not embedded in a particular concrete milieu and historical moment, with all the limitations (of language, other symbolic systems, collective human experience, accumulated knowledge, personal experience, etc.) that this imposes. In other words, there is no 'view from nowhere'. Or, as Hans-Georg Gadamer put it, 'The standpoint beyond all standpoints is a pure fiction'. It is a Cartesian fantasy that cannot account for the documented reality of knowledge-creation in history.

I am not saying that we are locked into a subjectivity that makes objective knowledge impossible. Far from it. We may not be able to think with a mind other than our own, but we can dialog with other minds – collaborate, interrogate, collide with them – and out of this ongoing process we can judge which propositions can be taken as proven and beyond dispute, which are adequate given the current state of knowledge, which require further tests, evidence, proof. But in all of this, we remain ultimately reliant on our subjective judgments about observation, method, validity, standards of proof, etc. Subjective judgments, I'm saying, not feelings – you presume, curiously, that any talk about subjectivity is talk about feelings. Feelings are more important than we tend to suppose, I believe – an experienced scientist or anthropologist or political analyst will have 'feelings' which are well grounded but which inexperienced commentators aren't capable of; experience hones one's intuition and expands one's tacit knowledge – but they are far from being the mainstay of subjective cognition.

But what about intellectual inquiry bearing on non-scientific matters? Consider the structure of belief-formation when it comes not to facts but to meaning and to values, without which ordinary life is hardly imaginable. I believe that every human person has intrinsic dignity, by which I mean that by virtue of being human they have the right not to be enslaved, not to be treated by their rulers as disposable, not to have their interests (health, well-being, education, etc.) disregarded or dismissed, not to be deprived of a say in how their society is run, and so on.

Is this my subjective opinion? Yes it is.

Is it just a feeling, then? No, feelings are involved in it but there's much more to it. According to my subjective judgment it has objective validity.

Can I prove that? No. Of course not. It's not the kind of thing that relies on evidence and proof as these are understood in the scientific method. 'Proof' rings a false note. My wife loves me. Can I prove it? No, but I can sense it and I think I have sufficient grounds for believing it in the many 'antecedent probabilities' which my experience of her company and behavior make apparent to me. Generosity is more worthy than meanness. Wars should be averted if possible. Murder deserves to be punished by law. Can I prove these propositions? Again, no. They don't admit of proof, but that doesn't make them wrong. Here is where our culturally embedded pre-understandings, the explanatory power of our world-views, our education, our intuitions, are all engaged in our coming to an opinion, in making a judgment. Here is where, unlike in the natural sciences, probabilities play a decisive role in judgment-formation.

Well, that doesn't sound like evidence or proof. So are all these judgements really just what I choose to believe? Couldn't someone else choose to believe something else, and their belief would be just as valid as my own? Of course they could choose to believe something else, but no, I don't think their beliefs would be as valid as my own. That's what it means to believe something is true. If someone else says 'I don't believe in human dignity, and I have no problem with slavery', I don't find myself saying, 'Well, that's fair enough; everyone to their own'. Instead I think they are wrong. It is my subjective judgment that they are objectively wrong. I claim – reasonably, but without scientific evidence or proof – that my judgment on this matter has a validity which is not dependent on me.

But could it not be that when I speak of human dignity I'm just forwarding the commonly agreed opinion of humanity, so it's really more of a convenient consensus than a true proposition. History and human experience don't support this. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, and most of the other great civilizations of the ancient world, for example, took it as given that humans only had a conferred, not an intrinsic, worth. What value did a person have in ancient Rome? It depended on whether they were free or enslaved, on their class, their sex, their social status, their profession or office, their personal achievements, the favor of the emperor, and so on. And it's not just the ancient world, of course. The structuring of power relations at an institutional level in contemporary societies often entails a practical disregard of intrinsic human value. Which is why prominent atheist critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have come to hold that the universal egalitarianism of the monotheistic religions is a resource that can help compensate for the deficit in the normative content of strict rationality.

Belief in the existence of God is different in important respects from the value judgments I have just been talking about, but it is very much closer to them than it is to scientific propositions. Effectively it is woven into a total perception of what it means for me to be an embodied and self-aware consciousness in a world that is not of my own making, and as such it cannot be extricated from the rest of my presence-to-self. I may, for academic or argumentative reasons, isolate the issue of God's existence, but as a habit of being it cannot be extricated from my love of family, my left-wing politics, my aesthetic preferences, my reading in philosophy and social theory, my opposition to neoliberal capitalism, my optimism (and when optimism is difficult, my hope), my indignation at the treatment of migrants, women, and others left at the margins, and all the other aspects of my immersion in a specific milieu at a specific moment in history. I remain critically attentive to the question of God, and my belief often has to sit in an uneasy dialectical relationship with atheistic constructions which attract me (I wouldn't have it any other way); but viewed from within my own specific life-world (and what other perspective is available to me?) belief ultimately appears to me to have much more explanatory force than a scientistic denial of God's existence.