How can highly intelligent people believe there is an afterlife and a God?

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The reason people get high and mighty about atheism is due to a belief in reason as necessarily being intuitive.

What intuition means to you will depend on whether you’re spiritually-minded or not. Materialistically-minded people think intuition means “fully-graspable and traversible immediately by mind.” Picking up a glass on the table is an intuitive act, the mind can easily grasp how to do it, and what might make it difficult. You can see why not having a thumb would make it difficult to grip a glass.

What you don’t necessarily understand is all the motor mechanics behind the precise movements your arm and hand are taking, or the electrical signals that pass from the brain down to the nerves in the arm. In scientific terms, you don’t necessarily have a mechanistic understanding of how your arm picks up a glass.

Spiritually-minded people use the word differently. When they speak of intuition, it means they’re using a mystical process to access the information. With enough mystic practice, your mind can make some pretty big leaps, and the confidence in these leaps can be pretty high.

Mystic practice requires the creation and maintenance of belief. When I was getting started, my teacher guided me through a few meditations and then had me do them at home, alone. The guidance primed my mind so that it could replicate the results later. Something about guidance causes the willing mind to suspend disbelief. Enough suspension of disbelief, and you start having experiences you can’t really explain rationally. This is the beginning of mysticism.

With enough experience with mystic frames of mind, they learn to use those frames to answer questions that are important to them. The answers leap to mind using brain pathways that were originally set during prayer / meditation. This makes them ‘intuitive’. Their minds form an understanding of the overall dynamics of the intuitive leaps, but not a mechanistic one.

It’s as accessible to Christians going to church as it is for occult practitioners trying to meet the “goddess.” The process is the same, suspend disbelief until you start having experiences that don’t require the suspension.

Materialists form an extremely strong disinclination to even try the first step, suspension of disbelief. But minds require belief in order to operate properly, nobody’s mind can operate in a total chaotic fog. So rather than forming beliefs out of the mystic experiences that most people get taught early on, (prayer) they instead form beliefs centered around materialism.

For those who reject spiritual approaches, they need a way to make existence and reality intuitive for them. So they wind up doubling down on the scientific as they do not have the mystic available. Reason is intuitive for them. Whereas for spiritualists, reason might feel strange and untrustworthy. Mark Twain once wrote, “there are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics.” (origin unclear)

God is real to them, because God is the believed force behind their mystic thought processes, which actually answer questions for them that are hugely important to them. (“Why did my mom have to die?”)