Should we want God to exist? If God would make the world better overall, then yes we should want God to exist. And I have reason to think God would make the world infinitely better.
There is only one good argument against pro-theism that I know of, which is a practical argument: Wanting impossible things will make you miserable, and wanting God is to want an impossible thing. So wanting God will make you miserable.
My response to this argument is that we find ourselves wanting impossible things all the time, and doing so is not only natural but can even show our virtue. When a loved one dies, we wish the loved one was not dead. It's impossible for the loved one to not be dead, but we have that desire anyway, and not only can we not be faulted for having such a desire, but if anything it would be callous for us to be indifferent.
When we experience loss, we naturally grieve that loss and wish against it. We must grieve to 1) express our emotion and not let it bottle up (the psychological / physiological demand), and 2) to demonstrate our good character (we appropriately recognize the value of what has been lost). Consider a mother who loses a child, but does not grieve. This would be very disturbing, and we would want to know why the mother isn't grieving.
Obviously, one cannot force grief; it must come naturally, and we only grieve when we lose something precious to us.
And yet, while we must grieve, we cannot grieve forever. One can feel guilty for "moving on" too quickly; one can feel as though the greater the grief, the greater the love, and thus if I am to prove my love I must grieve for a great while. But this isn't the case. The badness of death is tricky, because it depends on what the dead have been deprived of. Depending on the circumstances of the dead, when they were alive, they might not have been deprived of much. A sickly child who has only a life of illness and pain to look forward to doesn't lose much by dying. An elderly parent who has only a cold hospital room to look forward to doesn't lose much by dying. And one might reasonably feel that given that our world is not a good world, or at least not a fundamentally good world, for existential reasons it's always the case that the dead aren't being deprived of a whole lot. By being dead, all existential problems (and all other problems besides, with the only conditional exception of deprivation) have been solved. Given the potential goodness of death for these reasons, one's grief might be cut short, and depending on one's own depression, might even turn into envy.
But in ordinary circumstances, grief is what follows loss, and the problem of how to grieve and for how long emerges. This leads to the paradox of grieving: I must grieve forever to recognize the permanence of the loss, and yet I must not grieve forever so I can live my life. Overstaying in grief fails to maximize flourishing, and no loved one would want that of you. But how does one stop grieving and move on without callously pushing aside the loved one as if they never existed?
The answer, like with any paradox, is balance. You don't grieve so much that your grief gets in the way of your ability to live. But you don't bury your feelings or pretend like the loved one never existed either. You grieve for a time, and that's the time to let out your feelings, and then when it feels right you let go. There is some compartmentalization here: in you, at all times, is your love, hidden away. Then, after some time has passed, you can bring that hidden love back to the surface and grieve again. And again, you move on.
I suggest that the death of God should be treated like the death of a loved one. You grieve, you move on, and you grieve, and you move on, and this cycle repeats until the end. You do this by ear, not by ritual. If you don't feel like grieving, then you don't. But when you do feel like grieving, you do, and you do not suppress it. Grief is human, and humans have a way of finding the balance of things, and the right balance for one person is different for another.
You might want to say God is too different. When someone "loses" God they really gain the truth that there was no God in the first place. But this fails to appreciate just how real God is for those who believe, and just how deeply emotional that relationship is. If you ask those who had such a relationship with God and lost faith, I think you’ll find losing God very much analogous to losing a best friend, a fiance, a spouse, or, if I may, a heavenly father. (I note there are those who feel silly for ever believing in God in the first place. But did they have the kind of perceived deep connection with God and deep belief in God that I have in mind?)
It's true that strictly speaking God isn't lost, as God was never really there. Instead, it's more like losing your optimism in the world. The world was fundamentally good, and now it's not; the world is infinitely worse than I thought it was. You can reasonably ask: How on earth does one "grieve" infinite disappointment such as this? This isn't a normal kind of loss.
You can rejoice in the discovery of truth and the shedding of false beliefs. You can be infinitely grateful that the world is infinitely better than a fundamentally bad world. The world is fundamentally neutral, and that feels, yes, overwhelmingly disappointing, but, weirdly, it feels fair. It kind of feels right. From day one, how did life treat you? How does life treat anyone? Peasants wish they were kings, and kings, paranoid of the Sword of Damocles hanging over their bed, wish they were peasants. If something is too good to be true, it always is. That's why life has taught you since day one, hasn't it? To discover that the world isn't fundamentally bad is an incredible sigh of relief, and given how bad things can get, it can almost feel too good to be true that the world isn't fundamentally bad!
You can ask how we know the world isn't fundamentally bad. It's true that I guess I can't have absolute certainty that my soul won't survive my death and attach to some nearby rock and remain there in silent agony for billions of years. But if testimonies of near death experience mean anything (and I don't really think they do), there is no risk of this. More importantly, consciousness, by all accounts, is an incredibly expensive thing. You need very particular organs, brains, in a very particular state to maintain consciousness. Even with brains and even with the right state, we lose consciousness very easily, like in sleep or anesthesia. This nearly guarantees that death is the end of consciousness, which means a fundamentally bad life – a life of eternal conscious torment – is impossible.
So there is something oddly beautiful, I think, in the infinite fairness or neutrality of this arrangement. But for those of us who once upon a time truly believed in heaven, we will have to, occasionally, grieve our loss of faith. We have no choice. We simply recognize the infinite loss.
We grieve, and we move on.
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