I feel that critical/analytical thinking has taking over my worldview such that even if I had a strong desire to believe in God, I couldn't
Agree, and that's why I say that critical thought cannot lead to a sound conclusion that gods exist or do not. Any argument offered to date that concludes, "therefore God" has been found to be unsound, that is, contains some fallacy that makes its God conclusion a non sequitur - it does not follow from what came before.
Either one's reasoning is valid and supports his conclusion, or one has come to a belief without valid reasoning - my definition of faith-based thought (and seemingly yours as well). We can only hold two kinds of ideas about what is true - those derived rigorously and critically, and those arrived at and believed by other means (faith).
You probably already know that Newton made a faith-based comment about the solar system when he ran out of mathematics. His mathematics, later updated by Laplace to remedy its shortfall, suggested that the solar system ought to be unstable, and that before too long, large planets like Jupiter and Saturn would dislodge earth and other planets from their orbits and send them into the sun or out of the solar system. Since that hadn't happened, Newton realized that something was missing from his celestial model, and so he inserted his God to manually correct these perturbations and keep the solar system intact. Everything before that point was arrived at critically, using ideas that an equally talented atheist might have come up with, and is still considered useful science today. But then Isaac took the leap of faith and went off the rails with a faith-based conclusion. Two kinds of thinking there - critical followed by faith-based. These appear to be the only two ways to come to beliefs.
The skilled scientist who is also a theist has learned to compartmentalize his faith, which Newton did for awhile until his reason could take him no further.
So when theists object to an opinion like mine - no, one cannot arrive at a god conclusion with valid reasoning alone, therefore such a belief is not arrived at critically - I think they hear that all of their thinking is being criticized, as if the two could not be separated (compartmentalized). Of course such people can be fine and prescient thinkers, but only if they have learned to keep faith out of their professional work.
A little tangential, but I thought I'd quote Sam Harris about theist and NIH director Francis Collins because the issue of compartmentalization comes up:
BillMaher: To the person who says "So what. [Francis Collins] obviously is a scientist who can work in the lab and do scientific work and separate that from his beliefs about the space-god carpenter."
Sam Harris: But you can't actually separate these things. Because if you believe, for instance, as he does, that morality could not possibly have emerged out of evolution - that it can't really have its basis in the brain - but rather had to be inserted by the hand of god at some point when we diverged from apes - he's written this, he believes this - then, as someone funding neuroscience research, there's no reason to look for morality in biology. Nobody's going to fund a study that would explain its emergence out of the brain, which most serious scientists who study morality attempt to do. Your beliefs can't be kept separate. We have one sphere of reality we try to represent in our thoughts.
Harris is wondering if compartmentalization is really possible. I think it is, but it's an interesting consideration of critical thought mixing with faith-based thought and how the latter can corrupt the former.
And we saw what became of the intelligent design program, in which an assortment of presumably well-trained mathematicians and scientists allowed their faith that there was a God out there direct their research, which was unable to support their faith-based belief that our world was intelligently designed.
You think you have all the answers until I question everything you thought you knew.
Actually, most of us don't think we have all the answers, but in my case, I think I have most of the important answers that are possible and useful to have, that answers that will follow will come from the proper evaluation of evidence and not from some guru or adviser, and so I don't look to anybody else for more answers. For example, whereas I don't claim to have the answer for how life first appeared on earth - abiogenesis on earth, abiogenesis elsewhere and panspermia, or intelligent design - but I also know that I will likely never have that answer, and that nobody on this planet can answer it either. Just pointing out that somebody doesn't have all the answers does not mean that one does himself, or even that he has anything to add.
I think I've had some useful new insights about American culture and the American ethos in the last two years, but they came from the evaluation of the comments of Americans here and on other social media and news sources, not from teachers or textbooks.
Can critical thinking and "disbelief" in "God" coexist?
If by disbelief you mean the explicit assertion that gods do not or cannot exist as in what is called strong atheism, then no, that is a faith-based belief, and any critical thinking that came before that leap of faith has now been contaminated with a non sequitur as occurred with Newton above.
how do you define "critical thinking"
Critical thinking is a specified manner of thinking in which evidence and propositions are evaluated dispassionately and rigorously according to the rules of fallacy-free logic. Evidence is evaluated to determine the sound conclusions that can be derived from its proper interpretation, with a willingness to go to where the evidence leads without preconception or resistance. Propositions and arguments are evaluated open-mindedly, meaning with the ability to recognize a sound argument and a willingness to be convinced by it if it is compelling. It combines skepticism, empiricism, and reasoning to arrive at useful propositions about the world, useful meaning ideas that accurately allow one to predict outcomes.
