People come to AA when their lives have completely fallen to shit. They need something, even if it's something that they have to completely make up for themselves out of whole cloth. They'll believe it because they need to believe it.
People who can quit cold turkey, or manage their alcohol consumption, should do so. AA is a last resort, when you're so desperate that even an atheist is willing to give up something of themselves in order to stop drinking. For atheists there are ways to make that "higher power" palatable, but it's still going to be horrible.
Most people will never have to do that, and they should happily pass that by. Just be aware that there are people whose lives are that bad that they'll try to force themselves to believe. Even so, many will fail. Addiction is a terrible, awful thing.
(In my experience).
For me, to consider the very fact of existence rather than non-existence, the beauty and order of it, the people around me who have somehow manifested as conscious beings from chaos... (and on and on)...
none of those things require a supreme being or intelligent creator, but the sense of awe after giving sufficient consideration is difficult to differentiate from feeling god.
Do you think that, in a universe with a proven-real, interventionist diety—picture, say, the Architect in the Matrix—that "feeling god" would really be a feeling of awe?
I'd personally expect it to be mostly a feeling of fear, at how insignificant and easy-to-accidentally-kill you are.
Imagine the feeling of being made aware of an entire galaxy, one containing quadrillions of lifeforms, getting sucked into a black hole.
Imagine the feeling of knowing that if you ask a question, a million consciousnesses might be created and then destroyed in order to answer it.
In short, imagine the feeling of someone else having an omnipotent magical genie.
Feeling at one with the flow of the universe is, to me, the exact opposite of "feeling god." It's feeling that we're operating in a system with a static set of rules; a feeling that nobody has the capacity to declare humanity forfeit by fiat (but instead has to "work for it" through regular physics, in a way that we might be able to defend against through other physics); etc. It's a feeling that the universe is a fair game rather than a rigged one, at least on the quantum-chromodynamics level.
when I was a child I wanted to become a priest, I read all the books and I was a believer, the giant mistake the priests and religion teacher made is to be dogmatic, like to still consider that "creation happened as it is said in Bible, that the world is 5000 years old and avoiding though questions with a story where X did Y and then God done Z. I seen on YT interview with smarter clerics that are not as dogmatic and acknowledged some issues and if my teachers were like that maybe I would have kept my faith.
At least the priest/teachers are paid from taxes to tell our children stories and contradict science /s (this is in Romania btw)
Don't blame 'religion' in general for such things when frankly only a tiny group of people actually believe that; mostly American frankly.
And also contemplate that there might be reasons why spiritual affiliations have a tendency towards dogma - it's a powerful social instrument. Almost all groups of every kind are dogmatic, it's what we use to 'fill in the blanks' and for most of illiterate or semi-literate history it was 'good enough'. It can be used for good or evil surely, but it's pragmatic.
Everyone seems to be arguing about religion but not focusing on what aspects of it might relate to the ostensible success of AA.
There are people that can just say "from tomorrow I will believe in God/afterlife/spirits etc. It would be so easy to live knowing that your loved ones are not gone or that if you are good enough your problems will be solved soon but for some people(like me) it is like trying to convince me that 2+2=5 and giving cancer to children has a higher purpose that we are to stupid to understand but we still should worship that "bigger" thing.