Since being home from college I have been forced to go to church a few times. Sometimes I listen, but most of the time I think about other things. Lately I have been thinking about why I believe in God; perhaps that is an acceptable thing to contemplate at church? Anyway, here are five reasons why I believe in God.
1. We all desire to know God
For this one I am cheating — I stole this one from C.S. Lewis, but it really resonates with me. The explanation goes like this. All humans have desires that can be quenched. For example, everyone feels hunger, thirst, sexual desires, exhaustion, etc. For each of those feelings we can eat, drink, reproduce, and sleep. How is the existence of God any different?
Nearly every culture on the planet throughout history has believed in some kind of higher power because they have an innate desire for it that must be quenched. Of course, you could argue that you have an innate desire to ride a unicorn, but I doubt that desire is as common as the desire for God.
2. Spiritual and unexplained phenomena
There are countless stories of miracles and mysterious spiritual phenomena throughout all of human history. Sure, many or most of these could have been fabricated, but if I didn’t believe in God or any transcendental force, I would be forced to believe that every single story is embellished or due to some misfiring in the brain. Just because some or most miracles can be disproved does not mean their occurrence is impossible.
3. Everything has a purpose
This is again not my original thinking, but I am not sure who said it first. Why does anything exist rather than nothing? Everything exists to serve some purpose — can you think of anything that has no reason to exist whatsoever? Be honest, there is a difference between having no purpose and having no observable purpose. I think we could do without mosquitoes, but I am sure that some spiders might go hungry. Given that everything (or nearly everything) serves a purpose, let's apply this to the existence of God.
Either God exists to serve the purpose of creating the universe or the universe exists to serve no purpose. Actually, there are plenty of arguments for something coming from nothing; but since it seems like most things come from something, it is at least reasonable to think the universe came from something. Whether that something is God is another question, yet I believe that something is God.
4. Evil and pain
I think one of the strongest arguments for the atheist is that a loving, all-powerful God can’t exist because there is so much evil in the world and such a God would extinguish it. I see this one-liner all the time and I simply don’t agree with it. If God created a world where everything was good and there was no pain or suffering, we would have the classic utopia.
Good in theory, but we lose the one thing that is central to everything good: free-will. This is pivotal for loving relationships with others and a requirement for an authentic love for God. There is a immense amount of literature discussing the problem of evil, but for the most part it is explained by the necessity of balance — yin and yang.
5. It's not that simple
Atheism has some of the most logical and rational-thinking people promoting its cause. If atheists worshiped anything, it would be logic. The first problem with logic is that no person is perfectly logical; we are all just slaves to our passions and logic is just a method of justifying them. Logic will never prove whether something is right or wrong. It only proves whether something is valid or invalid based on given conditions.
Seeing as logic is not faultless, I try to use my head and my heart to guide my beliefs. Although logic often steers me toward the compelling arguments of Atheism, I truly feel that the belief in the Judeo-Christian God points to good within myself and society.
