When I was young I would think myself into fear. My thoughts would go something like this: “If God didn’t exist, then there would be nothing…” This line of reasoning terrified me. As I got older I became rather apathetic to religion and started to view life my own way. I lived life void of any transcendental point of reference and tried to ‘wing-it’. Also, I remember confessing there was no God, but only enlightenment (Buddha). My mom was very sad about this, but she still loved me so much despite my open non-confession. This went on for about 4 1/2 years or so.
I later realized that to reason God’s non-existence wasn’t proving to be very effective. I tried to live and think like an Atheist about there being no God, but it just wasn’t working out for me. Here were some of my arguments:
PAIN AND SUFFERING
It always came to me as common sense to reason that God didn’t exist. There is pain and suffering in the world. War exists and I think it will always exist. Don’t ask why though – that’s just my opinion. But the problem with using evil as an argument causes me to question where do I get this idea of evil? If God didn’t exist, then neither does good or evil since there really is not standard to go by. Also, evil doesn’t really work as a good argument because it’s not God doing the evil – it’s us humans who are screwing each other over every chance we get. So trying to be an atheist from this reasoning didn’t work for me. It did satisfy my appetite for justice to blame the idea of God, but rationally it didn’t make any sense.
MAN MADE IDEA
So, I thought perhaps the idea of God is just a figment of man’s imagination; a deification of ideas. That worked for a while, but later I started to see that this doesn’t disprove the existence of God at all, but is a starting point leading to the conclusion that, perhaps he does. Where did we get this ability to conceive perfection anyway? That was like a one ended stick argument for me. So, I discarded it.
SO MANY RELIGIONS
Then there was the plurality of religion. So many ‘gods’ and so many different beliefs. Have we gone mad? I thought I was on to something, but then I realized that multiple religions don’t disprove the existence of God, but actually proves that there is a universal existential concern in the heart of all cultures and religions that needed to be addressed. My first conclusion was the wrong conclusion.
EVOLUTION
The argument from science seemed to be useful to a lot of people. Didn’t work out for me though. It seemed like an inconsistency with how science is done in the laboratory. I mean, c’mon! It all came from a bang? That just brought more questions! It just wasn’t sufficient to me. So, it didn’t really fit as a good alternative. Although a lot of people say evolution is ‘scientific’, it just seems like a very biased interpretation of information. Pretty much, you gotta believe in the non-existence of God first before anything brought to the table actually makes sense. The former proved to be very complicated.
Well, I don’t know if these arguments would work for anyone else, but they did for me. However, I haven’t told you the strongest argument yet.
Here it is:
COHERENCE AND COMPREHENSION
How is it that such a desire for coherence and comprehension can come from nothing? That desire was the premise of all my thinking; trying to make sense of it all. If it came from nothing, why am I trying to make sense of it? Why are Atheists trying to make sense of it? The ability to conceive and comprehend lead me to believe that the world was made to be comprehended and to conclude that it came from something that contains no comprehension seemed like, here I say it – insanity. (No pun intended)
Knowing all these things made it irrational for me to be an atheist.
Verum Unus 