Why do you believe in God?

[Mariolee]

This is for everyone. I'm doing research on why and how people come to believe in God. If you could, please explain how you came to God in your life as thoroughly as possible, even if you've been a Christian your whole life.

[Silvertusk]

Here is my testimony of why i believe in God

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My journey towards God and Jesus comes from an almost desperate hope that it is all true, because otherwise in my opinion all existence on the planet would be meaningless. Nothing would have any point at all. This is a concept for me that is too horrifying to contemplate.

So unfortunately I guess my motives are fairly selfish. I had always an idea of a God when I was growing up – but as I approached thirty I sort of had a very early mid-life crisis. A lot of things were changing in my life – mostly for the better. However, one area that did concern me more than anything was I was now very aware of my own mortality and this scared me. My twenties were rapidly disappearing and my childhood long gone. Gone were the days when I was immortal and nothing could harm me.

I had already started to feel the affects of smoking on me so I quit that, but I needed to know if there was anything else for us in this life – or more importantly after it.

My wife, was definitely the catalyst for my journey. I obviously knew she was a Christian, and she was an excellent witness to that. She had a book called “The Jesus I never knew” by Phillip Yancey. I read it and I was surprised at how fast I did. It made me incredibly hungry for more. The irony of the title of the book was not lost on me. I think from here my journey began in earnest.

I needed to start with God. If I could believe in God then I could believe in a Son of a God. Being scientifically minded I need to approach this logically, my faith would not stand to self scrutiny if I didn’t believe the reasoning behind it. So I did my research. I investigated the origins of the universe and the origins of this planet and learnt how wonderful it all was. “The Heavens declare the Glory of God” was one quote I had heard time and time again. I was trying to find out if this was true. It certainly seemed that way.

I looked into areas like the Anthropic principal and intelligent design. I was certainly amazed at how ordered everything seemed to be and geared towards life. I looked at the odds of us being here by chance and it seemed to me ridiculous even considering the size of the universe. It became the case that it would need a bigger leap of faith to believe there wasn’t some intelligent intervention.

I went down to the biological level and read about ideas like irreducible complexity in human cells – again all evidence for the intelligent intervention. I believe it was Aristotle that once said that you need to go where the evidence pointed and considering the evidence I had gathered I moved towards God.

Next was Jesus. If I believed in a God that created the universe, then becoming a man on our level would certainly be well within his ability. But not only that – A God that could create such a universe and such a beautiful planet could only be a God of love. This is certainly how he is portrayed in the bible and how Jesus himself comes across. The idea of Jesus sacrificing himself for everyone to make us right with God is definitely an act of a loving God. This all made sense to me.

So I investigated Jesus and after reading several books on the subject I realised that there was a surprising amount of evidence that supported Jesus’s claim of who he was. The logic of all this appealed to me very much.

So my journey towards Christianity came about this way. My faith is not as strong as others who might have approached it differently, because for me it is a constant battle of reconciliation of science with the Bible and who Jesus is. But my heart is becoming more in line with my head. The final leap is a leap of faith and not of reason and logic and I feel I need to make that final motion and place my trust in God and Jesus. Trust in who Jesus is and what he has done for me.

I am hoping that my faith will strengthen over time to bring me more closer to God and really feel the measure of his sacrifice for me.

Coming to church has also helped as well, and again I have to thank my wife for that. I guess that she was the guide God had sent me. The love of the people here and the grounded realistic sermons delivered by our ministers each week strike a chord within me. It just makes sense and sparks credibility on a level that really appeals to me.

In the end I take comfort in the words Jesus said to Thomas after his resurrection – “You believe because you see, Blessed are those that believe and do not see”. I believe Jesus was talking to us today with those words. We are separated from the incarnation by 2000 years. For me it is sometimes hard to see, but I am trying and willing to believe – And I pray that I will be blessed for that. This is my hope.

[Canuckster1127]

I believe in God because God believes in me and loves me.

[Mariolee]

Thank you Silvertusk, that was exactly the type of response I was looking for: deep, touching, and insightful!
Canuckster, could you be a bit more thorough? Such as what was your journey like, if any at all? I was really hoping to avoid short responses like this by including in the OP that I wanted thorough responses, but I'm simply glad you even decided to post at all.

[Katabole]

Hi Mariolee

Since you are doing research, I'll tell you why I believe in God, specifically Jesus Christ.

I grew up in a small town in Canada as a Catholic. Most everyone in town was a Catholic, there were some Anglicans and Pentecostals. When I was young, life was like a Sesame Street dreamworld or at least it appeared to me that way. I was just a happy kid, naive and innocent. I come from a large family. We had a Catholic Bible at home but no one read it. It just gathered dust on our family bookshelf. We all went to church to Catholic mass every Saturday night or Sunday morning.

Probably the most dominant figure in my life at that time was the Catholic priest in our town, a very good man, interested in the community; a true pillar in our town. I don't believe any one of us denied there was a God, life was just too amazing and the natural world was too beautiful to claim anything other than a Creator and since we were indoctrinated into the Catholic faith, that is really all we really knew as kids. My Dad, who was natural cynic, really didn't believe in anything, but I knew he really believed in God.
As my family grew, like any family, my older brothers and sisters began to move out and go to university. I remember when I was 10, going to see my oldest brother at his dorm at university and specifically remember him saying to one of his friends, "Jesus, Smeasus. What a load of crap belief in God is". It seems as time went on, my oldest brother became more indoctrinated into all the ant-theist events going on in university. This affected my family because my brother was an influential person and manged to convince my older sister who remains agnostic and two of my older brothers that there was no God and Mum and Dad suffered from a delusion.
That was fine, I really didn't know what to make of it, so just left it on the shelf so to speak.

When I hit grade 8, I began studying physics in school for the first time and I was enthralled, when I was introduced to the scientist Isaac Newton, who remains one of my personal heroes. I found really intelligent people intriguing and when I read about Newton, well, he was about the smartest person who ever lived. It wasn't so much what he did when he was a young man in that he discovered the equation for gravity, the cycle of precession of the earth, invented the refracting telescope, developed calculus and perfected work on the nature of light and the spectrum, but what he did in his later life. I read a few of his biographies and they all said he spent the remaining 50 years of his life reading and studying the Bible. So I remember asking myself, "Why would a genius like Isaac Newton, spend his whole life reading the Bible"? I really thought my oldest brother was smart (which he was) but my brother never read the Bible only scorned it. I did a lot of reading when I was young and read virtually every other holy book as well but there was something sublime about the Bible that the other books were missing.

So I went to our family bookshelf and took our dusty family Bible and read it cover to cover. It didn't dawn on me at that time because then I believe God wanted my attention. My best friend in highschool was killed in a car accident just down the road from my house, two weeks before school closed for the summer when I was 16 and spent the last few moments of his life in extreme pain bleeding to death on the side of the road. Needless to say, that was a life changing experience.

It was then that I began to question life. Maybe my oldest brother was right, that Mum and Dad really did suffer from a delusion, that God was not real and that my own parents lied to me all my life, like telling us stories that Santa Claus was real. I remember after much introspection asking myself, "Is this all there is"? So I became very depressed for some time. I left the Catholic church, in fact, that was about the farthest thing from my mind. My attitude in life became very nihilistic. I flunked out of university because I didn't have the mental faculties to study and no friend, family member or anything else gave me any comfort at all. I would have given Richard Dawkins a run for his money when it came to the meaningless of life.

So, one night in the early 90's I was watching TV and came across a broadcast from a church in the US. I remember saying, "Oh no, not another loudmouth." But between the news and the info-mercials it was the only thing on at that time and instead of turning off the TV I listened to him. So during the Q&A part of the show a viewer wrote in with a question and the pastor responded by saying, "Don't you know that you are important in God's eyes, that's why He created you because he loved you. He wanted someone exactly like you, he gave you your own set of fingerprints because he considered you important enough to create. You are very valuable to God". So when the pastor said that, it was like a theologigal epiphany of the highest scale, that is the only way I could describe it.

So I became a member of that church, bought myself a King James Bible and began reading because I wanted to know, what was so important that God saw it well to create me. It wasn't until then, after reading the Bible a few times, that I understood why Isaac Newton found the Bible so appealing because when you have an intellect like that of Newton's, the only thing that would possibly appeal to you would be to meet an intellect, vastly superior to your own. I met that intellect within the Bible's pages best said in Psalm 40:7.


Psalm 40:7 (KJV) Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me,

My family immediately noticed a change in my personality but when I told them how excited I was, the only thing I received was indifference. That's good for you but not necessarily for me was the common response. In fact, once I became a believer, I swear I have lost more friends then those I gained when I wasn't one.

As for knowing Jesus specifically, I knew enough about law and history to know that He was not a mythical figure, but it wasn't until I did a study on the names in Genesis ch 5, that Christ really hit home. Adam's genealogy is mentioned in that chapter, and when I studied the names and their translations and secondary translations in context, this is what I came up with:

Adam = Mankind
Seth = Turns their faces towards
Enos = And are appointed mortal, grevous sorrow
Cainan = To lament and to mourn
Mahalaleel = God who is praised
Jared = Comes down
Enoch = To instruct and to concescrate
Methuselah = He is sent forth as a prophet, priest
Lamech = To be smitten and scourged, to die
Noah = To give rest and security, a quiet attitude of peace

The first four names designate the sin problem and the last six names explain the sin solution which is Christ.

Since that time I have gotten a pretty good job and developed my education quite substancially at the university of Toronto but going on would be leaning away from your question, so that in a nutshell is why I believe in God and Christ. I found within Christ the comfort I needed to get along in life. If you want to know anything else, just PM me.

[Mariolee]

It appears that most people turn to God out of fear that they are insignificant or that they want to continue to live forever. This is why I turned to God as well; as a 15 year old I quickly developed the realization that I am mortal. I could die at any second, and I didn't know what would happen. I was afraid that after I died, there'd be nothing. That thought led to thoughts like, "If there is no God, and we all simply return to dust and lose our sense of consciousness, then what is the point of living? What is the point of saving people or having fun or doing good if we all meet the same fate and won't remember it anyway? There is none." I became severely depressed, until I started rereading the Bible and coming upon sites like this one. I realized God was the only way I could not be afraid of death.

But I feel bad, because I love God because I'm selfish. It's not surprising in the least that many of the reason I've come upon for people turning to God are selfish. They don't want to die, they don't want to feel insignificant, all of the things I've mentioned before and more. Humans at their basic core are selfish, ever since birth. A baby doesn't come out politely out of the mother's womb. It comes out thrashing, crying, and basically a mess. It wants to survive and doesn't care what it has to do to get it.

So yes, I'm glad I realize that I'm selfish, because I can give that up to God and ask for His forgiveness.

I'd really like to hear from more people, especially ones that came from different faiths or lack of faith. Do not be afraid to reply!