Why do you believe God exists?

[robsia]

[magpie]

When I was a little child, I believed in God because I was told to. Then in my 20s, there was a long period when I wanted very much not to believe for some highly personal reasons. That is when I discovered that, while I might run from God, God would not run from me, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not escape God's pursuit of me. Finally I stopped running and discovered that what I had perceived as a God of judgment was in fact a God of unconditional love, and that the judgments which I had been fleeing were human constructs and not divine. Since then I have had several personal encounters with God, and there is now no way that I could ever give up this new relationship.

[Summer]

Like you, Magpie, I was raised Christian. But then I found out that I could always depend on God. You know, during those really hard pre-teen/teenager years. Ever since then, believing in God just made more sense. To kinda quote Puddleglum, I choose to live as if there's a God, even if God doesn't exist.

[magpie]

I never actually stopped believing that God exists, although I tried very hard to do so. My struggle was learning the true nature of God when I had been fed some very destructive images. One book which really helped me when I decided to stop running away from God was Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips. Unlike you, Summer, I had not been able to rely upon God in the dark places because I had not believed that I could. I had to go through the desert to find the Promised Land.

[Leslie]

I was not raised to believe in God, or at least not the God of Christianity. (My mother is vaguely pantheistic.) Christianity was actively discouraged in our house. However, I don't remember a time when I didn't think there was a God. I came to faith in God as a teenager, because God came and found me - I guess that fits under the "personal encounter" option.

I don't think logic enters into it. Is it logical to believe anything at all exists? Faith to my mind is more existential than rational.

[Adam Linton]

Thanks for the question.

I was raised to believe in God, but my family was not church-going until I was seven years old. I remember our first visit vividly. We were very active until I was twelve -- we moved, became disconnected. I was in the last couple of years in high school when I first was no longer sure that I was a Christian, then later no longer sure that I was a theist.

Without God, the universe seemed to be both a less risky and more lonely place -- the reality that I could claim to be in charge of had less depth to it.

But somehow, the sense that all true reality is either "charged with the glory of God" (as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it) or haunted by that same presence kept bearing down on me. And in spite of my oft-stated insistance that I was through with the Christianity-project, I also found myself drawn -- claimed by the figure of Christ.

The arts played a role in this for me, too. I remember one summer morning, listening to J.S. Bach's Cantata No. 140, "Sleepers, Wake!" [how very apt that was]. I was deeply enjoying it; and then I was struck by a jolting realization, "Who I am kidding? I'm not 'through' with this at all!"

The process was difficult and lasted a number of years; at least in part during it I could have felt something of what Lewis was talking about in being a reluctant convert. Much wrestling, thought, interior and exterior debate. Reading Lewis' Perelandra, by the way, pushed me right to the edge -- the very edge. I could feel myself start to slip.

Then one day, I found all this unexpectedly and decisively resolved. I knew myself to believe in God and to be a Christian.

I say "resolved," but living with this and into this over the years has been its own on-going adventure.

Regards.

Adam Linton

[John Anthony]

[Allison]

[AllanS]

[jo]

[Genie]

[Boromir]

[The Seventh Son]

[AslansGirl]

I sometimes wonder if it's a sign of shallow faith on my part that I have never lost faith in Gods existence. Maybe I just have not gotten there yet. It's supposed to happen when you are a young adult right? I'm eighteen and still quite solidly convinced, but maybe I'll go through my little streak of rebelliousness in a few years.
I have a strong Christ centered family so there was never any question when I was little. Now that I am older I have heard the arguments against Gods existence and they have never bothered me for some reason.
I have not had a personal experience of Gods presence except the little things that happen every day like when they play my favorite hymn at Mass or a passage in the Bible makes me think "That makes So much sense, God's so Cool!" Or I'm having a bad day and I suddenly realize I'm being an idiot, He's laughing with me about it and it's such a relief to know that he has me figured out even if I don't.

[sehoy]