I was thinking about this not too long ago… why do I believe there is a God? It was a little disconcerting to realize that I don’t have a very good answer. I googled the question to see if I could stumble on a good answer and what I found was pretty weak in my opinion. The answers I found other people giving seemed to be one of the following.
1. God calls us… This is perhaps the best answer for me. But it doesn’t really work if you’re trying to explain to someone else. And does a longing in me to connect to something bigger than me, something divine, really show that that something is there? Or could it just be an unfulfilled emotional need that doesn’t know how to express itself so it longs for the unknown.
2. Our world is so complex that someone must have created it… well, this argument simply doesn’t make sense to me. Ancient peoples attributed to God many things which we can now understand scientifically. This seems to be the same thing. We can’t understand what’s going on so it must be God.
3. So many people believe in God that God must exist… Well, I think there is at least something to this argument. We shouldn’t discount the experiences of millions of people over thousands of years. Of course, it doesn’t *prove* anything. I also believe humans have a great capacity to delude ourselves in order to maintain a semblance of order and security in our lives. I think many religious beliefs are rooted in this need for order.
So, why do I believe in God? I can’t give a definitive reason. I think we can neither prove that God does exist nor that God doesn’t exist. The arguments I’ve read about why God can’t exist seem just as weak to me as the arguments I’ve read that God does exist.
What I do believe is that humans are more than the sum of our physical parts. I find it hard to accept that we are nothing more than the elements that make up our bodies and charged by some electrical impulses in our brain. I guess that is more intuitive than scientific. But, if you can reject the machine model of humanity as insufficient, then spirituality to me is the quest for understanding what makes us more than a machine. Investigating this difference, what I might call our divine aspect, to me, is the spiritual journey that leads to God.
So I guess this is what it boils down to for me… if you believe in the machine model of humanity then I’ll never convince you there is a God. But if humankind is more than skin-clad machines, how can you not believe in God?
Of course, this says nothing about the nature of God… another good topic for another day…
