Finding Religion Through Reason
That’s the brief path that reader Matthew took on his journey through faith and doubt:
I think that I’ve made two big religious choices in my life—one was going from a “cafeteria Catholic” to a religious Catholic at the age of 16, and the other was becoming an agnostic a year later.
My family was never particularly religious, but I was baptized, had my first communion, was confirmed, and we would attend church occasionally. I’m not really sure how I felt about religion—I don’t recall if I ever thought about God’s existence, the meaning of religion, and what not. I remember being interested in the discussions in Sunday School, but I don’t think I ever thought about whether God existed. Either I just didn’t care or I believed it without being particularly religious.
Around the time when I turned 16, my dad introduced me to the Christian philosopher, theologian, and apologist William Lane Craig. It was life-changing for me.
For one, I became extremely interested in the subject of philosophy and those juicy speculative questions about the existence of God, the meaning of life, morality, the laws of nature, consciousness, etc. I’m even a Philosophy major right now in college.
The second thing though, and the thing relevant to the topic, is that I became religious. Dr. Craig is well-known for debating with atheists and arguing for the existence of God using philosophical arguments, and I became convinced that those arguments were sound. I’m not really sure why I became religious after that; maybe I was never sure that God existed and became sure after hearing those arguments? Maybe I just realized the importance of religion—how, if all this is true, it is really life changing? I’m not sure, but I became religious—started reading theology, praying, going to church, etc.
I think, from studying philosophy, I also became convinced that it is important to have evidence or reasons for your beliefs. If I didn’t have reasons for being a Christian, I thought, why not be a Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, etc.? Without evidence or reasons, they all seemed the same and equally implausible. However, I believed that there was evidence for God and for Jesus being God.
Eventually, however, I began to lose faith in the arguments for the existence of God and also began to realize how complex all these issues were and how little I’d studied. Even asides from the philosophy, I was believing that the whole Bible is true without having read the whole thing nor read the scholarship on it. I also began to worry how I could know that I’m right when there were also so many intelligent people on “the other side”?
So, since what seemed to be underpinning my belief in God were the arguments, when I became skeptical of the arguments, I became skeptical of religion and became agnostic. (I’ve always been kind of skeptical of “religious experience” because I thought there could be psychological explanations for that, but that’s another tangent.) Like I said earlier, this only happened about a year later, so I was only really “religious” for a short period of time.
About four years later, I’m still agnostic. Perhaps it’s just ingrained in me because of my religious upbringing and other people don’t feel this way, but I really would like to be religious again. I find religion to be beautiful, and I think it gives meaning to life and hope in the face of suffering. I would like to have faith, or I’d like to perhaps be religious for existential reasons rather than metaphysical ones—so just believe and let it give meaning to my life and not worry so much about the truth of the matter, since I guess if it’s not true, but I enjoyed being religious, it’s not like there were any negatives to being religious in my life … sort of like a Pascal’s Wager kind of thing.
Also, I know everyone doesn’t feel this way and I know this isn’t a rational thing to say, but I just have a feeling that there’s gotta be something more to life …