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Reply to "For those who used to be aetheists or agnostics - how did you find your faith?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To the OP:

I was brought up in a Catholic school from 1st - 12th grade. By age 16 I was absolutely convinced that there was no God and that people who believed in God were stupid. For the next ten years of my life I argued against religious people and though myself quite clever. In my mid 20s I began to have some very strong philosophical doubts about atheism. I was confused: if matter was all there is in the universe how could the Big Bang cause itself?, how could we possibly have free will if we are essentially just a machine - is free will just an illusion?, why am I thinking?, if there is no God there is no ultimate purpose to my life, yet I feel there must be a purpose? Around age 25 I changed from my militant atheism and drifted to agnosticism and let religious people be, I stopped harassing people and just tried to be at peace. In my late twenties, I  decided to occasionally pray to some kind of God in my mind to see if he /  it was listening, but also started really digging into philosophy. I started having nagging feelings that there had to be more to life than just matter and decided that I was at least some sort of Deist.  Around age 30, I slowly came to the conclusion that clearly God exists and I though the mostly likely explanation of God is as he is revealed himself through Christianity. It is really interesting that the dozens of questions and arguments I had for and against Theism and Christianity were already handled thousands of years ago, and I ended up coming to the same conclusions by reasoning without even knowing the arguments existed.  GK Chesterton explained the same near conversion of faith as mine in his book Orthodoxy - where he basically said he was all excited to reason out these things and set sail to his new undiscovered island, only to find an entire civilization existed.

Anywho, I think we are in an age of society where people are more disconnected, more self absorbed, and although many people think otherwise, know of many things, but also don't really know much about anything. Most people's reasoning skills are atrocious (as was mine when I was younger, and I violently thought I was so right about atheism.) I could have easily disarmed myself if I could have met me now as a 40 year old. (And if you are atheist or agnostic, you may be very will reasoned etc but I would probably respectfully disagree with your conclusions.)

My advice, if you are looking for any and are seeking, is to quiet your mind, get away from your iPhone, TV, blogs, news, and all the other junk that fills up our world. Humbly pray to know and understand God. Read some light philosophy if you haven't. I highly recommend these two books which I discovered late in life, which would have been game changers. Reasonable Faith and On Guard by William Lane Craig. He also has a great website Reasonable Faith which you can look up.

Peace
[/quote]

So, in other words, you came back to same ideas that were presented to you as "true" from an early age.  I also don't see how you can go from "how could the Big Bang cause itself?" to Jesus is definitely the son of the one true god, YHWH.  That's a big leap in logic.

Also, isn't William Lane Craig a young earth creationist?  Pretty sure he's not exactly who want to endorse if you're trying to bring people back to your faith.[/quote]

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