An atheist who wants to believe

[on_the_hill]

You know, I can sympathize with you. I became Catholic in 2006 but recently I started having a lot of doubts and now I just flat out don’t believe everything that the Catholic Church teaches.

Heh. I didn’t convert and feel the same way.

 

[TarkanAttila]

Here are 20 proofs for the existence of God by Dr. Peter Kreeft.

strangenotions.com/god-exists/

You need to know exactly what the Catholic Church teaches and what it teaches about God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is linked below.

You should also start reading the Bible, but use a Catholic Bible like the NARB, the Jerusalem, the Ignation, the RVS, or the Douay Rheims Bible.

You should examine exactly what it was that made you leave the Church in the first place. When did you start thinking God did not exist and why. And at the time did you know all you should have about what the Church taught and who God really was? Did you ever really practice your faith, it requires steady work and prayer, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum?

Peace
Linus2nd

Seconded. A bit of desire and a lot of logic and evidence can go a long way to our friend, the OP’s, benefit. He already has the desire. He just needs the ideas.

Perhaps the OP would like to understand, not just God, but Jesus, a bit better? After all, Catholicism stands on Christ. Without Him, we’re more or less left with deism. And Christ? He stands on His Resurrection, as Paul says often.

From the same author Linus drew from: peterkreeft.com/topics-more/resurrection-evidence.htm

Kreeft goes through five basic, likely possibilities as to what happened to Christ after the Crucifixion. Other things are possible. Why, anything is possible. But Kreeft addresses the likely things, and the problems there are with each of them, including the Resurrection.

I might also suggest the works of N.T. Wright, an Anglican bishop. Whatever else we may say of him, he seems to know what he’s talking about in regards to history. Here is an essay of his regarding the “historical problem” of the resurrection: ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Historical_Problem.htm

And he’s written many books besides. I have not dived into them; I don’t think most people need to. But if you have a spare 50 minutes, I think the gist of his work is compressed nicely in this video: youtube.com/watch?v=zqc7–CaCpM

Happy hunting to you!

PS: Reading the catechism, the Bible, and learning what the Church teaches from Catholics will also help. If you want to see what Catholicism is, may as well get it from the horse’s mouth. There’s a lot of misinformation about from non-Catholics - just as there is about any subject to which a person dissents. (Creationists who wreak havoc about evolution, for example.)

 

[fred_conty]

lonelyalgorithm, and Another Andrew,

Be thinking of you in my prayers.

 

[Another_Andrew]

Appreciated.

 

[Jerurussia]

Ask God. Ask Him by name: Most High God; Most Holy Trinity; Creator; God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. And when You talk to Him, put in a good word for me, please. Thanks.

 

[TarkanAttila]

I used to see God everywhere. Having seen many convincing refutations of miracles, and many things proclaimed to be miraculous that do not seem to be at all so to those not looking for miracles, I don’t know what to believe anymore. I am not convinced enough by the atheistic viewpoint on such things either, which is why I have chosen to persevere.

I also used to have an easier time as seeing the Bible as infallible before I realized how confusing it is. There are so many things which contradict each other, at least on the surface, and it puzzles me that God would give us such a confusing collection of books. Their are also things like God’s commands to wipe out entire races of people which seem to go against Jesus’ teachings of mercy. Or the command to expel people with non-contagious skin-diseases from the community (many of the “leprosies” described in Leviticus (or maybe it was Exodus?) are not leprosy at all according to the footnotes in my Bible, which is the New American Standard Version).

However, I see to much evidence against an atheistic point of view to dismiss my religion. Hopefully someday I will find a resolution to all the problems I see now.

I think, with study, and searching - and prayer - you will find the way.

I feel for you in many ways, really I do. There are things in the Bible that make me think and wonder. There are things in the world that make me wonder if God exists, if He is good, loving, or powerful enough to help.

What keeps bringing me back is the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. It doesn’t solve all the problems in a fully logical, satisfying way - except in light of Christ has proved He is God, and we can trust Him. In fact, He even makes human suffering a good, and brings good out of it.

And as I’ve said before, I believe God made us through Adam and Eve, and through evolution. Science does not necessarily contradict the miraculous. Some miracles, even in Scripture, can be explained naturally. But that does not mean they are not miracles. Sometimes they occur at an unusual time - such as on the very day or hour it is predicted. From what I’ve read, this is what made the Ten Plagues so miraculous, having all those relatively plausible things happen all at once.

Science never has to contradict faith. Even the multiverse must have been made by God, and all the beings in it are still morally responsible beings.

 

[brian_custer]

So I was baptized as a Catholic and performed communion and everything else but I became an atheist about 3 years ago. I want to believe in GOD and be part of the Catholic church but I simply don’t believe that there is someone who watches over our every move. I would like to receive some advice from Catholic members on how to deal with this because I really want to think there is a GOD but I see no evidence of the existence of a GOD.

i am so under-qualified to respond to this but i would just say go to confession & mass and prray for faith

Faith is is a gift from the Holy Spirit

you must pray to obtain it

 

[Techno2000]

http://qmbarque.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/miracleacolph.jpg?w=894&h=1199
qmbarque.com/2013/11/19/an-astounding-miraculous-photograph-taken-during-eucharistic-adoration/

 

[brian_custer]

beautiful icon

we all must pray for faith

pray to the Holy Spirit

 

[jbinueza]

personal experience,
whenever i pray with sincerity, God hears them right away…

at one time, i didn’t have money to buy food at our office cafeteria and I prayed silently, Lord, I’m getting hungry. I hope you can help me with my hunger.
Just as I finished praying, my colleague called me from behind and told she had some cake and soda that she just couldn’t finish…
I thought wow,that was quite quick for an answer.

 

[Morwenna]

So I was baptized as a Catholic and performed communion and everything else but I became an atheist about 3 years ago. I want to believe in GOD and be part of the Catholic church but I simply don’t believe that there is someone who watches over our every move. I would like to receive some advice from Catholic members on how to deal with this because I really want to think there is a GOD but I see no evidence of the existence of a GOD.

Hi lonelyalgorithm (great username, btw! ),

I **highly **recommend Mere Christianity by CS Lewis:

amazon.com/Mere-Christianity-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652926

This was the book which got me “over the hump” to accepting that Jesus “was who He said He was”.

Lewis was himself an Atheist for a long period, so I think you’ll enjoy his logical/intellectual treatment of the issues of 1) whether God exists, and 2) who He really is.

Happy reading!

 

[josh987654321]

I have converted many Atheists and fallen away theists with this simple wisdom that I learned from some dedicated Sisters.

I must assure you that you are trying to jump over a key step in the process of coming to know God. You cannot jump right to believing as your post describes.

If you think about it, all things that you really know, started with faith, then moved to belief then to knowledge.

Please consider someone who develops a vaccine for say Polio. He must first have faith that a vaccine can exist. This faith empowers him to do the hard work, the real hard work of developing the vaccine. Then if successful, he has belief in his potential new vaccine, so he promotes it and gains disciples, but it is not proven yet. Finally, after seeing it work and understanding the biochemistry, he has true knowledge of the vaccine.

Please note the sequence Faith → Belief → Knowledge.

Please consider first not the ultimate thing (God) but just anything and how this sequence played out.

Say sports, or music. You had faith you could do it. After lots of hard work and some success you move to belief, you gain confidence and finally when you are a pro ball player, you have knowledge of what it is. You have experienced it.

If you want to come to know God, start with the first thing, the prayer for faith. He has NEVER failed to deliver that.

The hard thing is that you and God are intimately linked. Knowledge of God requires deeper knowledge of yourself. God lives through you as you are his body - the body of Christ. Have faith that this is true and spend the rest of your life growing towards knowledge.

Oh, and please don’t label yourself. We all have doubts in the process.

 

[josh987654321]

Hi lonelyalgorithm (great username, btw! ),

I **highly **recommend Mere Christianity by CS Lewis:

amazon.com/Mere-Christianity-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652926

This was the book which got me “over the hump” to accepting that Jesus “was who He said He was”.

Lewis was himself an Atheist for a long period, so I think you’ll enjoy his logical/intellectual treatment of the issues of 1) whether God exists, and 2) who He really is.

Happy reading!

 

[Todd977]

God, if you exist, please help me.

When I was an agnostic and in need, I sincerely prayed the above prayer and God responded in a convincing way. You might give it a try…

 

[josh987654321]

So I was baptized as a Catholic and performed communion and everything else but I became an atheist about 3 years ago. I want to believe in GOD and be part of the Catholic church but I simply don’t believe that there is someone who watches over our every move. I would like to receive some advice from Catholic members on how to deal with this because I really want to think there is a GOD but I see no evidence of the existence of a GOD.

Hi lonelyalgorithm

May I ask whether you have read the Gospels before? The Canonical Gospels (The life and teachings of Jesus) Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the New Testament? if not, my advice would be to start there, as I agree with C.S. Lewis when he say’s “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” C.S. Lewis

I hope you don’t mind if I share some apologetic’s that I have enjoyed that may help you.

I believe to follow the concept of a purely material universe to it’s logical conclusion, pulls the rug out from under the New Atheists. As John Lennox say’s, If as they claim, there is nothing in the universe except matter and energy, some of which blindly and randomly evolved into the human mind, then how can we rely on our minds in the first place to arrive at this conclusion? Our minds are themselves, according to this Darwinian view, mere random purposeless movements of atoms, unable to recognize truth, or beauty, or goodness, to know anything, or to do science for that matter.

And yet other scientists of undisputed intellectual stature with diametrically opposed views concur that, ‘The reason why what is in my little mind can understand a bit of what is out there is because both of them are traceable back to the same grand designer.’

C.S. Lewis I believe also explains it very well.

“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.” - C.S. Lewis

*“The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words true or false.” *- C.S. Lewis

And I believe John Lennox also explains it well.

“The very fact that we do science, means we believe that the universe is rationally intelligible. Why does a scientist believe it is rationally intelligible? Atheism tells us that the human mind is the human brain and it’s the end product of a mindless unguided process, why should I believe anything it tells me if that’s the case? Whereas theism tells me that there is intelligence behind the universe and behind the human mind which fits perfectly with science. In fact the rise of science in the 16th and 17th century came about because people expected law in nature, because they believed in the Law giver (God). So science and faith in God fit perfectly together.” - John Lennox

There was also a poster in another thread that I believe put it well when he said, “I believe in God because I believe in free will. If all we are is matter, then all our actions are due to the laws of physics and random movements of particles. The concept of an immaterial soul allows for the possibility of free will. That’s what really allowed me to grab on to faith in God. I made the decision to decide that I had free will. If I am wrong, then nothing really matters and I can’t control my thoughts and ideas anyway.”

Please continue to next post -

 

[josh987654321]

Extract from the book 'Mere Christianity' by C.S. Lewis:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?

A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe, we should never have know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

Extract from John Lennox's book 'God's Undertaker':

In some quarters the very success of science has also lead to the idea that, because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe without bringing in God, we can safety conclude that there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first place.

However, such reasoning involves a logical fallacy, which we can illustrate as follows.

Take a Ford motor car. It is conceivable that someone from a remote part of the world, who was seeing one for the first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine that there is a god (Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because Mr Ford liked him, and when it refused to go it was because Mr Ford disliked him. Of Course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take the engine to pieces, he would discover that there is no Mr Ford inside it. neither would it take much intelligence for him to see that he did not need to introduce Mr Ford as an explanation for it’s working.

His Grasp of the impersonal principals of internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine works. So far, so good.

But if he then decided that his understanding of the principals of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of Mr Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false - in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake. Had there never been a Mr Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand.

It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principals according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe. In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms of the universe with either it’s cause or it’s upholder.

The basic issue here is that those of a scientific turn of mind like Atkins and Dawkins fail to distinguish between mechanism and agency.

When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, “I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.” Quite the opposite, precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.

G.K. Chesterton:

Modern Histories of mankind begin with the word evolution and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution. There is something smooth and gradual about the word and even the idea. As a matter of fact it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. This notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand everything else.

Extract from 'There is a God' by Anthony Flew:

Some have said that the laws of nature are simply accidental results of the way the universe cooled after the big bang. But, as Rees has pointed out, even such accidents can be regarded as secondary manifestations of deeper laws governing the ensemble of universes. Again, even the evolution of the laws of nature and changes to the constants follow certain laws. 'We’re still left with the question of how these “deeper” laws originated. No matter how far you push back the properties of the universe as somehow “emergent,” their very emergence has to follow certain prior laws. So multiverse or not, we still have to come to terms with the origin of the laws of nature. And the only viable explanation here is the divine Mind.

And just looking outside my window at the complexity of it all, I find myself agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he says “Some truths are so obvious, only experts can deny them.”

I hope this has helped

God Bless

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[CarmelJerome]

So I was baptized as a Catholic and performed communion and everything else but I became an atheist about 3 years ago. I want to believe in GOD and be part of the Catholic church but I simply don’t believe that there is someone who watches over our every move. I would like to receive some advice from Catholic members on how to deal with this because I really want to think there is a GOD but I see no evidence of the existence of a GOD.

What does it tell us about our human nature that we think about God, or His absence, and that we seek for evidence one way or the other? It means that we have a basic certainty that the universe is understandable, that it can be accurately grasped through reason. But this in itself is not an assumption based on evidence - much of what we experience can hardly be grasped through rational means. And atheism leaves one utterly incapable of dealing with the large tracts of life that can't be treated by reason apart from a faith which is reasonable but not limited to one's own powers of reasoning.

 

[fred_conty]

God, if you exist, please help me.

When I was an agnostic and in need, I sincerely prayed the above prayer and God responded in a convincing way. You might give it a try…

God, if you exist, please help me.

Great prayer…he will send you people, books, ideas, and move you in the right direction. Just keep asking.

We are all behind you.

 

[zz912]

My position is similar to that of the OP. I think the most accurate description of my beliefs would be agnostic Catholic, meaning that I am a practising Catholic, but I am not convinced that Catholicism is the truth. I nearly gave up at one point, and I think it would be accurate to say I was agnostic for a few months.

Being in my mid-teens, this is an especially difficult struggle, as so much is uncertain at this point in my life. My father is agnostic, and possibly atheist now, and my mother, though a fervent Catholic, is not an intellectual. I do not feel like I can confide with her, as it is hard enough for her to have a husband who has lost his faith and have to take care of seven children’s spiritual lives (I am the oldest of them). It’s a truly difficult situation to be in, and I hope it does not last into my adulthood, as I don’t think I will be able to make choices about marriage, for instance, if I am not in a good position to pass the faith on to others.

I genuinely hope that something, or somethings, will convince me that the Catholic religion is true, but until then I am stuck in a state of continual uncertainty.

My confirmation saint is St Andrew. (I want to be like him and bring my family to Jesus and the Church)

I’ll light a candle and say a prayer for you. God bless!

 

[zz912]

Their are also things like God’s commands to wipe out entire races of people which seem to go against Jesus’ teachings of mercy. Or the command to expel people with non-contagious skin-diseases from the community (many of the “leprosies” described in Leviticus (or maybe it was Exodus?) are not leprosy at all according to the footnotes in my Bible, which is the New American Standard Version).

Don’t make the mistake of assuming those who opposed the Israelites were innocent. Jimmy Akin has a good series of writings about the “dark passages” of Scripture. Those other tribes/peoples were evil and violent. It is tough to read sometimes, but people who are truly dead-set against God, and oppose His people won’t just sit back and be peaceful.

As to the skin-diseases, if I remember correctly, they were put out until the disease showed it was not spreading (unless leprosy, which always spreads). I’d have to go re-read it to refresh my memory. Once they had a chance to see that it wasn’t spreading, the person had to go through ritual purification rites and then was allowed back in the community. But let’s not assume that a skin disease that isn’t leprosy is automatically non-communicable. Part of the result of these strict rules was a large decrease in these types of diseases and a flourishing of the people.