I was an atheist for most of my life. I was Baptized in the Catholic Church when I was 5 as a kind of extended family obligation, but I was never raised as a believer in my immediate family. I not only didn’t believe in God, I actively sought to get others to stop believing in God.
What changed for me, apart from Grace of course, was the realization that the universe is a changing, unstable thing, and therefore couldn’t explain its own existence. I already believed in the Big Bang, but I didn’t think much about it and assumed that the universe perhaps fluctuated in bangs and crunches, though my growing understanding of science eliminated that possibility. I thought about how the Big Bang could have happened at all, especially since there wouldn’t have been any “time” before it, and I was flummoxed. How could a finite, dying universe exist, and start existing at a discernible point in the past, without something that transcended existence as we know it undergirding being itself? Obviously the universe, which not only lacks permanent being in the now (as it changes constantly), but also did in the past and will in the future, doesn’t account for existence. I was essentially falling into the various cosmological arguments without having been introduced to them properly.
The more I pondered this philosophical issue the more I came to realize that there must be an “is that is”, though I didn’t think it was God or personal just yet. Then I learned about the “name of God” according to Moses, “I Am that Am”, and I thought it sounded an awful lot like the kind of name my “necessary being” would have. What tripped me up, however, was that the ancient Israelites weren’t philosophers by an stretch, and none of their writings or history indicated the kind of people who would spend their time reasoning to some lofty and abstract philosophical “I Am that Am” and then write a grand, mythic story about it. Rather, they seemed like the sort who would record their own actual history in a grand, mythic fashion, but then where did they get such a notion like “I Am that Am”?
Finally I came to the conclusion that since an “I Am that Am”, in an abstract sense, must exist, and the Israelites weren’t the type to spend time pondering their navels about such things, the most likely scenario was that this very real “I Am that Am” was indeed personal, and actually addressed them. Wanting to know more about this mysterious necessary being I began to study Orthodox Judaism, which eventually led me to concepts about the Messiah, which led me to Christianity.
For me, God isn’t simply an idea or a hope, He’s a bare and clear fact of existence. I’m less certain about the existence of my own waking reality than I am about the existence of an “I Am that Am” which is the foundation of all reality. Through Grace I’ve come to know Him personally, and accept Apostolic Christianity as being His true Faith in the world, descended in an unbroken line from His revelations to Abraham and Moses.
Peace and God bless!
