Does God Exist?

This question "Does God exist?" is the ultimate question, the most important one that needs answered if we want to justify spending more time talking about religion.  Before I can get into my logical discoveries however,  I need to give a brief background of my life.  I am very logical.  Every decision I make is logic based.  I was also raised very religious.  I internalized and became very close to it.  For 35 years however the two, faith and logic, never crossed.  I suppressed my logical self on religious topics.  I assumed logic had no place when I just had to have faith.  I was very happy in this state but never truly felt whole.

Around this time my wife asked if I would help in her therapy sessions.  In helping I suddenly found myself in therapy as well. What happened next completely turned my world upside down.  I realized I  didn't feel whole because I was suppressing this logical need. To truly gain integrity and fix this I forced myself to set faith aside and work through my religious logic. I had no idea how hard this would be. Ultimately I had to start all over again, My logical self was completely Agnostic.

Consequently this first question was a doozy for me to figure out.  I struggled with it for over a year, and I was forced to figure it out because both internal sides were constantly fighting over it.  It was taxing not only spiritually but mentally and physically as well.  I ended up gaining over 70 pounds because of the stress this caused me.  I went through many battles in my own head and reading/watching others online.  Everything from creation vs evolution arguments to hokey proofs of God's existence.  The most common battle I would have went something like this:

• Faith) Please God help me figure out a way to appease my logical side. Or at least send someone to comfort me.
• Logic) God is not giving me any answers, or sending anyone.
• Logic) Life is sure miserable I am so sad lonely and hopeless. This year is by far the worst year of challenges I have had to deal with.
• Faith) These were never feelings I use to have before.
• Logic) Hope in God may bring happiness and keep me from being lonely but if its not true is that really better? I would rather not be naive.

So there I was trapped in an eternal battle of logic vs faith and it seemed like nothing I did was getting me out of it.

Finally after a year or so and many life changing challenges that I went through without God, I had a breakthrough in my logical thought process by asking and answering these questions:

• Can emotions really be trusted?  Not really, people rally and manipulate people's emotions and beliefs all the time.
• Can logic really be trusted? Actually this is no also because often logic doesn't think things all the way through. Often there are missing hidden variables in the equation that can completely change it often allowing for something that we didn't think of to be possible. As a developer I can't tell you how many times I would of sworn that a bug was impossible yet have been proven wrong because the bug forced me to look at it differently.
• If nothing can really be trusted what are we left with? Really we just have to make do with a combination of facts and feelings. Basically just theorize about what is truth based on everything we do know and then continually strive to prove it right or wrong.
• What are viable theories of how we got here? At this point I listed every theory I have ever heard or could think of,  allow me to state two of the most common:
• Big Bang/Evolution: Life just happened into existence and evolved into what it is today. This theory in my mind has many holes and challenges in it but it is the basis for many of my other theories that do make more sense. The science community also seems to accept it as viable and therefore I will as well as a viable option.
• Loving God: A loving all powerful all knowing God created us, is helping us, and we will live with him and the rest of our loved ones after we die. In all my research I have never been able to find absolute proof that God does or does not exist. In fact I determined that this will always be a viable theory no matter what scientific facts are discovered. This is simply because this loving God can just be creating things via whatever way science discovers. This leads to a lot of other questions that I will explore in other posts but this should be sufficient to prove viability.
• If I had a choice of which theory was true, which would I choose? This is where the real breakthrough happened for me. If all of these are theories anyway, and there is no way to really prove any of them 100% true, why not believe in the theory that helps me out the most right now.  As I analyzed each with this concept in mind, the theory of a loving God stood out above the others 10 fold.  Believing that the most powerful being loves you and is their helping you through your challenges allows you to handle them so much better and easier. Believing that you will live with your loved ones again after death makes it so much easier to handle their deaths.  All of the other theories I came up with were bleak and depressing and really didn't help me at all.  Not only did the loving God theory help me now, but it was also extremely flexible logically, so much so that it would hold up no matter what scientific discoveries happened.  Remember this is just the theory of a loving God, were not taking any scriptural or religious beliefs into account yet. 

At this point it was a no brainer,  choosing to believe in God and defend that theory was a path I was willing to take.  I finally had a solid logical base that worked with my faith instead of against it. It was possible to have Faith and Logic at the same time! This has opened an extremely fulfilling journey that I am happy to share of Faith Filled Logic.