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It is with some personal surprise that, after 30 years as an atheist, I’ve come to say:

I believe in one God, the Father almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages. …
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the Giver of life,
Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Lost

My first memories of my relationship to religion are as an eleven-year-old, sitting in church, full of scepticism. When I came to know what atheism was, I knew that it was descriptive of my own belief and, importantly, feeling. When I was thirteen, my best friend died, and I declared a staunch and trenchant belief that God doesn’t exist. It was the problem of pain and evil that sealed it for me.

During the heyday of the New Atheists, I became entrenched in a more academic sort of atheism and would spend a lot of my time modelling myself after their argumentative style, trying to talk as many people out of belief as I could. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said I just believed in the truth.

But the truth is, I was an angry young man who had experienced some of the worst life had to offer. It made me feel superior to others to rhetorically tear them apart.

With maturity growing over time, I softened from that position, from that way of being.

But my mind never changed.

And that’s where I’ve been for a long time. I began to believe that belief in God was something people are just either wired to do or not to do. I was the latter.

And I thought that it was mostly emotional reasoning, because it was so clear to me that I had all the facts on my side.

Life-Changing

It wasn’t until recently that I became aware of how I had a clear emotional attachment to being an atheist. It wasn’t just clinical analysis; I wanted it to be true because it comforted me in certain ways. There was no objective truth or transcendent moral grounding to how I had to behave; I just had to reason my way through these matters, guided by Darwin and the scientific method.

But here’s where it all turned around; this is where Darwin became insufficient: I married my wife, and we had three kids in two and a half years. And the love I feel for my family… it’s more than natural. It’s more than an evolutionarily trained, oxytocin-triggered thing. It’s supernatural. I’ve come to see this as a form of general revelation. It opened the door to God.

It didn’t happen suddenly. I don’t have a road-to-Damascus conversion experience to share. Instead, that revelation pulled me toward a study of apologetics and theology. I’ve read a ton, and listened to a ton, and it is so clear to me now that you cannot get a sense of the sophistication of the arguments for God’s existence merely by reading them through the eyes of His most vociferous detractors. My heart changed before my mind, but the most unexpected thing was that my mind DID change.

Anyway, this is all very new to me, and I’m probably going to be a terrible Christian and fail to live up to His word, but I am ready to try, in my own small way, to become an instrument of His will. I pray that He will show me the way.

So, that’s a lot, and I’m a little conflicted about sharing it all publicly, but I don’t want to shy away from the faith. When I was still very young, anger, hate, and pain drove me away from God. Thirty years later, love brought me back to Him.
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Republished with thanks to James A. Furey. Image courtesy of Adobe.