Why I believe in God

A normie's journey to faith

I picked up Ross Douthat’s book, “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” But, before reading it, I want to articulate the reasons for my own belief, both as a thought exercise and as a possible guide for anyone else contemplating frameworks for faith (or nonfaith).

‘I must be looking for something’

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

My belief in God started with a search. For … something. Wherever you’re at, and whatever you think about the rest of what I have to say, we likely have this feeling of searching in common.

The whole of humanity is searching for a higher power. That was true in primitive societies. It’s true today amid advancing AI.

While you can argue with my diagnosis of what’s behind our yearnings, humans are, and always have been, uniquely wired to find purpose beyond ourselves. I wrote about that after visiting Stonehenge last year and feeling awed by my sense of connection to those who came before me:

The famous circle does not exist in isolation. The surrounding area includes other stone structures and about 350 burial mounds, which collectively are thousands of years older than the main attraction. Humans have been laboring around Stonehenge for an unfathomably long time.

I'll admit the rocks don't present an obviously magnificent site to the modern eye. Full appreciation takes imagination. But you're not there to look at the rocks, per se. You're witnessing a monument to humanity's search for meaning, a quest underway since time immemorial.

From the prehistoric people who built Stonehenge to the sophisticated modern thinkers who've left us their writing, art and architecture at nearby Oxford, the entire recorded work product of our species amounts to a thirst to make sense of what we're all doing here.

I would argue that our hearts are oriented toward God, specifically. Now, of course, there’s an immense delta between acknowledging human longing and proving the existence of a deity. But I think normalizing our perception of something more is an important place to begin.

This sentiment really is normal — and we can either push it away or take it one step further. While I’ve been thinking through this post during the past week, I’ve encountered two examples of public figures confronting their own subconscious searches for meaning within their work while also resisting the ideas of God and religion.

First, as I’ve been on a big Billy Joel kick, I stumbled upon a video in which Joel talks about his song, “River of Dreams.”

Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To a river so deep
I know I'm searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind

This 1993 song was a departure for Joel in style and substance. As he explains it, the words and melody came to him and got stuck in his head, even while taking a shower, until he submitted to the song’s will and recorded it.

“It was kind of like a gospel song. I said, ‘I can’t write this. I’m not a gospel artist.’ I tried to shake it off,” Joel said. “It’s got all these biblical references. I still don’t know what it means. … I’m not a biblical person. I’m not a religious guy. But these images were very strong and it was the reason I wrote it. I haven’t figured it out, but it became a hit record.”

Science writer Mary Roach, another nonreligious person, spent a year reporting on evidence of the afterlife for her book, “Spook.” Roach fills her book with witty skepticism as she encounters a wide range of (often silly) sources who are all in on the supernatural.

At the end, Roach grapples with how her reporting shaped her views:

I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things can—including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising—but not all. I believe in the possibility of something more—rather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums). It’s not much, but it’s more than I believed a year ago.

Perhaps I’m confusing knowledge and belief. When I say I believe something, I mean I know it. But maybe belief is more subtle. A leaning, not a knowing. Is it possible to believe without knowing? While there are plenty of people who’ll tell you they know God exists, in the same way that they know that the earth is round and the sky is blue, there are also plenty of people, possibly even the majority of people who believe in God, who do not make such a claim. They believe without knowing.

I put myself in Roach’s latter category.

I’ve continuously believed in God to some extent since my late-teens. But, when I tell you I believe in God today, what I mean is that I think there’s a 60% chance God exists and knows me and cares about my life. That percentage has been higher at times and lower at others.

My certainty is great enough to drive me to seek God and to teach my children about him. My family goes to church. My wife and I participate in Bible studies. I read Bible stories to my son.

Meanwhile, my uncertainty is great enough, if I’m being honest, to cause me to live like a functional atheist much of the time. I don’t pray often. I make major decisions through a framework of American consumerism. That tension is for another post, but I didn’t want to move forward without defining what belief in God means for me in a practical sense.

Faith without reason didn’t work for me

When I was in my early 20s and still trying to sharpen my worldview, I asked a nondenominational Christian pastor about the problem of evil — you know, the question of why a loving God enables horrific things to happen. This is pretty close to God Belief 101.

The pastor looked at me with empathy in his eyes and said, “You know, that’s just one of the things we’re going to have to ask God when we get to heaven.”

I’m sorry, but that’s incredibly stupid.¹

If you are working in professional ministry and you have to punt on one of the world’s most common questions instead of engaging with its underlying doubt, you should either ask someone else or resign rather than subjecting another person to a repellant version of faith without reason.

The pastor’s answer set me back, at least a little. So did other bad answers to questions by other faith leaders who did not have particularly solid grasps on their own beliefs. As Coolio sang, “If they can’t understand it, how can they reach me?”

My search for meaning had brought me to a somewhat generic belief in God — and I needed a deeper understanding in order to keep going. Not everyone needs that. Some people have dramatic experiences and trust deeply in God without needing a logical argument.

I needed to think (and, more specifically, read) my way to faith. I am not particularly emotional. I never had a tearful conversion experience or responded to an altar call or rushed to some baptismal font. I perceived that what I was looking for was probably God and set out to determine what exactly that meant.

Eventually, I found the confidence I was looking for in Jesus. Many people can, and do, come to belief in God through other religions. I am not here to discredit anyone’s views.² I can only talk about the reasons for my faith.³

My belief in God is belief in Jesus

I’ve done a lot of throat clearing to get to a very simple point: My faith in God is actually faith in Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth is a historical person who claimed to be divine. Early Christians believed so deeply in Jesus’ death and resurrection that they joyfully accepted torturous deaths to advance his selfless, nonviolent mission. Jesus’ teachings inverted earthly power structures, affirming the “poor in spirit,” “those who mourn,” “the meek,” “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” “the pure in heart,” “the peacemakers” and “those who are persecuted because of righteousness.”

There is no analogous figure to Jesus in world history. But it’s the divinity claim that commands our attention. The endurance of Jesus’ story, the documentation supporting his life, the audacity of his teachings and the rapid growth of a religion fueled by early witnesses who gave up everything to follow a king who washed people’s feet forces us to acknowledge Jesus and decide who he was.

I’m not making a novel observation. C.S. Lewis put it like this in “Mere Christianity”:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I won’t go down a rabbit hole of apologetics here. Suffice to say for this post, I became satisfied with scholarly evidence supporting the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and his identity as God incarnate. That is the foundation of my belief.

Jesus is my framework for considering all other problems and questions of faith. I don’t know why Psalm 137:9 says, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock,” but I do know that is mutually exclusive from Jesus’ who-is-blessed column.

When you accept Jesus as the full and perfect manifestation of God, then you can view all other texts and matters through the prism of who Jesus was. Every conflicting idea (like that it’s good to kill infants) is subordinate to what we know about Jesus, which informs our view of God.

This framework does not provide an all-encompassing guide to knowledge. Jesus did not answer all of our questions⁴ and, in fact, refuted the premises of seemingly reasonable questions asked of him.

After more than two decades of adhering to a Christian worldview, I confess that I can’t offer anything close to a perfect answer to my own problem-of-evil question that I asked of the poor, beleaguered pastor mentioned above. But, because I accept Jesus’ claim to divinity and because Jesus’ nature is known to us, I see no contradiction between believing in a loving God and also believing that horrific things happen within God’s kingdom that are outside of God’s will.

Greg Boyd addresses these issues in the book, “Is God to Blame?”:

We ordinarily can’t know why particular individuals suffer the way they do. But in light of God’s revelation in Christ, our assumption should be that their suffering is something we should oppose in the name of God rather than accepting it as coming from God. Hence, the only relevant question disciples of Jesus should consider is, What can we do to bring God’s redemptive will into the situation, to alleviate suffering and to glorify God? How can we respond in such a way that God’s will is further accomplished “on earth as it is in heaven”?

Depending on your perspective, this explanation might range from reassuring to mere cope for simpletons struggling to accept mortality. Perhaps all of faith exists somewhere on this spectrum. Regardless of what we believe, on some level, we’re all like the pastor just making stuff up as we go⁵, or like Billy Joel singing, “I'm not sure about a life after this/God knows I've never been a spiritual man.”

Wherever we land, we’re united in a quest for understanding. If God exists, and if he loves us, as I believe, he is not hiding. He is here for us to find.

1. Yes, I’m very mean even when writing about my faith in Jesus as my lord and savior.

2. Though some Christians might tell me that’s precisely my job in a post like this.

3. Such as it is, at 60% certainty.

4. He was unhelpfully silent on many 2025 culture war debates, but that doesn’t stop religious leaders from attempting to fill in the blanks.

5. OK, fine, I’ll admit I was maybe too hard on him.