Why do I believe in God?

Dear Maigler,

Recently I've been questioning a lot of things in my life. I'm starting to wonder how much of what I believe and think is a product of just accepting what I was told and how much is my own thoughts. I believe in God, but I also believe in evolution. Is that a contradiction?

Floundering Faith

Dear Floundering,

The short answer is no. There does not need to be any contradiction between believing in evolution and believing in God. Many faith communities believe that evolution is part of God's grand design. There are very intelligent people, however, who believe that the evidence that explains evolution could also be explained by an all powerful God putting things on this earth they way he wanted them.

Socrates said "an unexamined life is not worth living" I believe that. I believe that we should question everything and if a belief is worth keeping it will stand up to a little shaking.

Religion is just the way we explain how the universe works. Organized religion is when a bunch of us agree on a lot of the same things. I remember learning about Apollo when I was six and thinking how foolish those ancient Greeks were that they could believe that the sun was a chariot wheel. As I grew older and I found out the Greeks and Romans were no fools I began to wonder if I was any better off with my belief that a man who was nailed to a cross came back to life. Where was my proof? Sure it was written down in some bible but that could be a pack of nonsense.


I became a history major in college and things only got worse. I found out that a lot of what we thought we "knew" about historical figures were just educated guesses. I mean how do I know that George Washington is any more real than Paul Bunyan? I never saw him.


I also learned the danger of deductive reasoning. Aristotle was a very smart man. Before Newton he had an explanation of why that apple fell to the earth. Because it was from the earth. He reasoned that all things from the earth returned to the earth, and he could prove it, take anything from the earth and throw it into the sky, you'll "prove" that he is correct. Only problem, there was a much better explanation waiting to be discovered.

Today many people, particularly in America, without realizing it use science as their religion. They dismiss the existence of God by saying they believe in the big bang. WHAT? That is a meaningless statement, so what came before the big bang?


At the end of the day we all have faith in things. We have faith that when we wake up in the morning gravity will be the same as it was the day before, we don't fear that we are going to jump out of bed and hit the ceiling. Faith saves time. Without faith in certain things we would spend all day trying to put our underwear on.


I must confess that I am an agnostic. I believe in something because I am here. I like Plato's concept of the unmoved mover. I am always looking to challenge my beliefs and if I find something that makes more sense to me I take that in to my belief system, but I never pretend that my ideas are better or more correct than someone else's just because they are more logical. Logic does not equal truth.

Look to the evidence you can find, find out who benefits from spinning a story a certain way but if you find the people who do not benefit also agree you might be onto something. Don't be afraid to be inconsistent or to acknowledge that your beliefs are a work in progress.

If you like thinking about bigger picture questions try reading any book by Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist and an essayist who will REALLY make you think.

When I encounter a crisis of faith I simply look at the face of a baby laughing or the perfection I see in the female form and the order and brilliance of these images restores my belief that this world did not come to this degree of complexity all by happy accident. I acknowledge that the world is big and my brain is small and I'm probably not supposed to understand it all but I will always continue to question.