Once again, I was stuck in this black hole of atheism. I really didn't want to be there. I desperately wanted to cling to religion. But logic, reason, anecdotal experiences, and science were all dragging me away. Those were much more compelling to me than a collection of ancient books that were probably just as mythical as Roman and Egyptian religions. However, the fact that there were people who were much smarter, older, and more educated than me who believed in the bible tripped me up a little bit. Why did they believe in the bible, but disregard all other religions and myths? What was so special about Christianity?
Once I'd gotten physically better and began to return to normality, my dad took me on a short hike in the mountains one cool, sunny spring day. On the way there, he asked me what I was up to in school. My dad still didn't think I was getting the most legitimate education at home, even though I was following the public school curriculum and being taught by a man who actually knew what he was teaching and how to teach it to me. But, regardless of my dad's skepticism, I opened up quite a lot about how well I was doing in school, and my dad was stunned by how positively I talked about school. In the past, I absolutely despised school and dreaded it every second of my life. But in home school, I was really enjoying myself, and the stuff I was learning was actually making sense to me and sticking in my mind.
When I started talking about what I was learning in Physics, my dad followed along and then said, "Isn't it kinda strange how our universe seems to have been literally coded into reality? I mean, we can describe and predict what will happen to things with numbers! Isn't that crazy?!"
"Yeah, it actually is." I admitted, "I never really put too much thought into how wild that is, to be honest."
That was the beginning of a very long discussion that spanned for the rest of our drive to the trailhead, our whole two-and-a-half mile hike, and the drive home. In it, my dad said that Physics and Math were the two things that made him question his atheism. Yes, my dad was an atheist, but he still felt that because of how good math was at explaining the hows, whys, whens, and wheres about the behavior of materialistic things, there must be something intelligent behind it all. My dad was willing to consider every possibility of what that intelligence was.
Maybe we were all in virtual reality, and when we died, we woke up in the real world. Maybe we were just a coded experiment, all living in a computer in a science lab alongside hundreds of other computers running similar programs. Maybe we were the product of aliens who created life and then dropped us off on Earth before going back to their own planet in some other far off galaxy. Maybe there really was a God. Perhaps He wasn't a personal God. But, maybe God created the universe and the laws that govern how things work, and then let it run its course while He went off to do other stuff. Or, maybe, just maybe, there was a personal God who created the universe, and who was interested in our lives and enjoyed interacting with us through prayer and miracles. Whatever it was, my dad was pretty convinced that there must be something behind our existence, since math worked so well to explain materialistic things.
Who knew a conversation with an atheist would be the reason why I decided to give God yet another chance! After I thought about my dad's thoughts on science and continued to learn more and more about Physics in school, I realized that it really was wild that our universe seemed to have been coded into existence. Of course, that begged for there to be an intelligent Being behind it all. Whether or not that Being was personal or even just a single Being, rather than multiple Beings, was up for debate. But, there must be something beyond our universe that created it. In fact, the expansion of the universe seemed to be proof of that. I mean, what was our universe expanding into? Better yet, why the hell was it speeding up instead of slowing down?! Also, what triggered the Big Bang in the first place? Why did a tiny little dot of matter suddenly decide to expand? And, of course, where was this tiny little dot and what was it expanding into?
Those were one of the many questions not even the best physicists could really answer. Sure, everyone could speculate and come up with ideas, but it was pretty much impossible to really answer those questions with the knowledge and technology we had (and still have) at the moment. But, I wasn't ready to put my faith in God yet just because there were a lot of things science still couldn't explain. I needed a lot more than just scientific unknowns to convince me that there really was a God. I felt that there was a major missing piece to this whole God puzzle that I didn't have.
At the time, I wasn't quite sure what that missing piece was. But, looking back, that missing piece was fellowship with other Christians. I didn't really know anyone who believed in God similarly to how I did, or who was even willing to question and learn things along with me. I wasn't looking for people who had the exact same beliefs as me, but I was looking for people who were willing to hear me out without shutting me down, just like how I was willing to hear them out without shutting them down. I was also looking for people who could verify that it was ok and reasonable for me to believe the things that I believed. But, throughout my life, I didn't really have that. Sure, my family encouraged me to question things, however they definitely played the "God knows more than anyone" card when I lead them into uncharted territory.
It was true that I was very lonely at that time. In fact, I still am. As much as I desired to be around other people and interact with them, I didn't really know how to make new friends or not be so skittish. I didn't really care about what people thought about me, in the sense that people could give me weird looks or make little disapproving comments about me and I just wouldn't care. But, I was afraid of what people were capable of doing to me, especially after the abuse I'd endured for most of my childhood that came from all sorts of people, including people from church and that private school I attended. I knew if I was gonna find other Christians who were more similar to me, and who were interested in the intellectual side of the faith, rather than the emotional or the traditional sides of faith like my family was, I'd have to venture in that alone. That terrified me.
