I really don't believe, except I sorta do.

My mother, before I was born, became a born-again Christian. I'm not entirely sure why, although my father, from whom she is now divorced, thinks it may have had something to do with the seven miscarriages and one kid who lived for two days before also giving up the ghost. I guess losing eight kids will force one to seek some kind of meaning or purpose where there (probably) isn't any. 

Oddly enough, my aunt, her sister, who, in the Sixties, marched at Birmingham, was a member of the Communist Party, and adopted four mixed-race Wards of the State, is also now a born-again evangelical Christian, but that's a different story. 

I was raised pretty hardcore Christian. We were, when I was growing up, Presbyterian. Our Sunday dance card was pretty filled up with Jesus. Sunday school, Church service after that, youth group on Sunday afternoon. I ended up even attending a Christian college, where the rules, which were legion, included no drinkin', dancin', druggin', smokin', gamblin', or fornicatin'. Which pretty much nixes every reason I can see to actually go to college. 

Problem was that there was doubt fermenting away in my soul. I'm not sure what triggered it. It might have been when I came across a picture of the Archaeopteryx in a dinosaur book when I was in sixth grade. If God really DID blink all the animals in the world into existence in their current forms in six days, He must have created the Archaeopteryx to really screw with us, no? 

Or it might have been that I had relatives who did not believe as I did, and I really couldn't see any reason for them to go to Hell. As my mother assured me they would unless they came to Jesus, too. 

I don't know that there was an exact moment when I realized it was all baloney. I don't remember a Road to Damascus moment (I just giggled like a cheerleader when I wrote that). I do know it was an awfully long, and in many ways, painful, process. Because I really desperately wanted to believe. I kept looking for reasons to cling to faith. I kept trying to justify the faith that I kept telling myself that I had, and that I really wanted to have. 

What, I think, eventually killed it for me is this: the faith of a Christian is entirely dependent on the veracity of the Bible. That's it. If the Bible isn't the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God, then your faith is malarkey. And, after an awful lot of reading--both the Bible itself, and then about the Bible--I reached the inescapable conclusion that, as cool as it is, it's just a book. 

And then came the moment when I realized that I didn't believe--and, more importantly, when I realized I could no longer keep telling myself I believed. 

At least not in Jesus. Or, really, in any kind of religion whatsoever. But I find I cannot quite give up a belief in Something. Call it Plato's Primary Cause. Or Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. Or der Alter (the Old One), as Einstein called It. Or the Grand Architect of the Universe, as the Masons call It. Or the Supreme Being, as Robespierre called It. Or, for lack of a better term, God. 

Don't get me wrong. I gave atheism a shot. I dutifully read Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Victor Stenger. And they make some good points and raise some tough questions. All people of faith--whatever faith--ought to read them. 

But none of them could answer--at least not to my satisfaction--the question of if not, why? Nor could they answer the question of why, in a universe that has entropy--the waste energy generated by processes in a closed system that eventually leads to breakdown--hotwired into its very physics, are systems--subatomic systems, star systems, biological systems--getting more complex and not less. 

Where a lot of atheists get it wrong, I think, is in going to the extreme. They realize that religion is phony--a man-made construct--and so they reject the concept of the existence of Something Else altogether. A Catholic-raised atheist probably comes to the realization that the Catholic Church is a human organization, and makes the mistake of thinking that if he or she can't believe in the Church, then he or she can't believe in God. A Jewish-raised atheist probably comes to the realization that the prohibition on eating pork was a health hint rather than a Divine instruction, and throws out not only the observance of Judaism, but God as well. 

Thomas Huxley famously said that agnosticism was the only intellectually respectable option. He's got a point. If you can't empirically prove God's existence, then you can't empirically disprove it either. Even Richard Dawkins concedes this. On his "atheism scale" of 1-7, he only gives himself a six, because, as he says, a scientist doesn't wholeheartedly endorse what he can't prove.

But I'm going to inch just a little to the left of Huxley. I'm going to throw out there for consideration the idea that belief in God has absolutely nothing to do with religion whatsoever. 

Let's see if we can't get beyond the very childish conception of the Wise Old Man in the Sky with the Big Long Beard--the Big Sky Daddy, as the atheists are fond of calling It. Let's see if we can't, based on what we can know about the Universe, come up with a concept of God that intelligent people can actually believe in--and for which we actually have reasons to believe. 

The idea that there might be a cosmic intelligence behind the universe does not strain credulity, or at least mine. In a lot of ways, it appears to be the most logical, rational explanation for a lot of stuff. It answers both the questions that the atheists were unable to answer for me. 

But, having said that, don't expect me to start rattling rosaries any time soon. I see no evidence whatsoever that that Being loves us, or is protecting us, or cares about us, or has any interest in us whatsoever. Maybe It does. But if It does, I don't see it. In fact, I'd argue that the evidence seems to point that It doesn't. Or maybe God just really, really hates Haitians. 

So, for lack of a better word, or term, I've come to think of myself as a deist. Not a theist, but a deist. Not because I really want to believe, but because that's the argument that makes the best sense to me (Dawkins also, in a slip he must be kicking himself for, once also said that a very strong case could be made for the existence of a deistic God, a quote that was immediately jumped on by the likes of Melanie Phillips and the rest of the God squad). 

In the end, having gotten rid of religion--as we all should, and must, and I'll argue why later on--we are faced with a choice between two implausibles. 

Either we believe that, zillions of years ago, everything just spontaneously burst out of pure nothingness--no matter, no time, no space, not even void, just nothing--with no trigger or reason for doing so at all. This strikes me as pretty tough to swallow. 

Or we believe that there exists Something outside of time, space, or physics that set the whole cosmos in motion. Which is also pretty tough to believe. But which, to me, seems to make more sense than any other option.