Once An Athiest - My Personal Testimony

The reason it is impossible to prove God’s existence is not because He does not exist. Rather, it is because it is not possible to prove the spiritual by using the material world, that is, by using the observable or the philosophical. By its very nature, the spiritual realm lies outside of the material realm, and so is not subject to the methods we use to learn about material things. There are three basic methods by which we learn all things:

1. Perceiving - This is learning by the use of our five senses to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. This is often referred to as empiricism.

2. Thinking - This is learning by the use of our mental processes such as understanding, remembering, concluding, and imagining. This is often referred to as philosophy.

3. Believing - This is learning by accepting as fact the experiences and thinking of others. This is often referred to as faith.

It is the last method by which we learn most of what we know. For instance, most of what we learn in school (history, geography, science) is by faith. We believe the teachers who instruct us and the textbooks we use, concerning information which we did not, nor usually could not, experience on our own. It is this last method of learning, faith, by which we must acquire our knowledge of spiritual things.

Nevertheless, I do not advocate a spiritual faith based purely on one’s emotions or experiences, because our feelings and perceptions are not always reliable. Our faith should always be an extension of what we know to be true. A trustworthy faith is based on reasonable evidence that conforms to our logic and common sense. It is the result of a serious search for the truth, and our willingness to base our faith on the evidence we discover as the result of that search. True faith is the result of an honest examination of the evidence that is available to us, and a willingness to adapt objectively to that evidence. True faith does not start with emotional or intellectual prejudices and then force the evidence to support such biases.

For example, everything that we experience in the material world has a beginning and an end, a cause and an effect. This suggests that the physical world must have a beginning, a “first cause”. The evidence of the “big bang” theory and the expanding universe support a beginning, a first cause. This first cause would logically have to be outside of the physical realm and not subject to its requirements to have brought it into existence. This is not proof of the spiritual realm, but is strong evidence supporting a first cause that would have the power and means to begin all material things. Whatever we believe concerning the origin of the world is by necessity a faith decision, because no human being was there, and there is no way to prove one conclusion or another. What differentiates one person’s conclusion from someone else’s is the degree to which a faith decision on this topic conforms to what we know, what we experience, our logic and common sense, as well as provable scientific evidence. Our faith should also be free from predetermined biases, such as blind religion or stubborn atheism.