A Personal Manifesto on Why I Believe in God

"To the reverent scientist...the simplest features of the world about us are in themselves so awe- inspiring that there seems no need to seek new and greater miracles of God's care."

Since the moment that I could make intelligible sounds come out of my mouth, I have been sent to a private Catholic school. For the past thirteen years, my young, impressionable mind has been bombarded with stories of resurrection, and miracles. Now, as I sit here as a senior in High School, about to embark on the rest of my life, I am asked a question, Do you believe in God? To most, this question will have a clear and obvious answer, but I am not sure that I can give one. This is not to say that all my schooling has gone for naught, but rather it is a comment on the free will that we all have. If I am going to stand up and say that I believe in God, it will not be because I have been told I do since I was four, but rather because I actually do, meaning, I have thought about it, and came to a conclusion based on my own thoughts and ideas.

I am not going to state outright whether or not I believe, but rather give my thoughts, and see what I feel at the end. On one hand, there is the most obvious thing of all; the universe is supremely awesome. This fact alone may be enough to persuade almost anybody. I will give an example I saw in a book from the library. The sun is burning at approximately 20 million degrees Celsius at its interior. If we were to move the earth away 10%, we would soon freeze to death. If we were to move the earth closer by 10%, we would once again be incinerated. The sun is poised at 93 million miles from earth, which happens to be just right--by accident? The moon is poised some 240,000 miles from the earth. Move it in just one fifth, and twice every day there would be 35-50 feet high tidal waves over most of the earth's surface. The distance of 240,000 miles happens to he just right--by accident? These are just a few of the examples that we can see in nature that demonstrate that th! ere is some divine mind behind it all, working all of this out, so we can survive.

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Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. This is Pascals wager, in my mind, the other main reason for believing in God. At its core, it an optimistic way of dealing with the question, because it gives a clear way not to lose. If you believe that there is a God, than you can gain the whole world or lose nothing. If you believe that there is no God, than you can lose the whole world or gain nothing. When I think about this on a rational level, it makes so much sense that sometimes I believe a person would have to be crazy not to admit the existence of God.

On a more day to day level, I have found that believing in God makes a person happier than not. Most people who do not believe in God have this dark cloud hanging over them all the time because they feel that their lives here in earth are all that there is, and that in the end they amount to nothing. Believing in God gives us a hope that after we die on earth, it will be a beginning to something much greater afterwards.

I have never witnesses the miracle of birth, I have never been in an accident where I thought I was going to lose my life, and I have never had to go under for surgery. All in all my life has been relatively uneventful (knock on wood), and I would like to keep it that way. But there is a problem with this, however appealing it may be. I have not had the opportunity to have an experience were I can truly say that I came out of it believing that there is a God. It is well documented that when people come out of a situation where they thought they were going to die they have a new appreciation for life, which frequently includes a newfound belief in God. There has been no such experience for me, the closest I can remember would be when my dog died. I had Sandy for 12 years until she passed last year, and I remember thinking then, when it hurt the most, that their must be someplace better where she would be going to. It was too hard for me to picture anything else, and bel!

ieving that God was going to take care of her was a great consolation for me. I have never had to deal with the death of a human family member, and this was really my first experience of death with anybody, or anything, that I considered close to me.

Well, there it is, my manifesto on why I believe in God. I guess from the examples it can be inferred that my answer was yes, I do. I am not however saying yes to the question of whether or not I understand God, or choose to worship. There are many things that I still do not understand, but there is one thing that I can be absolutely sure of, the God does exist. I have found no information denying the existence of God that has been able to sway my thoughts from what I now believe. I did not come to this conclusion because of all my years of brainwashing, although I do believe that the methods with which religion is taught in the early years of school are flawed, and are just that, brainwashing. I rather used my own intelligence to make an informed decision for myself based on what I have seen, and what I feel.

Sir Isaac Newton once said, "In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence."

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