Atheist Turned Believer

 No one has asked this question in this blog yet, but it's a really big barrier to believing in the existence of God, so I thought I would address it as best I can.  And by "best I can," I mean "not too well." I lay no claim to being an expert on this subject.  It is a question that people have asked as long as we have had any sort of belief in God, and it has been addressed through the millennia by far greater minds than mine.  I have read any number of great works on the subject, and among the best in recent years is When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner and The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis.  If my few paragraphs inspire a further interest in the subject, these would be a great place to start your research.  But on to my small contribution: I have said for decades now that almost all the really important things I know about God, I learned from my children, and this is one of those things.  For years, I ca...

Okay, so I had gotten this far in my research, I had all the valid conclusions lined up, and still I was hesitant to believe.  This made no sense.  I had laid out the argument succinctly, I had checked all my conclusions for fallacies, I had, for all intents and purposes, proven my point.  Why couldn't I simply accept that I was wrong?  It turned out, there was a very good reason for my hesitation. There are barriers to our logical processes that we all share and that are well documented by psychiatrists.  These are not insidious as long as we are aware of them, but can become so if we act on them unawares.  Collectively these are known as "cognitive biases."  Essentially, these are erroneous "shortcuts" our brains take because, despite the promises made by corporate America, we can't actually multi-task; our brains can only concentrate on one thing at a time, so it invents these shortcuts to more efficiently get on to the next task. I did a quick Goog...