Atheist Turned Believer

 After all this typing, we finally come to the question, "Who cares?  My life is going along pretty good all on my own; why do I need to subject myself to the all-seeing gaze of some omnipresent Supreme Being?  I control my own destiny.  What need have I of God?" This is not an unreasonable position to take in 21st Century Western society.  After all, as we will see, our whole civilization is built on the concept of self-reliance.  Some take the concept to a further extreme than others, but the basic idea is embedded in all of us, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist and Atheist alike. Much of what is to follow is a very brief condensation of the ideas expressed in The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis (I'm currently reading my way through Lewis' works).  If my statements fall a bit flat, I recommend the book for a more thorough examination of the concepts. In a way, I rather feel sorry for modern Christians in relation to their First Century counterparts....

 Some of my readers are still having some difficulty with my assertion that in order for the universe to exist then God, of necessity, must exist.  Let us consider this from another angle. Consider for a moment the vast number of events that must have occurred in a given order over the course of the last 13.8 billion years to get from the Big Bang to me typing on my computer keyboard.  Without going into great detail (although you're free to look those details up if you prefer), the Laws of Statistics confirm that all of those events happening just as they did to make my typing possible represent a statistical impossibility.  The odds are better than I might place $1.00 into every lottery on the planet and hit the jackpot on all of them at the same time.  Possible?  Sure, but the odds are so negligible as to be beyond consideration.  Again avoiding too much detail, we're basically saying that trillions of cosmic events not only happened just so, but th...