How I Came To Believe In God

Surprised by joy

I’ve described elsewhere the arguments that lead to my belief in God, and vaguely gestured at the story of how I came to believe, but I’ve yet to really tell the story of how I went from being an extremely confident atheist to believing in God.

I was raised a conservative Jew. My family was—and continues to be—religious, going to services on various occasions, sending me to Hebrew school (oh how I hated Hebrew school!), and doing the other sorts of things that conservative Jewish families tend to do. I had a Bar Mitzvah, during which, in my speech about the Joseph story, I, among other things, uttered the line “there you go all you Trotskyites in the audience.”

But despite being Jewish, my family never really believed in God. When you ask most non-Orthodox Jews if they believe in God, a sizeable share of them answer no. Others give some convoluted analogy or metaphor about God or say “I believe that there’s something out there,” generally meaning something very unclear (presumably they are not just affirming their commitment to the notion that reality has at least one thing and is not a barren void). Few, it seems, believe in the God I currently do—an all powerful, all knowing, perfect creator of the universe. Certainly my parents do not—my father is something bordering on agnostic and my mother is an atheist.

I was an atheist for as long as I can remember. It seemed quite obvious that in a world where so many wretched things happened, there could be no God. It didn’t even occur to me that there might be arguments for the existence of God or that they might be persuasive, and when I watched Hitchens debate Craig during my middle-school years, it was the first time I was aware that anyone made arguments for God. I felt about the existence of God rather like, to quote an analogy from Ben Burgis, one might feel about the notion that there’s a giant that paints the sky yellow: not only is there no evidence for such a thing, if there is such a being, then why isn’t the sky yellow? If there is a God, it seemed impossible that there’d be any evil, and even more obviously impossible that there’d be as much evil as there is. I even have a faint memory of, when I was in early elementary school, addressing the skeptical theist response to the problem of evil. I thought God couldn’t have a plan that required evil, because being omnipotent, he could produce the goods that came from the evil without the evil.

My older brother was something verging on a new atheist. I remember him showing me videos from a website called Godisimaginary.com. The arguments are very bad, but at the time, I thought they were quite persuasive. He argued with adults about this, and because most of them hadn’t considered the topic much, would mostly run circles around them (at least, that’s how I remembered it).

As I grew earlier, and gained possession of a computer, I began watching atheist YouTube channels. I watched CosmicSkeptic, RationalityRules, Genetically Modified Skeptic—and probably a few others. I found myself in almost complete agreement with them. I held the standard new atheist suite of views—the only exception being that I was much less convinced that religion was bad for the world than new atheists seemed to be, and I hadn’t much personal animosity towards religion. I thought it was false, not necessarily dangerous or bad.

Around 10th grade, I got extremely interested in philosophy. I read Derek Parfit, began reading Richard Yetter Chappell’s blog and Michael Huemer’s as well as arguing about philosophy on various discord servers. I became a vegan and my utilitarianism and belief in objective morality solidified. Beyond that, though, I grew more convinced that the world was, aside from the moral bits, at bottom just atoms swirling around. I thought consciousness was physical and that good philosophy was about reducing the complicated things in our experience to simpler things. To quote an essay I wrote at the time (pardon the bizarre locution) “Good philosophy is reductionist—it parses out very complex ideas like morality in terms of much simpler concepts.”

I became a more sophisticated atheist. Rather than quoting Dawkins and Hitchens, I’d quote Oppy. I read Logic and Theism and began to understand theistic arguments better. I remained equally convinced of atheism, but was more sophisticated in my responses to theistic arguments—this video shows my beliefs around that time. I didn’t just maintain my conclusion that theism was false; I thought it absurd, utterly crazy. That there was no God was, by several orders of magnitude (and I’m not using orders of magnitude facetiously here to just mean a lot—no, it actually was orders of magnitude) my most confidently held philosophical view. I remember saying around that time that the odds I’d give to theism were maybe 1 in 100,000—and it would have been much lower if there weren’t so many smart people who disagreed with me.

In the following years, some of my philosophical views shifted around, but my atheism never wavered. I became a non-physicalist about consciousness, on the basis of arguments provided here and came to realize that my view about morality was firmly in the moral non-naturalist camp (my core view didn’t change, but for a while I was unable to figure out what differentiated moral naturalists from non-naturalists). I became a platonist about modal facts and mathematics, believing that these were not part of the fabric of the physical world. I grew increasingly disappointed in the new atheists and their ilk—though I agreed with them about atheism, I came to see that their arguments were very bad and mostly came from misrepresenting and misunderstanding those they disagreed with.

Despite never seriously considering theism, this period began to sow the seeds of what eventually became my theism. I heard the argument from psychophysical harmony—about the puzzling pairing between the mental and the physical. It was one of the puzzles I spent lots of time thinking about; why is there consciousness at all, and why is it so harmonious (NOTE: probably most of you won’t really understand what I’m talking about. Psychophysical harmony is a hard thing to get your head around and it’s easy to think it’s obviously stupid after briefly hearing about it. I’d encourage you to read the paper presenting the problem and watch YouTube videos explaining it before you dismiss it as stupid. I’ll also have an article out soon defending the argument).

I similarly wondered about moral knowledge. How is it, if our beliefs are generated by our brains, that we come to have true moral beliefs? Moral facts, like that torture is wrong, aren’t the sorts of things that can move atoms. But if the moral facts don’t explain our beliefs, wouldn’t it be a huge coincidence if our moral beliefs are right. And the same point applies to lots of other beliefs, including those as basic as the ones needed to infer that the sun will rise tomorrow.

I’d always been puzzled by fine-tuning. Sure, I thought it was explained by a multiverse, but why would something as complex as a multiverse exist by chance? This had always bothered me—and it would continue to do so. You might say that, like Kant, I was puzzled by the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. Not the existence of the law, but how we come to know it.

I spent a lot of time thinking about all of these. When I spoke with Dustin Crummett at EA global—a, well, global event for effective altruists—I pretty much admitted that psychophysical harmony was puzzling and didn’t make much sense under naturalism. But, I thought it wasn’t reasonable to be a theist because theism is just crazy—problem of evil and all! When I wrote an article about it, I sort of desperately flailed around and admitted that while theism explains it, it’s so ridiculously improbable that we can’t accept theism, so instead we’ll have to settle on some desperate atheistic explanation.

I think for a lot of this time I was extremely motivated in my reasoning. I’d spend much more time reading atheists than theists. When I came across an argument for God, I’d try to debunk it rather than try to accurately assess it. I would often double and triple count the same evidence and not be careful in my assessment of it. When thinking about and discussing arguments for theism, rather than assessing them one by one, I’d say that they understated the evidence—and then point to other issues that were slightly similar, but fundamentally different arguments, which mostly were only as persuasive as other arguments for atheism.

For instance, when thinking about the moral knowledge argument, I’d argue that theism is a bad explanation because it doesn’t explain our moral error. But, given the problem of evil, the theist will need to have an account of why stuff in the world ends up badly. Whatever explanation they provide for that will also explain our moral ignorance. If you just raise a version of the problem of evil as a counterargument to every theistic argument, that’s a way to count the same evidence dozens of times over. It’s an effective debate strategy to constantly bring up adjacent issues, but bad if you want to figure out how the evidence for theism compares to the evidence for atheism!

During this time, as I was gathering more and more evidence for theism, I never seriously considered accepting it. For I still found it absurd.

That all changed around the start of my second year of college. I don’t quite know what caused it. One day, I was reading Andrew Hronich’s excellent book in a common room at my university. The book doesn’t argue for theism but that Christians should be universalists. It has no arguments designed to convince an atheist.

Yet as I was reading it, for the first time it dawned on me that the way Hronich described reality being really could be right. I didn’t think he was right by any means, but for the first time it didn’t seem automatically absurd. It went from the realm of complete lunacy to merely being a philosophical position I found very implausible.

I thought to myself: why is it that I’m so confident that there is no God? God’s existence explains so much about the world—consciousness, fine-tuning, the existence of laws, and moral knowledge. In the face of the theistic understanding of reality, most all my philosophical puzzles were cleared up.

Around this time I decided to steelman theism—writing, despite not believing it, the best case I could for theism. The case was disjointed, merely an assemblage of everything I could think of that might be evidence for God. I didn’t understand anthropics at all but just assumed everyone would share my anthropic theory, so crafted a baby version of what later became the anthropic argument (learning more about anthropics only solidified my conviction that my basic intuitions were right).

But even in its stilted form, the case was powerful. I saw that there were serious considerations that had to be reckoned with. Theism explained so much about the world, so much that was otherwise puzzling or mysterious. There would need to be a good argument for atheism for it to be worth maintaining.

At the time I had three major objections to theism.

The first was that theism seemed committed to lots of very weird metaphysics. How is God’s soul supposed to work—surely God can’t just have a normal soul with extra powers. But believing in extra, special souls is a very strange thing to believe in. God is the greatest conceivable being, but it’s not at all obvious that greatness is the sort of thing that admits of a maximum. This fit poorly with the sort of scalar utilitarianism to which I was sympathetic. For God to be simple, he has to be the maximal instantiation of some basic property like perfection—but it’s not clear if perfection is a fundamental property that a being is simple by being unlimited in respects to. Is it possible to know an absolutely infinite number of things? For God to exist, it must be, but it’s not at all clear that it is. And don’t get me started on God’s relationship to time.

While I still think this argument has some force, over time my concern about it faded. I began to see coherent answers to many of the puzzles—for instance, there are many accounts of God and time. While God is mysterious and puzzling, nothing about God’s existence is obviously impossible, so it’s hard for this argument to reduce one’s credence in theism by very much. An article by Alexander Pruss was helpful in working through this objection:

Given what we have learned from science and philosophy, fundamental aspects of the world are mysterious and verge on contradiction: photons are waves and particles; light from the headlamp on a fast train goes at the same speed relative to the train and relative to the ground; objects persist while changing; we should not murder but we should redirect trolleys; etc. Basically, when we think deeper, things start looking strange, and that’s not a sign of us going right. There are two explanations of this, both of which are likely a part of the truth: reality is strange and our minds are weak.

It seems not unreasonable to expect that if there were a definitive revelation of God, that revelation would also be mysterious and verge on contradiction.

What the naturalists think is at the basis of ultimate reality is super weird! The string theorists think, as far as I understand, that there are 1-dimensional vibrating strings that do so in 10-dimensions to produce reality. That’s super weird and even seems impossible! We’d expect ultimate reality to be strange, and so it’s no problem for God to be strange. It’s hard to throw out a mysterious invisible entity on the grounds that it’s weird, when science has already verified that about 96% of the universe is made up of mysterious invisible entities called dark matter and dark energy!

My second worry was that it seemed there were too many different hypotheses that explained the data. There are infinite different hypotheses for ways the world could be, so even if God explains the world, it’s hard to believe he exists.

But even when there are infinite different theories, we still are within our rights to think that a theory is likely if it is very simple and explains the data. An article by Dustin Crummett was helpful here:

In thinking about how to evaluate the intrinsic probability of theism, it may help to consider how we evaluate the intrinsic probability of A (that physics is uniform) and B (that there’s a weird patch out there somewhere). First, recall Draper’s point about modesty. A is far less modest than B, since there are many, many more ways that B could be true than that A could be true. Suppose we know which set of equations governs things around these parts; given that, there is only one way A could be true (that set of equations holds everywhere), whereas there are an infinite number of ways B could be true. This fact counts against A, but it clearly isn’t a decisive consideration. There must be something about A which is epistemically powerful enough to outweigh the fact that A is much less modest than B.

Unfortunately, there is philosophical disagreement about exactly which feature or features of A this might be, and I don’t plan to offer any very detailed account here. But it’s plausible that it has something to do with the fact that A is simpler than B, which I understand, roughly, as meaning that it takes much less to completely describe the fundamental elements of the theory in A’s case than in B’s. (Roughly, the fundamental elements are those taken as given by the theory, rather than explained by other elements of it.) Describing physics on A requires just one set of physical equations. Unless there is some way of subsuming the two sets of laws posited by B under some deeper set of laws, then describing physics on B requires describing the set of laws posited by A plus another set which governs some small patch plus a description of which set governs which place.

Another (possibly related) ^[5] point is that B seems to contain features which are arbitrary in a way which A doesn’t. If someone suggested that there was a patch of the universe governed by different equations, the natural question would be something like, “What’s so special about that area?” If the answer was “nothing, the laws are just different for no reason,” this seems like a good reason to reject that view. A deviation of the sort posited by B seems to cry out for explanation in a way that the uniformity posited by A does not. ^[6]

Analyzing Theism

What happens when we apply these criteria to theism? Draper is correct that theism is immodest, and that this lowers its intrinsic probability. But remember that simplicity and non-arbitrariness were more than enough to outweigh this feature in A. And I claim that theism possesses simplicity and non-arbitrariness in a way similar to A. Contra Dawkins, theism is extremely simple. It begins by positing a single being (God) with just one property (being absolutely perfect) which entails all of the being’s other essential properties (omnipotence, omniscience, etc.). It then suggests that all of contingent reality can be explained in terms of decisions God makes in light of these essential properties.

So even though theism is specific, that’s not a deal breaker. The theory that the laws of physics are uniform is specific and rules out infinity alternatives, but it nonetheless highly probable.

My final concern was about evil. This is a concern I share to this day. If there’s a God, it’s very hard to see why the world seems indifferent to us—why babies get cancer, why the laws keep chugging along in predictable ways rather than being geared toward the production of value.

For a while I was in limbo. My conviction in the success of the arguments for theism only deepened. I became convinced of the anthropic argument, and the atheistic worldview began to look more arbitrary and ad hoc given how poorly it explained lots of different facts—many unrelated. Yet theism still seemed so hard to square with the evil of the world.

Eventually though, I concluded that theism was simply the better worldview. A few things lead to this.

The main one was just seeing how good the case for God was. There were so many things it explained: a physical world, laws, nomological harmony, fine-tuning, the anthropic facts, consciousness, psychophysical harmony, and much more. It seemed way more likely that I was mistaken about the problem of evil—a problem I was biased to overrate based on its emotional salience—than that I was wrong about the 20 or so facts favoring theism. While evil might be enough to outweigh, say, fine-tuning alone, it couldn’t outweigh all the arguments for God.

At one point, I decided to apply Bayes theorem to the evidence for and against theism. Bayes theorem is a theorem that tells you how to update on new evidence, meaning it describes how confident to be in a conclusion after getting new evidence for it. Now, you can’t take these results too seriously in cases where the numbers are made-up and handwavey, but even when I used pretty conservative numbers and treated the presence of evil as evidence that makes theism 100,000 times less likely than it would otherwise be—enough to reduce a probability from 99.9% to 0.000999%—theism still came out hundreds of thousands of times more likely than atheism (this does not, of course, mean that you should actually think theism is hundreds of thousands of times more likely than naturalism, as there’s some probability that you’re mistaken about the strength of the considerations). Unless one has super crazy priors, theism would always seem to come out ahead, even assuming that the problem of evil is a great argument for atheism.

I’ve relayed this before, but I began to feel like my atheism was a bit like creationism. There were so many different converging lines of evidence against it, so many weird ad-hoc assumptions that were needed to explain the data, that it was extremely implausible. Just one argument—evil—isn’t enough to save a view like atheism.

Second, I came to see that all the evils of the world really trace to one fundamental feature of our world: its indifference. The world has predictable natural laws that chug along, never—or almost never—violated. The laws are indifferent to us; gravity doesn’t weaken even in cases when doing so would be helpful. All the evils stem from the indifference of our world.

But there are loads of explanations that the theist can give of the world’s indifference. None of these are super plausible, but they’re not completely crazy. One shouldn’t think it’s that unlikely that God has a reason to place us in an indifferent universe for an infinitely tiny slice of our boundless existence. Can I really be much more than 99.999% confident that God wouldn’t place us in an indifferent world?

But the theory that God places us in an indifferent world—with suitable modifications so that the world can have us and we can access certain basic goods like knowledge—perfectly explains all the facts of the world. God making sure the world has us explains the presence of a physical universe, laws, consciousness, and so on, and his making sure we can access the basic goods—each of the things that make one’s lives go well—explains the presence of loving relationships, moral knowledge, and the universe’s discoverability.

The final thing that moved me was realizing just how limited my knowledge was. How could I be confident in conclusions about the badness of the world formed after seeing just 20 years of it, when the goods coming from this world last forever and we don’t know what most of them are? It would be like being confident that someone is making a bad move in a game that you don’t know the rules to after seeing only their first two moves when they have a plan that will take at least a billion moves. An article by Pruss was quite convincing on this subject.

At this point, my atheism had mostly come to an end. I realized that there were very good arguments for theism, that even if you gave the only very good argument for atheism extreme weight it wasn’t enough to outweigh the good theistic arguments, and that there were convincing replies to it that weren’t obviously wrong. Evil, the last thing that kept me from God, was not enough.

I still feel significant doubt about it primarily because it just feels too good to be true. Despite the arguments for it, there’s something very hard to believe about a worldview on which the world is infinitely amazing—on which the life that we can look forward to is so much better than anything we’ve experienced that we haven’t the words to even vaguely gesture at it. That a being of unlimited, transcendent goodness will spend eternity in paradise with us.

Though I find this hard to believe psychologically, I think we can establish that it is highly likely by argument. Pessimism is not a good basis for rejecting a philosophical argument. Powerful arguments testify to the world being crafted by an infinitely wise, loving, merciful, and just creator, and so that is what I believe. Though I rejected the conclusion that God exists as absurd for most of my life, like C.S. Lewis, I came to be surprised by joy.