Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

Why the limitations to one God?

I don't subscribe to God.

Humans have been inventing gods since the beginning of time as a way to control/exploit the masses or soothe the over active mind.

There are thousands of dead religions, but this round of current popular religions has hit the nail on the head... right?

A truly powerful and kind super being would not allow child abuse, cancer, famine, or rape to happen. Even if there is a god, I don't want to worship something that allows those things to happen.

Also, the term god is relative. To an ant, we are gods. Any sufficiently advanced being would appear god like to us. Should ants worship us given how little we care about them?

For every moment of beauty that must prove God's existence, there are an equal number of atrocities that must prove God's absence. We just don't see them as often, because humans hide that sort of stuff from polite society.

It's far more healthy to accept our mortality and short lifespan, packing it with things that make us happy. Masking your fears of death with a religion is a mistake.

Rather than devoting my life to worshipping something which may or may not reward me in the next life, I plan to spend my time doing and feeling positive things (because they feel good).

If I had to pick a religion, I think I'd choose Buddhism. It just seems like a good way to be peaceful.

Don't know if I believe in God in the typical sense of the word (specifically the traditional idea of omnipotence), but I do think it's quite logical to assume there is some form of higher power. The idea that human beings are the end-all to reality, the highest form of consciousness and most powerful being, just seems hopelessly self-centered to me.

When did this happen? Probably in college when I studied philosophy and realized that the typical atheist arguments from Dawkins etc. were not taken seriously by actual thinkers.

I haven’t read enough of their work but I think whitehead / the process philosophers are probably on the right track.

There is absolutely no god(s). It is a false fabrication of the human mind.

Using his name instead of his title/position helps. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-83-18/

For me it was that the implications of atheistic materialism contradicted basic empiric knowledge. Atheistic materialism is an onthologic monism, the ultimate implication of it is that nothing can be defined since everything is a continuum. yet we can discriminate concrete objects and things. No essence can be defined in Mat-Ath, When I was an atheist I argued that the essence of things can be defined in their composition and geometry (arrangement) of constituent parts. But that is a weak argument since "objects" constantly lose atoms and gain new ones. Think about the atoms you lose and gain through all your life (throwback to the greek boat paradox)

Ultimately it was that in MatAth the person could not be defined, yet we are persons. Also the concept of specie was broken too, every animal would be its own specie.

Then I realized that atheists have no explaination for quantum probabilities, i thought that for God to not exist everything had to be explainable with mechanisms. But when we measure the spin of a particle, whether is spin up or spin down, there is a 50/50 perfect chance? what mechanism makes the choice? There is none, and atheists have no answer other than "thats just how the universe works, period" I realized that since there is no mechanism the only thing that remains to explain it is Will, and if there is will there is a person behind that will.

Which god?

I ate mushrooms 10 years ago and it made me realize how little humans really know about existence, despite how confidently some people assert that there's no god. I didn't directly communicate with god or anything, but in some way the experience broadened my mind to be less dismissive about the idea of a higher power.

Reading Christian mystics, Orthodox apophatic theology. It's correct and all very real despite the language they use. Zen etc is a better starting point, achieve kensho then go read the New Testament and watch your brain meltdown.

By "believe", do you mean just hold the belief that it somehow exists, as in "I believe black holes exist / dinosaurs existed (but this belief has zero effect in my day to day life)", or something more consequential?

I had an atheist phase when I was like 15. Probably lasted until my early 20s. I blame that on Carl Sagen, Richard Dawkins, et al. I obsessively read science books, and all of these smart people were telling me there isn't a God. They made sense; I believed them.

I think around age 20-21, I read Descartes' Meditations on Philosophy, which forced me to evaluate all of my beliefs about existence. Digging further into other philosophers (and religions), I realized there's not a whole lot I really know... about anything.

Eventually, I came to the belief of there being a creator, although who or what this creator is, I have no idea.

Grew up in the faith, but never made it my own. I fell away for some years after I left home, with psychedelics, and ‘free’ sexuality before I realized that I had been desperate to fill an emptiness and the find answers to the plaguing questions that plagued me of who I was and what I was for and why I should continue living. It took a night of experimentation in witchcraft to snap me to the realization that if there WAS a god, maybe it was possible that it could be the God that came to be with us as man. “If he is there, if he is all powerful and loving, then surely you will let me know you are there, that you are Truth, because that is what I have been searching for“ was the essence of the prayer that night and the rest is history. I have an M.Sc. in the earth sciences. I loved learning previously about the beautiful and intricate interplay of factors across discrete systems in our physical world and, from the start of my reversion, I have looked for something that I can’t accept in the teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that is logically inconsistent or incoherent within an all-encompassing view of reality, physical and otherwise… something I can unequivocally view as bullshit so that I don’t have to believe it, so I don’t have to impose upon myself everything that would be entailed if religion were indeed all true. Instead, The book has instead been wonderfully illuminating and found it to be a great primer for learning about the spiritual and human side of our metaphysical reality.

Regardless of religion, creed, or motto, it is human to seek the truth and understand it.

Started at, idk, 2yo because everyone around me believed. Stopped at 18yo once I was old enough to actually understand reality.

I have a PhD in STEM. I started believing in my late 20s in graduate school. Readings that were influential included: accounts of high profile scientists who were also believers (e.g., Freeman Dyson), Tolstoy's "Confession", poets like William Blake and thinkers like Simone Weil, philosophers like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and apologetics from C.S. Lewis and GK Chesterton.

My motivation to read any of this was downstream of some other internal feeling that I couldn't shake and slowly began to gnaw at me in my 20s -- that what I could sense around me (or sense at all) couldn't be all that "is". I suppose one way to phrase this is that I became increasingly disturbed by my inability to answer fundamental "where?" or "why?" questions (e.g., "why did the Big Bang happen?", "where is the singularity?", etc.). The standard retorts that some things are simply mysteries didn't satisfy me. Instead I started to suspect that much of what I thought was "territory" was actually just various "maps" that people have created in their minds to help navigate the territory. Around this time I stumbled onto Immanuel Kant's antinomies and realized that many people had thought along these lines in the past. Once I was on this trail, I've never strayed.

Natural scientist by education and degrees and raised in implicitly atheistic soviet family in my pursuit of truth I started noticing more and more evidence of the world picture without God not making much sense and fundamentally incomplete, flawed in many ways. Also it is heavily pushed down modern western people’s throats with very little real scientific support for its foundational claims.

Also noticing people pursuing their own agenda and manipulating others with “atheism” religion.

A lot of thinking, logical reasoning and a sprinkle of personal unusual experiences eventually made obvious for me that there is much more to all this than meets the eye. And there must be some deity.

Nobody knows for certain what or who he is, but world with him is much more credible model of reality than without. And by definition he can’t be “proved” so I believe in him technically, though it feels like I know.

Also on a personal note (as you see from many comments here) - many so called atheists are arrogant people (in same way as religious radicals), while most true believers I met are more humble about their faith. Though it is definitely a biased perspective. But still Id rather be associated with best religion thinkers (like for example vast majority of mideveal thinkers that shaped our modern civilization) rather than with so called atheists who tend think they are the center of the universe.

Obvs the first thing is that everyone interprets the word "God" differently. But for myself I'd say I believe that there is

1. a universal consciousness,

2. an energy that works through everything, and

3. that we can tap into both.

Been a slow journey from atheism to this, but mainly based on reading countless first-hand descriptions of enlightenment, mostly related to Kundalini experiences and psychedelic-induced. Reported experiences often fall into such similar categories, sometimes with the same symbology it's either something weirdly evolved in us (for no evolutionary advantage I can see), or some people gain access to deeper levels of reality.

Personal experiences for me that tipped it were:

1. My own Kundalini experiences (not the full-blown transcendental kind yet, but energy surges, meditation phenomena)

2. Receiving remote shaktipat, where energy was projected into me. One of the most surprising was when I was just lying down and a woman 10 miles away sent energy to me for half an hour. It was unmistakable, and wasn't possible she had subconsciously influenced me as she barely spoke to me until after the practice apart from telling me to lie down and relax.

Also, I recently worked out how to 'drop my mind' like Zen practioners talk about. Realised that's the core of concentration-style meditation. Good feelings start to arise on their own.

It's a personal journey (and ultimately the only one that counts), and the mind gets in the way, but each to their own.

I outgrew atheism but for me it’s been a process. I think this ongoing “wrestling with God” is an essential feature. Atheism for me was a stopping of thought, a conclusion or an end. Belief in a creator, for me, raises so many questions, it is a beginning or an opening of thought. Life is much better having moved on from the simpler view, and that evidence reinforces the value of that shift for me.

I was a lapsed Catholic / agnostic CS major in college. Met a crazy chaplain priest who would show up at lots of university events and got to know students, and who was very good at explaining the Catholic faith and the Scriptures.

At the same time, I took two humanities electives by accident: a philosophy course, which taught me what atheism brought to its conclusion results in (thank you Nietzche), and a Hebrew scriptures course, which taught me that the scriptures are essentially a story about the nature of God's relationship with humans.

My math courses were also very convicting. Kurt Godel and his proof for the existence of God, and his incompleteness theorem. I couldn't shake the experience, upon learning about Bertrand Russell's failed endeavor, that there must be a foundation for the mathematical reality we know deeper than humans can perceive.

I ended up in seminary and studied philosophy and theology, and finally made my way back to software engineering. 12 years later my life is still full of purpose and growth due to the faith I found then.

When I realised how many different perspectives on and understandings of the same thing can exist in the world. That these were deeply irreconcilable, despite anyone's pitiful efforts to meditate. That humans would senselessly argue into eternity, if there existed not a singular entity to , eventually, arbritrate between them all, at a fixed moment in time.

Also Pascal's Wager. And the fact there exists much more in common between all religions than initially meets the eye, as reinforced by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtlWoqWLm9Q

I'm agnostic, mostly. I'm not sure what my actual experience was, but I was given a choice, made said choice, and life pretty much went on.

However, tangentially, and related to this discussion, Peter Girnus (a satire account from Twitter) makes what I believe is a quite strong argument for having time away from instant gratification (especially that from AI), and letting yourself sit with problems, and in that space you might find the spark from God.

https://x.com/gothburz/status/2059621427561521251

Lecturer in Cybersecurity. I started to believe in God in my late teens, 40 years ago. I was at a party and a friend told me he had become a Christian. As I slept on a sofa in the party house I prayed, “Jesus, if you are out there, will you come into my life”.

Christian belief tends to follow by being told about God through colleagues, friends and family. Becoming a follower follows study of the Scriptures and disciplines such as prayer.

Some HNers may see belief as less intelligent. At 54 I can guarantee there are men and woman out there more intelligent than yourself who believe in God. My most intelligent, unbelieving Professor friend, would agree with me on this point.

Almost every human being started believing in god(s) because they were introduced to the idea by their parents or other family members or teachers in stories and rituals and songs, usually long before they had the capacity to focus on objects more than two feet away. Every human society I’ve ever visited is saturated with the trappings of some religion or another, often many, and the messages and symbols of history’s many mythologies resonate in everything from the architecture to the money.

Those who don’t believe are usually the ones who have changed their minds, not the other way around. It’s not surprising that some number of those change their minds again.

When I heard Carl Sagan defining “God” as the sum total of all matter, forces, causality chains, and events in the known and unknown universe. (Paraphrasing).

And when I read about the concept of all matter and all consciousness inhabiting each other just as they did prior and during the big bang.

I came to believe in God when I was 41. My 8-year-old son believed in God and went to church with my wife. Gradually, he convinced me too. It was probably preparation so that I could bear his death when he was 14.

I think it depends on how you define god. Personally, I believe in pantheism. It's a philosophical stance which equates god to the universe and nature itself. It's hard not to believe in something that actually exists.

I started believing at 4 years old when going to a christian school, then stopped believing a few years later when I realised I couldn’t see any proof of any god watching, planning or influencing the world in any way at all…

I was told to when I was a toddler, but by the time I turned 12 or 13, I had outgrown the phase.

Which god are you asking about? People have come up with so many different ones. Do they all count?

Wow this is is so on-brand for Hacker News, a religious discussion entirely divorced from tech...

I built a more solid foundation for life after discovering spirituality in my mid 30s, but I still do not believe in a God the way religious people do. The existence of a prime mover from which the universe expanded (pretty difficult to refute) doesn't require my worship.

The first few chapters of Alan Watts' "The Way of Zen" opened a completely new world to me outside of rationality which I sorely was ignorant about, and I desperately needed. Having a spiritual perspective from which to view the world is probably the most valuable part of the religious experience. The fantasies people have over the centuries built on top, I really can do without.

When? I was a kid...7ish.

Why? Thats harder to answer. Because my parents told me about Jesus, and the Holy Spirit opened my heart to receive it. I didn't weigh the evidence. My eyes were opened and I "saw". The "why" is ultimately that I was pursued. My heart was changed and I was given faith. I wasn't smart enough and definitely didn't pursue him on my own. That's the best thing about it.

That's the only honest answer I can give.

I was bought up C of E and went to a religious school. I can remember being a kid (maybe 6 or 7) and being forced to recite the lord's prayer and thinking "what is the point in this?". And then as I grew up still being confused as to what was going on.

Anyway, I'm a lot older now and am passed all the religious stuff. I don't think it adds anything to my life. I'm still confused that other people believe in this stuff though, it really makes zero sense to me.

I grew up in a christian home, so got my initial belief from there.

Had a kind of pivot moment when I moved out from home though, where I immediately realized my parents will not be there forever, and the inner me needs to reach for my ultimate parent. This got me into a much closer relation with the Lord. I had (and have) many somewhat spectacular answers to prayer, and basically learned to have a really trustful relationship with him.

I know many people's faith is challenged when going to the university and learning about biology as I did (studying biotech and bioinformatics).

I had came into contact with some great apologetics material, especially around evolution etc, in Swedish, which I found super interesting.

Still, I must say my faith was even more reinforced when we started to study macro-molecular machines, and I realized that biology is a whole world of extremely advanced nano-machines, working in an extremely intricate network of interlocking interdependencies.

I've been involved in quite a bit of debates regarding evolutionism and creationism over the years, and one thing I have noticed is that scientific creationism is much closer to modern evolutionary theory than most people realize. Recent secular paradigms such as "The third way of evolution" [1] pretty much perfectly recapitulates what many creationists have said for years; Biology is shock-full of pre-programmed ability to adapt, according to pre-existing modules and adjustable parameters, in an extremely dynamic software system, with tons of generative algorithms for how animals and plants are built up through embryogenesis, which allows for powerful adjustments of a lot of parameters with often surprisingly little change in the genomic "source code".

For people interested in an introduction to what secular science has to say here, I often recommend "The Plausability of Life", by Gerhart and Kirschner [2]. Other great titles are "Evolution: A View from the 21st century" by James Shapiro [3], and a few more (the third way website lists a lot of great books).

In my view, the Genesis story in the Bible matches these findings perfectly, disagreeing mainly in the expected age of things. But these biological mechanisms actually mean that "evolution" can happen extremely fast, without even actual genomic changes just by turning on and off or regulating features, via mechanisms like Epigenetics.

Eventually I've became involved in trying to figure out the more detailed view of how the Biblical narrative could explain the bleeding edge of biology, which led me to co-organize a seminar in Sweden in 2024 with European researchers (mostly), which resulted in both a video series and a book, which is available from this web store among others (not affiliated).

This work, especially the chapters on 1) Mendelian genetics 2) Epigenetics and 3) Transposable elements (think Endogenous Retroviruses, Jumping Genes etc), together in my mind creates an extremely interesting explanatory framework for how life was pre-programmed to be extremely efficient - and fast - mind you - at adapting to varying environments.

Whether you want to call that "evolution" or "pre-programmed adaptive creation" is in my mind very much a question of definitions, and TBF, the term evolution hasn't had a very strict definition for as long as I remember.

Anyways, today I'm more fascinated than ever the more I learn about the extremely complex and ingenuous solutions out there in nature to vastly different problem areas like chemistry, metabolism, mechanics, information processing and general cognition. It fills me with awe and respect for the creator that must be there behind all this.

[1] https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/

[2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119770/the-plausibili...

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11004717-evolution

[4] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNkVOx7YbWiDABv5nB3Ih...

[5] https://store.answersingenesis.co.uk/product/a-creation-scie...