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

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...

I don't believe in a superior grand designer overlooking it all from "his" cloud castle, but if such a deity did exist, I would be profoundly amazed. I find it interesting to think that one could come to find it anything but consequential.

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.

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.