Gideon,I've been a staunch atheist since my teen years, but lately I've grudgingly come to the following conclusion:
1. The matter which makes up the Universe had to have come from somewhere.
2. Nobody can ever know where this matter came from. We can know how old it is, what's it's made from, how it spread and formed, but it's origins are impossible to determine.
3. Something cannot come from nothing. Where then did matter come from? The only answer left is: God, i.e., a mysterious force or entity beyond human understanding.
Fortunately, that's where my agreement with the religious folk ends. In my opinion, we cannot know the nature of what, for want of a better term, we call "God." We cannot know what God wants, or how God operates. Anyone attempting to tell us these things is misguided or worse. So, I'll accept the notion of a mysterious force which created the Universe, but that's all. The rest -- morality, prayer, organized devotion, everything else encompassed by the term "religion" -- is up to us to figure out.
