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As I grew up in Southern India, I automatically had an upbringing which involved religion and temples. When I was 17, I graduated high school to go to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai (then Bombay). While at IITB, like most of my peers, I became an atheist. There seemed very few intersection points between technology and God, especially my perception of God.
When I first came to the US, a few people reached out to me to share the gospel. The most persuasive of them was an entrepreneur that I highly respected. I heard him talk about the Bible as a book that one could prove was the Word of God.
To a scientific and analytical person, the word proof means that there is evidence that is objective. So I approached the question of the Word of God in that fashion. What could possibly prove one book rather than another was the revealed Word of God?
From my friend, I learned about Prophecy. While the Old Testament has many prophecies, the ones that interested me were about Jesus. The OT talked about where he would be born (Bethlehem), when he would be born (he would preach at the temple, so he would be born before the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D), to who he would be born (family of David), how he would live (to reconcile people to God) and how he would die (Crucifiction).
Of these, the crucifixion account interested me the most. At that time of writing of Isaiah 53, which describes Jesus’s death via crucifixion, the Romans had not invented crucifixion yet. How then was Isaiah able to describe this in detail centuries before?
One of my friends then handed me “The case for Christ” by Lee Strobel. This book, along with others by Lee and Josh McDowell, changed my life. Suddenly I was able to analyze the case for Christ and Christianity as a scientist should - with no preconceived biases and a priori assumptions except that of logic and rationality. Faith after all needs to stand on the shoulders of reasonable explanations of intelligibility.
There are (at least) three areas that a rational person, seeking to understand the truth about God, should explore.
1. The origin of the universe - Virtually everyone believes in the Big Bang, where space, matter and time had a beginning. While physicists have worked to answer the question of how the universe was created and how galaxies were then formed, I ran into a different question. Who caused the bang?
Logically if the universe didn’t exist at a certain point in time (time = zero), and then began to exist beyond that time, then someone (a creator) is needed. If I left a room that had a blank canvas, came back some time later and found a masterpiece painted on the canvas, wouldn’t it be logical to postulate an artist?
The creator has to be immaterial (matter didn’t exist yet), eternal (time didn’t either) and personal (he/she/it chose to create a universe and presumably could have chosen not to).
2. The origin of life - no one, including Darwin, has been able to explain the origin of the first cell of life. Darwin, at best, attempted to explain how life, once present, could with infinite minor variations (random genetic mutations coupled with natural selection) cause more complex life but he didn’t present any evidence for the origin of the first cell (other than saying “if (and oh what a big if)”, which one must admit in passing is a pretty cool phrase). Unfortunately this isn’t evidence, perhaps not even a theory and little more than an idea.
For most of the last 150 years since Darwin’s evolutionary theory, time has been considered a friend of evolution and given sufficient time, one could postulate the creation of virtually anything accidentally (such as a DNA molecule that could then be used to create amino acids, proteins and then the first cell). Recently, some scientists (such as Dr. James Tour of Rice University) have pointed out that time, instead of being a friend, is the enemy of the origin of life. Molecules, rather than having billions of years to form the first cell, in actuality react quite rapidly to form other molecules. These reactions happen in lab time (seconds to hours), well short of a few billion years. As a chemical engineer, I can attest to the problem of creating a pure molecule. Usually purity is created not by reaction but by separation of the chosen molecule from others. How does this happen in nature? I haven’t seen a proposed mechanism.
3. The origin of information - the information in our DNA is stored in 4-alphabet language. This language fully describes the process of creating amino acids and proteins and other molecules. How is this possible by random chance?
As a rational thinker, if I ran across a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare at the local library, what would be more likely? That there is an author (though I can’t see him) or that the creation of paper, books, print, language and the complete works were created by random chemical reactions in the environment?
Information, such as a play or a poem, requires intelligence and can not be created by random letters and words coming together. There is after all a difference between a child’s box of alphabets and a book. The letters in the book may be the same as in the child's box but where is the intelligence to arrange the letters in a book coming from?
In conclusion, I found the evidence to be persuasive and chose to put my faith in God. No doubt you will make your own conclusions based on your journey. My hope is that you keep an open and rational mind throughout.
My story wouldn’t be complete without talking about a major question - is religion cultural? Do different people in different parts of the world simply perceive God differently? I wrestled with this question for many a year and those from India will perhaps sympathize. Synchronizing ideas from different philosophies is a natural way of life for us.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that while the desire for God is perhaps written on each heart and within each culture, the nature of God can’t be based on a culture. God precedes culture; as the creator of the universe he existed before there was life and therefore humans and culture. We may perceive his nature based on his creation; but it is not for us to define him.
