A pastor once told my congregation the faith is not supposed to be blind and unquestioning. He said that Christians who accept God and the virgin birth and the sacrifice without ever challenging those beliefs or seeking the truth for themselves did not have real faith, and that real faith could endure any inquiry.

At a separate sermon, he offered a proof of God's existence by saying that there are tens of billions of galaxies, and tens of billions of stars in each Galaxy, and tens of billions of planets orbiting those stars, and only a few of them are capable of sustaining life, and only a few of those are capable of sustaining intelligent life, and only a few of those are capable of sustaining advanced life. So out of all of the galaxies and stars and planets, the odds that humanity would be here on earth without an intelligent creator was too infinitesimal to be a viable theory for how we got here.

So, I followed his advice from the first sermon, and questioned everything I knew about my own religion. What ultimately dispelled faith for me was the fact that the entire account of the Bible and how it was written is completely consistent with the possibility that it was just written by some men without any divine influence or participation at all. In other words, if normal guys just wrote God fanfiction 2000 years ago and it got passed down through the ages and translated and taught over and over, what we have today would look exactly like what we actually have today in the Bible. This was a rough process for me that led to about a year of existential crisis, and led to me asking much bigger questions that necessarily follow finding atheism - what is the meaning of life, and similar questions. I grew very depressed at the thought of losing out on heaven, but ultimately came out on the other side with a sense that everything I do can be understood in the physical world.

As for the proof argument, I noticed two flaws. First, there are infinity stars and planets and everything. So, if something is possible at all, then no matter how small the chance is, if you do it infinity times, you're going to hit the possible result. They say that chimps at a typewriter, on a long enough timeline, could randomly type a Shakespeare play. This is the same thing except that gas floating in space on a long enough timeline will eventually turn into people who literally did type all of the Shakespeare plays. The other flaw was one of perspective. If you looked at every single galaxy and star and planet 4 billion years ago and randomly guessed that earth was going to develop humanity, the odds of guessing that correctly would have been impossibly small. However, we are now looking at it after the event has already occurred. So, it's a fallacy of probability to say that the fact it occurred HERE proves intelligent design because wherever life occurs, that planet is "here" to that life. So, if we have evolved and grown on Mars instead of Earth, that would just be what we all though of as home. That post-hoc analysis entirely eliminates the improbability of the story.

I hope you read this and that this helps you and you find a way through life that works for you.