God DOES exist, and He loves us: What I've Learned From My Decade-Long Intellectual Pursuit of God and His Glorious Creation

In church today, after praying for the families of all those children from Connecticut who died in a horrible school shooting, and the community, and all the hurting children, my pastor then launched into the main focus of his message, which is one we Christians have heard many times before:  How can a good God allow such evil in the world?  In order to answer that question, he brought up all sorts of ideas, mostly dealing with the fine tuned universe we live in, and how intricate and special the life on this planet, which is just a little spec of dust in the cosmos, really is!  It touched me because this is something I've been writing about in my journal and reading about for well over a decade now.  That argument is to take all the scientific data we've collected about life on earth and what we know about the stars and galaxies, and electrons and neutrons and the cell, and all the elements that make up, well, everything, and then using that data to say one of two things:  God doesn't exist, or God exists.  For many scientists, and many non-scientists, the evidence is so plain and clear that there can be no other answer than to say the obvious:  God doesn't exist, and they treat anyone who thinks otherwise as an idiot, especially based upon the evidence.  But there is a problem here, because there are many bright people, with high IQ's even, who look at this same evidence and DO see God there.  In fact, for these intelligent people, they see irrefutable proof that God exists, for they cannot understand how a person could explain all of it without adding God to the equation!  You won't find a lot of them in the scientific community, public schools, higher education, Hollywood, the media, or the Democratic party, but these highly intelligent people, who are quite difficult to actually debate, cannot be dismissed with just a smirk, even though that is the attitude bestowed upon them by the persons and left-wing communities I just mentioned, and wholly accepted by a brainwashed populous.  There is just something there that simply cannot be denied, and that something is God.
     As I said, this is the argument I've been embroiled in for the last decade, in my own little way, as I have listened to both sides and taken notes.  This sermon that was delivered today was making me think, as I sat there and soaked it all in, of all sorts of things, from Dinesh D'Souza's books Life After Death: The Evidence and Godforsaken, Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer, Beyond the Cosmos by Hugh Ross, and Refuting Evolution by Jonathan Sarfati, as well as Ann Coulter's well mounted and deliciously sarcastic argument for creationism in Godless: The Church of Liberalism, and quite a bit of my own writing from my journals over the years, especially two Christmas poems I wrote about 10 years ago and that I'll be posting in this blog shortly, "One Christ to Rule Them All" and "The Birthings".  Because after all of the arguments back and forth over the years, and despite that some people who came to a different conclusion can claim just as long of an in-depth investigation, I can still come away from all of it content in the knowledge that my faith has only been strengthened by this more intellectual pursuit of the truth, and that I am not ashamed of what I believe.  I am wholly satisfied to know that men and women of great intelligence believe the same thing, and don't have to hang their intellectual pursuit on a hook when they walk with God, but can use that which God gave them - an exceptional brain - to help prove His existence!  That is what I take away from this entire intellectual and theological pursuit I've been on all these years:  That smart men can believe in God without having to sacrifice anything or make excuses for any of it.  In fact, it is quite often the revered scientists who are making mistakes and who keep having to backtrack and explain themselves, and come up with more complicated and fantastical ideas bordering on religion in order to explain themselves, such as the ideas of punctuated mutations, multiple universes, and alien seeding, and still - STILL - can't explain how such a complicated thing as a living cell developed from nothing.
     As for how a good God can allow evil in the world, that is not something that can be answered simply or tritely, or even to our satisfaction - but if you have the time and the inclination, it is also something that has been dealt with in many different ways and from many different philosophers and writers over the centuries of our existence.  Many non-Christians have used this concept to argue against the belief in God, chief among them Friedrich Neitzsche, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky and Ayn Rand, but they have quite a bit of intelligent opposition from religious scholars.  The arguments of thinkers like Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lee Strobel, C.S. Lewis, and Dinesh D'Souza simply cannot be so summarily refuted, and it is infuriating watching the likes of Bill Maher and Bill Nye the Science Guy do just that with dim, simple soundbites!
     At the very least, I urge people not to let others do their thinking for them, but to get out there and read, and decide for themselves.  Either get on Neitzsche's bus and take a seat next to Bill Maher, or get on the bus driven by C.S. Lewis and take a seat next to me, but whatever you do, make it an informed decision, and don't be easily led by either side.  After a decade of studying all sides in this debate, I still find myself firmly in the Christian camp, and still quite happy and satisfied to be here, thank you!