I grew up in a household where it seemed my dad practiced religion regularly but my mom did not. Both were very good people, so I knew church wasn't really necessary to make you a good person. Plenty of people are good without going to church. So why go?
Initially I went because I was scared of Hell, and I wanted to know what I could do to avoid that place. But over time, as I read the Bible more and as I found out more about life, I realized that in the past there were quite a few people who went to church regularly who were NOT good people, people like the Pharisees that Jesus always complained about. Those posers were just pretending to be good, and God wasn't going to be fooled by that.
For a good while, I thought reading the Bible and trying to be a good person was good enough, and I knew God didn't like lukewarm people in his church. He wants people to have genuine feeling for him.
But then as I became a father, I realized how important it is to try to give a child a moral center of some sort so that they know that right and wrong are just not arbitrary. Finding out what is arbitrary and what is not is tough for a field like ethics where you don't have quantitative measures of things like you have in chemistry or physics.
I read part of the Quran out of curiosity but I never finished my copy. I think I only read 100 pages or so. It never really offended me but I just wasn't into it. However, I read quite a few books of the New Testament over and over because I was so impressed with the Apostle Paul's eloquence. His words gave so much hope to a world where it's easy to see a lot of uncomfortable ugliness, like many of those gruesome nature scenes from the film Buffalo Rider. Paul was sure that this world was not all there was. And as I re-read his words, I became sure as well. Just from trusting in God alone.
But I didn't know what God wanted me to do other than just provide for my family, because I felt there was something more I could do that I had a real passion for. And as much as I admire so many churches for their outreach programs of feeding the homeless or handing out Bibles, I did not feel best suited for that kind of work. What I did notice was that the only times Christianity and science are mentioned in the same breath is when Christians are trying to refute evolution or justify Noah's ark. And I thought, heck, Christians can do a lot more science than that! Michael Faraday was a devout Christian and he pioneered the field of electricity like no one else had before him. Bernhard Riemann and Carl Gauss pushed geometry to new heights that even more than 150 years later are just barely within the grasp of the human mind. Even today Christian apologist John Lennox made his mark as a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. Not an easy thing to do even for scientifically adept minds. Yet, I see over and over the idea pushed that religious people are somehow incapable of understanding and appreciating scientific ideas, or that their religion hinders their mental progression. This was not the case for Friar Gregor Mendel, devout Hindu Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Reverend Thomas Bayes. They made great strides in thinking, and I think all would credit a large part of those strides to the fire within them that they had for pursuing the beauty of God and better understanding the world he created.
We will never understand beauty scientifically but it is a real non-arbitrary thing. It reminds me of Godel's incompleteness theorem that says there are certain things out there that are mathematically true, yet are mathematically unprovable.
So, as someone who has a background in the natural sciences (B.S. Mathematics, UT Austin, 2004), and an interest in scientific topics like geodesics, I wanted to make it VERY clear that I DO believe in God, and that my belief in him does not hinder my scientific abilities or curiosity. If anything, that belief makes them stronger. Granted I am never going to win a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal or anything, but that lack of talent is not due to my religious affiliation I assure you. I also have a background in accounting as well, but I'm not sure that matters as much.
So now my primary desire in going to church is to demonstrate that somebody who does have a mathematical background and some definite experience in the logic of Boolean algebra is still on God's side. I want them to say, "That guy may not be a super-genius, but he is no dummy either. He has a scientific mind and he wants to make it clear that he believes." I'm just one man, but that's all the difference I can make.
