These are excerpts from my half of a conversation with my 15 year old nephew who asked a similar question:
Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time there was an unmarried king in search of a wife. The King held ball after ball and invited all the princesses From the nearby kingdoms, and then eventually all the kingdoms there were at the time. He looked at every princess and still found nothing.
Then one day at another fancy ball, a peasant girl, the baker’s daughter, caught his eye as they prepared for the festivities. He was captivated and wanted to get to know this beautiful girl. But he knew that if he approached her as king that his position would be quite imposing and would preclude him from truly getting to know her: she would feel pressured to do whatever he asked.
He wanted her to choose and to be free to choose to love him. So he dressed up as a peasant boy and took apprenticeship with her father, so he could be close to her. Over the course of his apprenticeship, he won her heart and hand. After they were married, he did not start his own bakery, but instead revealed himself as king.
You ever wonder why you can’t prove the existence of God? If proving the existence of God was possible, how could you possibly choose to love Him? It would not be a choice, it would be coercion. And God doesn’t want to coerce you. He wants you to choose Him. This is why you have free will.
This is why I think “creation” scientists trying to “prove God created creation” is kinda stupid as a matter of definition.
There will always be two equally logical and reasonable ways to interpret just about anything: one that makes perfect sense if you believe in a personal and loving God that wants to know you and one that makes perfect logical sense in a godless universe ruled by chance and statistics alone.
At the end of the day, logic is required for both science and faith; but faith relies on personal experience while science relies upon repeatability of measurements. Intent and love are logical but not measurable. Science can not ***ANSWER*** the God question.
Another common misunderstanding is that God allows evil to exist. This is untrue. It’s a consequence of allowing humans to have free will.
If any of this was illogical it would be worthy of rejecting. But just because something makes sense, that’s not proof that it’s true.
At the end of the day, it’s about personal experience. Either God loves you and wants a relationship with you (and hence with every person) or He doesn’t want a relationship with you or He doesn’t exist. Those are the only options. Only you can answer the relationship question and you can only answer it for yourself.
Anyhow, rest assured that the questions you have are the same questions everyone has. And the answers have been the same for thousands of years.
