Why Do I Believe in God?

Why do I believe in God? I remember the very first time I asked myself that question. I was around twelve years old, laying in bed late at night, and the thought just hit me. I mean, my parents have always told me that there was a God, but how could I know for sure? How could I know that they weren't mistaken? I had never heard any good reason to believe in God outside of the bible. God had never talked to me. I had asked God to let me see a miracle so that I could believe, but he never did. As far as I was concerned, there wasn't one good reason for me to believe in God, or anything supernatural for that matter. It was a very scary thought. I didn't like it. But it was there, and I couldn't get rid of it.
I struggled with that thought for years. When I was sixteen, I finally put the thought behind me. I was at a christian youth camp (Camp Wiregrass) when I finally decided that there just had to be a God. I saw so many young people worshiping God with all their hearts. I could feel the emotion for myself, and I just knew that this "God thing" had to be legit. I was baptized into Christ later that year for the remission of my sins, and I put all my worry and doubt of God's existence behind me for good. Or so I thought.
It wasn't until after I graduated from high school and was getting prepared to start my adult life when the question struck me again. Why do I believe in God? The doubt had taken its a game to a whole new level. Now I was old enough to understand the theory of Evolution, and that most scientists believed it to be a fact. Now I understood that there are many other religions out in the world, and that the followers of those religions believe that there religion is true, just like I do. What gave me the right to believe that I was right and they were wrong? What really hit me the hardest, was the matter of Hell. I knew what God commanded us to do in order to go to Heaven, and based off my own personal observations, I came to the conclusion that about 9 out of 10 people, including many of my loved ones, weren't living the way God had commanded. Did this mean that around 90 percent of people on earth, including people I loved dearly, were going to Hell? I just didn't want to believe that. As a matter of fact, I refused to believe that. If God loved us so much, why would he allow that to happen? What gave God the right to send so many people, including some who I would consider to be really good people, to an eternity of torment? These are the kinds of questions that I could not seem to get out of my head, and once again, my faith had been rattled.
I finally decided that it was time for me to make a decision. I wasn't going to play the fence any longer. Was I going to believe in the God of the Bible or not? I started investigating for myself. I wasn't to going to shy away from things like evolution anymore. I was going to study it, with an open mind, and see what kind of facts that it really had. I was going to do more in depth studies of the bible to see if it really would prevail as the inspired word of God. I was going to take to look at history to see if the bible's accounts of Jesus really were true. So what did I find?
In all the research that I have done, I have come away with the conclusion that the God of the bible is the one true God. I don't understand how anyone who has taken a look at all the evidence could come away with anything else. Over the next few weeks, I am going to be answering the question, "Why do I believe in God?". I am going to discuss why evolution is a theory and not a fact, and I am going to inform you why some of your science text books lie to you. I am also going to talk about how we know that Jesus Christ really did live on this earth 2,000 years ago, and how we can know for sure that the bible is 100 percent accurate. The goal of this discussion is to help you grow in your faith, and to better equip you to defend the reason for what you believe in (1 Peter 3:15). I am going to do my best to explain these topics in a way that a college or high school student can really understand. If you would like to study these topics on your own at a higher level, I would suggest that you visit www.apologeticspress.org. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know, and I will do my best to answer them. - Colton