You want to believe in God but you can't

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You want to believe in God but your intellect prevents it.

First, allow me to relieve you of a burden: you cannot force yourself to believe. Faith is a gift, not a work of man.

But know this: the insurmountable gulf which you imagine stands between your present doubt and deep faith does not exist.

For if you want to find God, you are already praying. You are in the atrium of faith, and now you must walk through the door into the great hall in which the fire burns.

Your task is to deepen your prayer. It will become unselfconscious, sweeping into all aspects of your being.

For now, your lack of faith is a gift. It presents the possibility of a journey: a journey from nothing to everything. It requires boldness. By praying, you begin to experience that which you will experience for all eternity; you begin to do that which you will do for all eternity.

Your method will not be to close your mind on the certainty of God; it will be to open your mind to the possibility of discarding the irrational limitations in which it now finds itself encased.

Your first step is to release yourself from sterile modern preoccupations with ‘rationalism’. (Fear not: to matters of the intellect we will return. As martyred philosopher Edith Stein noted, “God is Truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.”)

The modern mind treats ‘reason’ as a philosophy of its own - but it is not. Reason is a tool with which to make deductions from foundational metaphysical assertions. Reason alone - divorced from any context in which to operate - can never supply these fundamental assertions. Nor can it reach them through its own efforts: this attempt results in a circular fever dream of recurring tautologies, uncertainties, and absurdities.

It is within one of these fever dreams that you now find yourself. Your intellect is both your greatest strength - for the knowledge that God is necessary has bought you this far - and your greatest weakness, for modernity has twisted and deceived your mind, allowing you to access only a thin slice of reality.

Wandering without an ultimate destination, you have become trapped in a dead-end side corridor of erroneous reason. The path to the Truth is unclear. But the walls of your corridor have been built without a strong foundation: they will give if you push.