After all, the universe was a wonderful place, and its parts intricately fit together and worked flawlessly according to immutable mathematical laws. Surely this meant some kind of intelligence was behind it all.

Of course, I could see even back then that all that stuff in church was absolute nonsense. I saw no reason why I should be punished for Adam and Eve's Original Sin, and it certainly was stupid that Jesus could take the rap for MY sins. Besides, most of those sins seemed to be victimless crimes anyway. Why did anyone but me have to be punished? And how could His suffering have anything to do with getting Me off the hook? It all sounded way too tribal for my sense of fair play, which of course, is precisely what it was, tribal superstition. And the part about going to Hell for not having unquestioning faith struck me as not only wrong, but actually evil.

By the time I was 12 I felt there had to be some kind of creator, and that maybe he cared about my personal conduct and human morality, although I realized I had absolutely no evidence about that part and I could see no reason why the creator should be interested in human affairs, much less my own.

But by that time I had learned enough science through my reading that this wonderful intricacy in the universe was mot a highly detailed blueprint for the cosmos,but just the logical consequence of a very few simple natural laws and common sense. Evolution explained why the moth's proboscis was just long enough to reach into the flower, and Darwin, Newton, Einstein and Freud explained how even the most subtle and complex behavior was simply the consequence of a few simple laws operating in a perfectly understandable universe. Maybe god created those simple laws. Then one day, it finally struck me. You didn't need a god if the laws were simple.The universe wasn't planned this way, it had no choice but to wind up this way. For about a year I clung to the god concept, but it simply could not be justified. If there was one, he simply hadn't given me any reason to believe it.

I haven't looked back since.