Reintroducing myself :)

Owen,

I was where you are a couple of years ago. I needed logical reasons to believe in God. Eventually God gave me the faith to believe in him (something I only realised with hindsight). My belief came in two steps:belief in a creator God, then belief in the unique Christian God. Through all your searching the only comment I have is that you keep an open mind and don't limit God. What I mean is that God is all-powerful, he can do anything. Anything! Even violate the laws of quantum physics that he created. I'm not saying just accept this truth on blind faith but at least consider it possible.

I wish you well in your search.

Food for thought, perhaps from an angle that might make sense?

"Most mistakenly we often seem to think that God put Adam there to test him, to see whether he would obey or not. Not so. It was because by no other means could he discover his own innate helplessness.It was not as we often erroneously think, that Adam could have done the good deed of rejecting the advances of Satan. If that were so, man could be good by his own unaided effort. But he was placed between those two trees to learn that of himself he can do nothing good, and is not expected to! It was to teach him the basic fact of his creation, that his own human spirit is an empty, helpless vessel so far as living the good life is concerned: "in me, that is in my flesh (my humanity) dwelleth no good thing." He was not created to be good. He was created to be indwelt by the Good One, and the negative command not to eat of the tree, followed by the direct temptation to do so, was not to stir into action some potential capacity in Adam for obedience and goodness nor to demonstrate that he could be good if he would, but to reveal to him the one essential point he had to learn about himself - that he was created helpless so far as being and doing good is concerned -and then that his little human spirit had one marvelous potentiality: it could be the container of the Divine Spirit via the tree of life, and yet not lose its own individuality in being so; but (the fact is) that the two can dwell together, each in the other, in an eternal fruitful bond of union. The Liberating Secret"

- Norman Grubb