Why I Decided to Believe in God: A Cryptographer’s Twelve-Year Case Against God, Three Graves, and the Evidence That Would Not Break
What if the strongest case against God came from someone who desperately wanted it to be true?
Dr. Alfred Basta spent twelve years trying to prove that God did not exist.
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A cryptographer by training, a mathematician, scientist, professor, and lifelong skeptic of unsupported conclusions, Basta approached faith the way he approached a code: attack it from every direction, test every assumption, and trust only what survives serious examination.
Then the evidence refused to cooperate.
Drawing on cosmology, physics, biology, mathematics, philosophy, biblical scholarship, and the historical case for the resurrection, Why I Decided to Believe in God follows one man’s extraordinary intellectual journey from determined unbelief to Christian conviction.
But this is not simply a book of apologetics.
It is also the story of three graves.
After losing his father in 1994, his mother in 2024, and his wife Nadine in 2025 after her eight-year battle with brain cancer, Basta faced the question every theological argument eventually has to confront:
Can faith survive suffering that cannot be explained away?
With unusual honesty, he examines the strongest arguments against Christianity—including the problem of evil, the reliability of Scripture, the origins of the universe, evolution and biological information, and the challenge of explaining suffering—before explaining why he ultimately found those arguments insufficient.
He does not pretend to have easy answers. He openly acknowledges the weaknesses in his own position and refuses to manufacture explanations for the things he cannot explain. His faith, he argues, was not built by ignoring evidence but by following the evidence wherever it led.
Part intellectual investigation, part spiritual memoir, and part meditation on grief, death, love, and hope, this is the story of a man who spent twelve years trying to break a case—and discovered that the case would not break.
For skeptics, seekers, Christians wrestling with doubt, and anyone who has ever wondered whether belief in God can withstand the hardest questions life can ask, Why I Decided to Believe in God offers an invitation:
Don’t believe because you are afraid to question. Question deeply. Test everything. Then see what survives.