I used to believe that religion was nonsense, invented before people knew enough science to explain the phenomena around them. Now I believe that God exists and guides the universe, even if His hand is seldom seen and most people's beliefs about Him are false.
I grew up in Israel, in a very secular environment. This is counter-intuitive for Americans, but when Israelis say they are Jewish they are usually talking about the Judaism as an ethnic group and a shared culture, not a religion. As a bright student, I got a thorough education in science and technology, leading me to conclude that science had the answers to all the important questions. We did not spend a lot of time discussing those questions which were not amenable to scientific discovery.
I knew, of course, that some people were religious, and believed in the existence of God and that He gave us certain rules (for Jews the two are tightly bound together - Judaism is very much a religion of the law). However, most of them were raised by religious parents and I was sure they just inherited their parents' prejudices. I did not stop to consider that I may have inherited some prejudices myself.
My attitude started to change when I met and married Teresa, my wife. She believed then, as she does now, in God. But as somebody raised in Unity Church her belief did not include a list of rules that I had to follow, and therefore was a lot less off-putting. I wanted to share her faith, but I couldn't. I could not reconcile a belief in a God that was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent with the suffering endured by most people for most of human history.
But then I had my nose rubbed into the limitations of human intellect by our son. Itai, our first born, hated his car seat with a passion. Whenever we went somewhere, Teresa would drive up front, and I'd sit next to him and try to console him. I also tried to think about things from his perspective. At seven months old, Itai knew he was surrounded by beings who were immensely powerful compared to him. Hopefully, he already knew we were favorably disposed towards him and that we knew what he needed. Why, then, was I keeping him in his car seat instead of holding him in my arms as he wanted? I was sitting right there next to him, there was no reason that Itai could see for my cruel behavior.
The truth of the matter is that there is a good reason to keep babies in their car seats. Traffic accidents are a fact of life, even if no amount of pondering by a seven month old could reveal them (not that at seven month old Itai had much use for philosophy, he just cried until we arrived at our destination - but I tried to put myself in his place, and think what I would have thought had my knowledge of the world was as limited as his). The more I pondered the philosophical problem of car seats, the clearer that parallels with the problem of evil appeared. Maybe there are some kinds of divine traffic accidents, and the evil that God allows is a kind of car seat that prevents worse things from happening.
Of course, this did not convince me that God exists. But it did convince me that God could exist, so I started to look in the world from that perspective. And lo and behold, it actually started to make more sense. A lot of events that appeared to be completely random when I was an Atheist became parts of an intricate plan. I started reading religious thinkers, and they made sense, and were a lot happier than the Atheistic philosophers I read previously.
I still know all my old arguments. I cannot prove that the patterns I see are not in the eye of the beholder, and that God is not some comforting story people tell themselves to feel better. But I don't need such a proof. Life is not a mathematics textbook, and none of the real decisions we make in life rely on such proofs. As long as what I believe in not demonstrated to be false, I may hold on to beliefs that make my life better. If I am right, I am right. If I am wrong, it does not really matter.
Danny Lieblich raised the important point that I put my kids in car seats because I couldn't prevent traffic accidents. I'm a lot stronger than a seven month old baby, but nowhere near omnipotent.
The way I resolve this is that I don't believe God is omnipotent, at least not exactly. For example, God can force people to do something. Or, God can grant them free will. However, God is not able to do both with the same person in the same way.