Does God exist?

It’s a good question, and one that seems to become more relevant the older one gets. I was brought up a Catholic—I may have mentioned that before. Not a strict upbringing, but any deficiency from my parents was more than compensated for by various forms of mental and physical abuse meted out at the Catholic schools that I attended.
 
Catholicism I shrugged off as soon as I left school. It is, after all man-made, and since there are so many religions—more than you can count affirming various flavours of just Christianity—the chances are not great that the Catholic Church is the actual true one, even if such a thing exists.
 
Freed from the chains of Catholic belief, I found myself starting to think the unthinkable: was it possible that the God of the Catholic church did not, actually, exist? And if He was a myth, was it possible—since we had had it drummed into us at school time out of number that the Catholic God was the only true one—that no god existed at all?
 
Minds many times greater than mine have considered this problem over the ages, nevertheless it is a subject that I have continued to ponder. C S Lewis was a notable writer and academic who famously converted to Christianity from atheism. His book, Surprised by Joy, is supposed to describe this conversion. A further work, The Problem of Pain, explains how and why pain exists in a world created, allegedly, by a loving God. In these two works there must, I felt, be some answers…
 
Both were a great disappointment. I must have misunderstood the point of Surprised by Joy—a limited autobiography of Lewis’s early life. ‘Joy’, which I assume he saw as equivalent to spiritual revelation, he tried to explain—in terms of a toy garden made by his brother and Squirrel Nutkin (yes really)—as a sort of supercharged nostalgia. As for his conversion to Christianity, which seems to have taken place on a bus, the best I could make of it was that those of his colleagues at his Oxford college whom he most admired were all Christians.
 
The second book, The Problem of Pain, seeks to counter a common assertion used by atheists to attack the idea of a loving god. Stephen Fry makes a good argument here. Why on earth would a loving god create a parasite that bores into the eyes of children making them blind? Lewis’s thesis appears to revolve around the concept of free will. Individuals’ free wills impinge on each other and thus cause conflict and pain, although this hardly counters Fry’s point, nor does it address the acute pain in diseases like cancer. Instead, Lewis presents a series of carefully constructed philosophical arguments—bordering on sophistry—to support his case. This is all interspersed with plenty of devotional mumbo jumbo. All in all, a very disappointing effort.
 
And so, I am no further forward. Even Bertrand Russell is no great help. He was a towering intellect, a philosopher and mathematician and a notable atheist. And yet with all of his analytical ability, he was an ardent supporter of CND. He failed to grasp the burningly obvious point that once invented, nuclear weapons could not be un-invented. Thus to give them up, is potentially to surrender to those who still have them, pace Ukraine…
 
On balance I don’t believe in God by quite some margin, and the fact that certain devotional music regularly reduces me to tears, I write off as sentimentality and stupidity in old age.