When I think back across my conversion from (almost) lifelong atheism to Christianity, it seems clear that the biggest barrier was that God the creator is a person.
Even in my youth I was prepared, even keen, to adopt abstract deistic principles, and assumptions about the directional or cohesive structure of reality...
But the idea of the creator as a person was an assumption that I ruled out - quickly, effortlessly - as obviously absurd, obviously childish.
Yet now I regard creator-as-person as an absolutely foundational and essential fact (and assumption).
