"Oh great. Another idiot who thinks the world is only 6,000 years old!"
This statement by an anonymous user on the Internet is what set a search for answers into motion. I forget what the topic was but when I mentioned my Christian perspective, the person typed this sentence and abruptly left. The thought that came to my mind upon reading this was, "Is Christianity really that stupid?"
I'm the kind of person who likes knowing the answer to the question "Why?" - why is such thing true, why does a certain event happen, and so on. When I read this skeptic's complaint back in 2011, I had not received many answers to the "Why"'s of Christianity. Sometimes the pastor or youth leaders in my church would dig into deeper topics of Christian belief and I'd enjoy it. Yet for the most part, such things came in the form of "fun facts" and sidenotes, and not central points of Bible studies and sermons.
There was a distressing trend I had noticed on the Internet at the time. A skeptic would raise what seemed to be a rational point against Christianity. If the person got any response at all, the response was usually so shallow and fallacious the skeptic could refute it easily. As someone who was (and is) by nature a thinker, this was a problem. It made me wonder if Christianity actually had any logic behind it, or if it truly was just a matter of blind faith in something that could not be reasonably defended or explained.
When that frustrated user made that snide remark, it initiated my first and, as of now, only crisis of faith. I started doubting and questioning. My intentions were clear - I wanted to know if there were logical reasons to believe in God. At that point I knew that atheism was not something I considered logically feasible, but agnosticism was, and for the few months of my doubts I teetered closely to it.
My initial experiences with trying to find answers to my questions were disappointing. I asked my youth leaders for proof (and by proof I didn't necessarily mean hard-and-fast proofs like what you find in mathematics, but rather any sort of evidence or reasoning to believe). One said there was none - it was pure faith - and the other couldn't answer the question. I asked online via another Christian message board, and a couple people started talking to me about something called "apologetics." It was on that message board that I was shown how science and philosophy could be used to point to God.
There were two books which led me through this period of doubt. The first was C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. The first part of the book spoke about morality and how the presence of what seemed to be objective morality pointed toward the existence of God. The book engaged my mind but didn't do terribly well at persuading me.
Another pastor who I knew, aware of my doubts, lent me a book about apologetics. It was Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics, by Doug Powell. Next to the Bible, this may very well be the most influential book I've ever read. Before I left church that night I was already most of the way through the first chapter, and I would be awe-inspired with what I would read later on.
The book introduced me more formally to what apologetics was. It also introduced me to the three big arguments in modern apologetics - the cosmological argument (in its many forms), the teleological argument (including irreducible complexity), and the moral argument. These and later chapters led me to not only see belief in God was reasonable, it also pointed to Jesus as a real, resurrected Messiah and Christianity as the one true faith. As I read the chapters of this book, I could see my faith roaring back to life. Finally! I could believe in God, and be able to explain why I believe!
My crisis of faith concluded around December or January. I now had strong foundations that complemented personal experiences which originally led me to faith. I felt more confident in talking about my beliefs, because I knew they were reasonable. Skeptics don't shake me like they used to, because I realized they were usually the ones whose statements were fallacious and shallow. In an interesting turn of events, I found myself moving away from my Young Earth Creationism and being undecided on the topic, before finally settling for progressive creationism (a flavor of Old Earth Creationism). Apologetics, which helped me so much, has become a passion of mine, something I expect will interest me for the rest of my life. My trust in God is stronger and more stable because I'm not relying on emotions and fanciful notions of "Well I just think he exist."
Where do I see God in all of this? I doubted it, but I never walked away from the faith. I sought, and God revealed himself to me. Everyone "experiences" God in different ways. Apologetics is how I experience God, when I see how he has made himself visible to us through fields like physics, philosophy, and history.
This statement by an anonymous user on the Internet is what set a search for answers into motion. I forget what the topic was but when I mentioned my Christian perspective, the person typed this sentence and abruptly left. The thought that came to my mind upon reading this was, "Is Christianity really that stupid?"
I'm the kind of person who likes knowing the answer to the question "Why?" - why is such thing true, why does a certain event happen, and so on. When I read this skeptic's complaint back in 2011, I had not received many answers to the "Why"'s of Christianity. Sometimes the pastor or youth leaders in my church would dig into deeper topics of Christian belief and I'd enjoy it. Yet for the most part, such things came in the form of "fun facts" and sidenotes, and not central points of Bible studies and sermons.
There was a distressing trend I had noticed on the Internet at the time. A skeptic would raise what seemed to be a rational point against Christianity. If the person got any response at all, the response was usually so shallow and fallacious the skeptic could refute it easily. As someone who was (and is) by nature a thinker, this was a problem. It made me wonder if Christianity actually had any logic behind it, or if it truly was just a matter of blind faith in something that could not be reasonably defended or explained.
When that frustrated user made that snide remark, it initiated my first and, as of now, only crisis of faith. I started doubting and questioning. My intentions were clear - I wanted to know if there were logical reasons to believe in God. At that point I knew that atheism was not something I considered logically feasible, but agnosticism was, and for the few months of my doubts I teetered closely to it.
My initial experiences with trying to find answers to my questions were disappointing. I asked my youth leaders for proof (and by proof I didn't necessarily mean hard-and-fast proofs like what you find in mathematics, but rather any sort of evidence or reasoning to believe). One said there was none - it was pure faith - and the other couldn't answer the question. I asked online via another Christian message board, and a couple people started talking to me about something called "apologetics." It was on that message board that I was shown how science and philosophy could be used to point to God.
There were two books which led me through this period of doubt. The first was C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. The first part of the book spoke about morality and how the presence of what seemed to be objective morality pointed toward the existence of God. The book engaged my mind but didn't do terribly well at persuading me.
Another pastor who I knew, aware of my doubts, lent me a book about apologetics. It was Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics, by Doug Powell. Next to the Bible, this may very well be the most influential book I've ever read. Before I left church that night I was already most of the way through the first chapter, and I would be awe-inspired with what I would read later on.
The book introduced me more formally to what apologetics was. It also introduced me to the three big arguments in modern apologetics - the cosmological argument (in its many forms), the teleological argument (including irreducible complexity), and the moral argument. These and later chapters led me to not only see belief in God was reasonable, it also pointed to Jesus as a real, resurrected Messiah and Christianity as the one true faith. As I read the chapters of this book, I could see my faith roaring back to life. Finally! I could believe in God, and be able to explain why I believe!
My crisis of faith concluded around December or January. I now had strong foundations that complemented personal experiences which originally led me to faith. I felt more confident in talking about my beliefs, because I knew they were reasonable. Skeptics don't shake me like they used to, because I realized they were usually the ones whose statements were fallacious and shallow. In an interesting turn of events, I found myself moving away from my Young Earth Creationism and being undecided on the topic, before finally settling for progressive creationism (a flavor of Old Earth Creationism). Apologetics, which helped me so much, has become a passion of mine, something I expect will interest me for the rest of my life. My trust in God is stronger and more stable because I'm not relying on emotions and fanciful notions of "Well I just think he exist."
Where do I see God in all of this? I doubted it, but I never walked away from the faith. I sought, and God revealed himself to me. Everyone "experiences" God in different ways. Apologetics is how I experience God, when I see how he has made himself visible to us through fields like physics, philosophy, and history.