I don’t feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
Somewhere around my early twenties I realized that if I was going to believe the faith I had been brought up in then my faith would have to stand up to being challenged.
So, I tasked myself with investigating the flaws, contradictions, and errors that are always brought up around Christianity and the Bible. Like how the Bible and its Books was supposedly ‘selected’ by a small group of Roman Catholics with an agenda. Or, parts of the Bible that are contradicted by other parts of the Bible. Or, outright mistakes in the Bible, perhaps about geography, mathematics, historical figures, or its account of Creation at odds with Evolution.
This was the early days of the Internet, before social media, when people frequented discussion forums, made personal websites, and wrote personal blogs. I started responding to Atheist questions on discussion forums and started a personal website where I wrote things now lost even to the Internet’s memory.
As questions came up, I pushed myself to research the answers and quickly discovered a number of resources that largely dealt with all of these issues before. Places like GotQuestions.org, Creation.com, and good old fashion search engines turned up people who had already tackled these issues and provided the logic for how to respond and uphold the reliability and robustness of the Bible.
As it turns out, and to paraphrase a famous saying, there are no new questions, only old questions posed to new people. I would discover that nearly every issue brought up had been dealt with already by others, sometimes for centuries, sometimes for millennia.
I wasn’t always as confident in finding the Bible-supporting answers as I am now. There was a time when each new question struck a note of panicked doubt. Maybe my faith really was imaginary, the Bible really was just written by mere men, and God didn’t really exist. It took years to build up the confidence out of experience that any new question that came my way would already have a satisfactory answer.
So, I hope you can now now understand a little of where I’m coming from. My story isn’t unusual. Most go through the same thing. Many are scared and don’t engage the questions. Most won’t experience the delight of finding answers that support their faith.
Even fewer come to understand the deeper and richer nature of the faith that lies beyond those questions. Over time, I gained a sense of peace from all of this investigation that revealed highly reasonable, highly satisfying responses to critiques of the faith.
But some ideas refuse to give us peace until we find peace in the reasonableness of the unreasonable.