I’m going to respond to some of the thoughts above, contribute some thoughts of mine that I think might be helpful to the general discussion, and then just go on from there with my own thoughts, because I don’t have a blog, and it’s rare that I get to honestly share my thoughts on this subject.

First, that definitely sucks to be praying to God for faith and not seeming to receive any answers. I’ve definitely been there. I pray similarly, “God, if you’re real, if you’re there, show me… I’m open.” I can definitely relate to the loneliness of not being able to share your doubt with those around you. Ahhh…. the anonymity of the internet

To David, there is something to be said about the whole Spirit witnessing to the scriptures thing. There are some pretty powerful passages of scripture that have really resonated with me before, and even now. One thing that testifies to me the power of scripture is the prophecy that through Abraham’s seed all nations will be blessed, and that Abraham’s descendants would number as the stars in the sky. Christians believe that knowing Christ is an incredible (the ultimate?) blessing, and Jesus was a son of Abraham. There are millions, well more than a thousand million people on this earth that identify with the name “Christian.” So descended from a man who would be the father of a relatively small nation (compared to the empires of the day), would come someone who would claim to be the messiah, and not just to bless his people, but all of the people of earth. His followers spread his message of salvation, and now more than a thousand million believe, and according to the New Testament, believers are “spiritual descendants of Abraham.” A Christ-centered society seems to be one that would be geared towards justice, mercy, charity, and a striving towards peace. There’s just so much in the Bible about justice and defending the weak/poor. I don’t see how a logical basis for this can be found in an atheistic worldview, though many atheists herald these causes. Also, we have the pattern of forgiveness taught and modeled by Christ, and he is called the “healer of the nations”. I met a young lady from Mongolia once. She described to me how her parents would be horrified if she wanted to marry a Chinese, and how there is still a lot of burning resentment between nations in the area, for past atrocities and oppression etc., though underneath the surface to most of us Americans. She asked me how I thought these tensions could be relieved. At first I was too timid to reply “the Gospel,” but later I told her that was what I thought. All of these things indicate to me that Abraham was indeed the father of many nations, and that through his seed all nations have been blessed. And it seems odd that the whole prophesy was poppycock if it has been arguably fulfilled.

Something that I’ve thought about is that maybe the whole Bible is not some perfect writing straight from the mouth of God. This may seem funny considering the previous paragraph, but what if God is the creator, and he did work with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Israel as a nation, and sent Jesus to spread his message to the nations and show us his true character, but that with men recording all these things, though there is much good in the Bible, and much profound and even prophetic passages, it is still man’s writing and so capable of error. In comments above, there was some discussion about the justice of God given the doctrine of original sin and the idea of eternal damnation. In a letter of Paul’s, he writes about this issue, where some are seemingly unable to prevent their hell-bound destiny, and he seems to be responding to those who think it’s unfair. He says that God is the potter, and we are the clay, and how can the clay say to the potter, “Why did you make me this way?” He goes on to say that God may make some vessels (we’re the vessels/pots) to be objects of His glory (the saved) and others to be objects of His wrath (the damned), and we have no right to question this. Now, I am not satisfied with this, and I imagine that several of you who posted above would not be either. The idea of God creating a thinking, feeling, being for the sole purpose of one day tormenting this person forever seems pretty cruel. Now, on the other hand, the idea of God sending a wicked king to hell who oppressed and stole from his people, massacred innocents, and made monuments to his own greatness doesn’t bother me as much. Or God sending to hell a wicked husband who cheated on his wife repeatedly, beat her, and molested their children doesn’t bother me too much either. But in Christianity, these people can go to heaven too, if they are truly sorry for their sins, repent, and ask God’s forgiveness in the name of Jesus. Whereas, according to orthodox Christianity, a person who has been raised in a Christian home and later rejected his faith can go to hell, without committing any of these atrocious offenses. How can this be? Why should the latter person be condemned, whereas the dastardly fellows are saved. This is where we come to the humility required for a genuine Christian understanding of the self and of depravity. I myself certainly feel worthy of damnation. I haven’t done the things I listed above, but besides evil thoughts and many selfish actions over the years, there’s one thing that seems to stand out. I broke a girl’s heart who I had led to love me. She was a Christian virgin who I “became one with.” Then after devastating her by breaking up, when later trying to be “friends,” against her will I physically forced her to kiss me… not quite rape, but bad enough to make her cry and make me feel like sh**. I believe someone like me is supposed to feel the same unworthiness of God or goodness as someone like the wicked king or husband above. And in fact, we all should feel that unworthiness. And so when a sinner, great or small, rejects the notion that he needs forgiveness, there is grounds for judgment of the sin.

This was kind of a side-track. The original immediate topic was about allowing for the fallibility of scripture. I brought up the Paul passage as an illustration for the idea that there may be good men who follow the true God, but who in attempting to explain God’s ways, draw from their own heads and may reason in ways unsatisfactory to us, and indeed in ways unsatisfactory to God. It seems odd to me to believe that the Bible is God’s one perfect way of communicating with man that we have with us today, while many pages are filled with census data from ancient Israel, or detailed accounts of the dimensions and decorum of various objects of the tabernacle. What if the basic philosophy and perspectives on God and man in the Bible are valid, and God did sometimes communicate directly with man, but that some of the authors in the Bible were confused about some things? Perhaps they were like us, trying to sift through reality and use there moral compasses and what had been passed down through the generations or personally experienced to try to understand God, his plan, and what righteousness and goodness are, but didn’t always interpret their world infallibly. Really, even this topic of the inspiration of scripture is tangential, and I will return to the existence of God.

Mark, in the post above, you said that there was no evidence of the super natural. Sometimes, I struggle with this, but I see more of a problem with a purely naturalistic universe, given my life experience as a whole. Allow me to begin my explanation with an anecdote. I had a good friend who was an agnostic. He suggested to me the idea that, “What if the story of a creator God and his relationship with humanity, culminating in the life and work of Jesus, was a great story, one of the greatest stories ever, but just a story?” I thought about the fundamental beauty of God’s redemptive plan in the Bible, and I think about the apparent meaning imbued into so much of life. We humans grow from infancy and are raised by our parents. We are loved, and we love. We feel… pleasure, pain, victory, defeat, remorse. We wonder at the meaning of life. We laugh and enjoy having some beer with our friends. We become angry when an injustice is committed. We think about how we can be a better older brother and make sure everyone in the family feels loved. We fall in love, hold hands, feel “on top of the world” and right at home. With a little effort, you may be able to explain most of these human characteristics from an evolutionary perspective. But from a purely naturalistic, atheistic perspective, does it really make sense? There was some infinitely dense “singularity.” It blew up in the big bang. Hot inanimate matter and energy flew everywhere, forming stars and planets too. One star had a planet with water. Some rock particles, salt, and water, formed primitive “cells”, by an odd coincidence. Some cells survived better than others, and the ones that survived better evolved into more complex life forms, and voila, a few hundred million years later, you have these beings who compose symphonies, write love poems, paint magnificent scenes, write beautiful prose that probes the depths of our hearts and minds, engineer suspension bridges and robotic arms, and write hilarious jokes to perform stand-up comedy. I’m not saying that these abilities are impossible to develop evolutionarily. I’m saying that it is absurd to me to imagine this existence without a God behind it. These observations do not necessarily warrant the God of the Bible, but some sort of intelligent, supernatural creator. I’m also not arguing that the complexity of biology mathematically requires “intelligent design,” through some probabilistic calculations. I’m saying that the depth of the human soul and experience implies a purposeful creator. In many ways, our lives are like stories, and human history is full of stories. It seems odd to have stories without an author. It seems odd for atomic reactions and collisions guided only by chemical and physical laws to write a story. And without God, these are the only forces that guide all of our being: our thoughts and words. In my view, the notion of absolute determinism is inescapable in an atheistic viewpoint. Of course we feel that our thoughts are our own, our decisions are our own, but it must be an illusion. For the same forces that impersonally turned bits of rock and salt and water into primitive cells are the same forces that guided these primitive cells into complex cells, then guided the complex cells into us, and must guide our thoughts, whether pro-Christian, pro-atheist, or in between or somewhere else entirely. So if you’re an atheist, then you must believe that the thought pathways that guided you towards atheism could have just as easily guided you towards Christian theism, and that “you” had nothing to do with it, just chemistry and physics. In fact, there really isn’t a “you” at all. You’re just bag of bags of chemicals.

The fact that anything meaningful exists without God seems absurd. And indeed, in looking at the writings of atheist philosophers and “deep” fiction writers of the last century and a half, they seem to agree. Here’s a link to an interview with an author of a book called “Meaninglessness: The Solutions of Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty” http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:XQYG-Jb4iaIJ:www.mercatornet.com/articles/the_ultimate_conversation_stopper_does_life_have_meaning/+nietzsche+meaning&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a . The author speaks/writes much better than I, so give it a read. It is interesting that one of Nietzsche’s works he called The Antichrist. Also, check out Absurdism as a philosophy (Wiki). Here’s Kierkegaard (not an Atheist), in The Sickness Unto Death, writing about the absurd man in a meaningless world: “… in spite of or in defiance of the whole of existence he wills to be himself with it, to take it along, almost defying his torment. For to hope in the possibility of help, not to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all things are possible – no, that he will not do. And as for seeking help from any other – no, that he will not do for all the world; rather than seek help he would prefer to be himself – with all the tortures of hell, if so it must be.” That’s some pride there. The Bible definitely has a lot to say about what God thinks of the prideful.

Atheist philosophers mostly expressly hate Christianity, which lends support to Jesus’s words “the world will hate me and those that follow me.” Some of the most prominent atheists hate Christianity with a passion. They seek to paint themselves as dispassionate critics, but then can’t resist going on lengthy (emotional) tirades against Christianity and Christian values. I was always taught that the desire for complete autonomy was the original sin. The goal was to be like God, and hence to not have anyone above ourselves. If atheist writers came to their conclusions purely through reason, why would they spend so much time bashing the idea of God, and those who believed in a God. And you also hear much decrying of the rules inherit in religion (in the words of an everyday person): “well, if some infinite being wants to tell me I can’t do this or that, he can kiss my ass.” Maybe these God-bashing atheists do want to be their own god.

Will, this little schpeal seems to be ending rather weakly, because I’m very tired, it started out… well if not “strong”, at least energetic.

I do feel sorry for those who do not find meaning or God in the universe. I believe that many of you do not come to this conclusion from pride, but from an honest doubt that comes from within, and from some of the same difficulties that I have with various passages in the Bible, and common understandings in evangelical Christianity today. I have had these same doubts about the fundamental trueness of my faith, and still do have some uncertainty, but at times I just feel so convinced at the power of Christianity, and I hope that you do not give up without continuing to seek answers, and considering the power of Christianity to explain human nature and existence.

PS Apologies for the not-always thought process, and general wordiness. If I only I had time to edit… I commend you if you made it this far.

So much for your Deity’s “justice”.

I recently read a book and a half by two prominent atheists (a half because the author of one was so arrogant that I couldn’t finish it to even hear his points). What I realized about both authors is that even as they tried to debunk Christianity, their arguments fell flat because they lacked complete understanding about the purpose of Scripture.

I was always taught that Christianity was primarily about a way to live. The Old Testament contained a lot of great stories about people who accomplished awesome things with the help of God, and the New Testament had Jesus dying on the cross to pay for my sins, but honestly, I just couldn’t live the way it prescribed. That led me to hopelessness and doubt.

When God showed me that the Bible was really not about me, but about His plan of redemption, I was able to read the Bible in a whole new light. Without even considering the outside evidence to support the historical accuracy of the Bible, think about what it contains: sixty-six books written over about 1600 years by 44 different men, yet unified in providing one story- the story of God’s salvation for His people. That in itself is amazing!

When I read the Bible as God’s story, it helped me with your second question. In the Garden, God walked and talked with humans. Did it work? No. Then God established a covenant with Abraham and His people which eventually resulted in Him giving them the law and speaking to them through Moses. Additionally, He led them day and night through the wilderness. Did it work? No. Then God spoke to them through the Prophets. Did that work? No. Finally and definitively, He spoke to all mankind through His Son Jesus Christ and promised to send His Holy Spirit as a sign and a seal to lead and teach believers.

My greatest encouragement to you is to seek Him in His Word. It’s where He has spoken and He still speaks to us there today.

Praying that He will give you belief in the midst of your unbelief,
Natalie

Your story grieves my heart, because I have been where you are.

God isn’t invisible. Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).

Praying that you will be like the man in Mark 8 who cried out to Jesus: “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

Sincerely,
Natalie

You’ve essentially told Mark that he will get nothing from God until he “just believes”, and you’ve strongly implied that his inability to believe is a product of his own sin, or possibly God’s arbitrary will.

On the other hand, you said that you yourself struggled with doubt until God did a supernatural work in your life.

Would you be willing to elaborate on the “supernatural work” that God did in you that has enabled you to stop doubting and believe? Why do you think that God might have given you this gift, but would be unwilling to give a simliar gift to Mark?

Thanks in advance,
Gideon

Regarding #4, I agree that none of us can be completely certain about much of the things we most value in life. For instance, the love of a spouse is a valuable thing; however, one cannot be certain that one’s spouse will not fall out of love someday. But one can keep living in the assurance of that love until evidence indicates otherwise. I think in reality we live based on probability. I think it is very unlikely that my wife will fall out of love with me, so I can live my life being confident of that love. That is the strength I see with naturalism; there is a high probability that things can be explained by natural means. How probable is it that there needs to be a supernatural explanation? I’m not saying that a supernatural explanation is impossible; I’m just saying it appears improbable. Granted I’m early in this research, but I’ve never experience the supernatural, I haven’t seen evidence that points to a supernatural cause, the supernatural is outside my ability to know whether it is true or not.

The long road out of unbelief that you indicate, although honest, is not encouraging. Why does it need to be so hard? Why can’t it just be as simple as “Repent and Believe”? I hope someday I’ll be able to look back and see the necessity of the struggle.

Is ‘somewhat solid’ an option? I’m going to be completely honest in this comment and if you don’t share it that’s okay. I only check your blog sporadically so I might not be able to respond quickly. I spent a very long time struggling with what it meant to completely lose my faith. I talked to my wife about how I was pretty sure that if I wasn’t an atheist that I was headed down that path. Why am I not there now? There are a few reasons:

1. I studied the atheistic worldview more…not from Dawkins and their ilk, but from the big boys like Oppy, Martin and Nagel. I was hoping that their arguments would give me the secure footing that I thought I had back when I was an ignorant Christian (I mean one of the ‘blind faith’ types). These philosophers simply didn’t have the strong arguments I was hoping for and like what I quoted from Nagel above, I found out that their arguments were often qualified by uncertainty as well.

2. I kept studying Christianity. I’m not a fundamentalist and haven’t really been that affected by fundamentalist churches, so I was more open to share my doubts and confusion with pastors and educated Christian friends and read a lot of book suggestions. I found more compelling answers than I had before and these helped lead me back into a more reasoned faith. I personally found the arguments made by many of the better Christian philosophers to be just as compelling as those made by the atheist ones.

3. I talked to a lot of people. I spent time talking to ex-Christians, ex-atheists and some who had dabbled in both before settling on a firm view. I found that many of the reasons people left Christianity were different from my doubts, and usually rather intellectually shallow reasons to leave IMO (i.e. stuff like…”the NT is primarily based on myths so I can’t believe anymore”…anyone who does the research without simply reading Bob Price and Richard Carrier knows this to be a rather untenable position which is rejected by scholarship on the whole). I dug into why the former atheists had become Christians. Did they have the certainty that I wanted again? I also talked through e-mail to professors in the fields I was interested in studying at the time. I would e-mail NT and OT scholars, philosophers (atheist and theist), etc. with questions. Most responded and were very helpful. I’m still in dialogue with a few.

4. I came to the realization that if we’re honest, none of us are completely certain about much of the things we most value in life, and we simply have to play the game on a field that moves around and is somewhat unstable. For some people who only think in black/white fundamentalist categories, that means that they reject Christianity or atheism because their beliefs are shaken, but then hop into a fundamentalist form of the other system simply because they want to be ‘certain’ again. This is probably 90% of the stuff you read online at ex-whatever sites, ya know? Instead, the honest people on both sides of these discussions say that they are not certain, but they’re not simply “just believing” or making a “blind leap of faith” one way or the other. No matter your worldview there is something of a leap, but for those who have really thought through their worldview the leap is much more reasoned.

So it was a long hard process. I didn’t just give up because I was tired of seeking answers and waiting (although I wanted to), and eventually I found some that have restored my faith. I now understand the atheistic worldview much better, some of their best arguments and have actual reasons (not just fears) for why I personally can’t embrace atheism or agnosticism (i.e. weak atheism). I also had a few of the transcendental moments which helped me along the way…I wish those were more frequent.

I’ve mentioned some books that helped me before (including the one you’re reading by Wright). It’s not a knock down argument, because neither side has one of those…history can’t be proven one way or the other on any matter…yet I think his arguments are sufficient for belief. Still, while it’s a difficult book it’s probably the most comprehensive book on the resurrection that I’ve read. It deals very honestly with the highest level of scholarship on the topics. But, I hope you aren’t simply placing your hopes at finally finding or losing faith based on that book alone. Trust me, it’s a long process one way or the other.

You (and your family) will continue to be in my prayers, and I hope you will include me and my family in yours.

In Christ,
Kyle