Why Faith Should Not Be Blind
It took me 8 years of going to church and studying the evidence before I became a Christian. I was raised in a traditional Jewish home going to Synagogue every weekend and celebrating all the Jewish festivals but there seemed to be no reason for the rules that we followed. Many of our actions were hypocritical such as following dietary laws at home but not when we were out in restaurants or on vacation. This made me rather uncomfortable.
When I moved to Southern California in my late 20s I dated a guy who took me to church. I was hearing the bible preached for the first time and came to understand it as the word of God. The fact that there is a holy God that demands something of us had never come up in my Jewish upbringing. I started investigating everything I was hearing in church. It took me 8 years of study, going to church almost every week and even attending some small group ministries. I had many questions and certain sticking points. I got them answered one by one, but it was a traumatic event in my life that caused me to realize I wasn’t in control and led me to completely surrender to God; putting my entire trust and faith in him one afternoon in my back yard.
Christianity often gets lumped into a category of all religions and dismissed as folly by skeptics. Christians are even chided as being unreasonable and disconnected from reality with science thrown up as evidence against God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Christianity is set apart from all other religions as it is based on historical events with clear evidence supporting its claims and encourages skepticism and investigation to be convinced of its truths.
Christianity is set apart from all other religions as it is based on historical events with clear evidence supporting its claims, and encourages skepticism and investigation to be convinced of its truths.
The bible itself commands us to “test everything” (1 John 5:21) such that each person is “fully convinced in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). 1 John 4:1 warns us “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world”.
Many Christians sound no different to other religions when asked why they believe or follow a particular philosophy. They grew up this way, or it’s what they’ve always followed or maybe they had a certain experience or big change in their life that caused them to believe. So we need to be prepared to present the evidence as to why Christianity is true as the evidence for other religions falls apart pretty quickly.
Faith is not meant to be blind faith, believing something that is unreasonable. True faith needs to be based on reasonable evidence and it turns out that the cumulative case for Christianity is substantial including: the evidence in nature that the universe was created at a point in time, that life was created from matter, the intelligence of information transfer in DNA, consciousness itself, the existence of human free will in a deterministic world, even the existence of good and evil, and of moral truth. Then there is the eyewitness testimony of the writers of the New Testament and the extra-biblical evidence confirming that the writings are the original words of actual eye witnesses. The overwhelming evidence stands up to all scrutiny. However, there are unanswered questions. There are complexities that our human brains don’t understand but this doesn’t mean that it’s not true. We make decisions every day based on the evidence in front of us even if there are unanswered questions.
Atheists have way more unanswered questions than Christians such as why biological organisms show evidence of design, how did consciousness emerge from unconscious matter, how did the universe begin, why does it appear to be fine-tuned for life, how did life emerge from non-life, where does transcendent moral truth come from? So atheists are applying an element of faith in their belief too. The difference is that a Christian’s faith becomes a supernatural saving faith that changes their heart into one that lives for God.
Looking at the evidence can strengthen faith and generate awe in the power of God so that following Him and resting in His will for our life becomes easier along with a desire and enthusiasm to share what we know.
Faith does come from God but it is supposed to be tested. Jesus and the writers of the New Testament made this very clear. If Christian case makers from the early church onwards didn’t gather all of this evidence and continue to challenge the culture that prefers to ignore the evidence, I never would have believed. It is more important than ever for Christians to use the evidence when reaching the lost and given we are all commissioned to spread the good news, it is necessary for us all to study the evidence.
