"5 REASONS: Why I Still Believe in God" - DAY 54

Day 54 – the author’s testimony

Increase our faith!  –the DISCIPLES of Jesus  

 
I believe; help my unbelief! 
                              –a FATHER who brought his sick son to Jesus

In the introduction to this book, I gave you a bit of my own personal testimony. I told you about my early belief in the existence of God, a belief that was more a product of my upbringing than anything else. Unaware of any evidence to the contrary, I accepted as true virtually everything I heard about God at home and church. In college, however, I encountered skepticism about God that totally went against the grain of my youth. There I studied the greatest philosophers who ever lived and discovered that some of them were avowed atheists.¹ As much as I would have liked, I could not easily discard their passionate and persuasive arguments. I was a novice in the area of theology and philosophy and, in every sense of the phrase, was in water way over my head. Inevitably, my rock-solid faith began to show some cracks. I began to doubt.

Thus began for me a religious journey that continues to the present, a journey of persistent faith in the midst of lingering doubt. Through the years I sought and found satisfactory answers to the rhetoric of atheists and agnostics. Forced daily as a physician to weigh diagnostic and therapeutic evidence in the balance, I found it rather easy to analyze the arguments for and against God and discard the ones that were marginal. The others I put under a microscope with three lenses: the lens of reason, the lens of common sense, and the lens of practicality. Only those arguments that were all three—rational, sensible, and livable—were embraced by me as true.

After years of such study and reflection, I have come to the conclusion that my childhood faith in God was legitimate, in spite of the doubts and uncertainties put in its way. The existence of God, a belief I took for granted in my youth and thoroughly dissected as a young adult, is now to me a viable hypothesis that has been tried and tested in the "laboratory" of my mind, emotions, and experience. While I cannot truthfully claim to have eliminated every parcel of doubt, I can declare that my life today as a theist—in the midst of some occasional doubts—is more rewarding, meaningful, challenging, and fulfilling than ever before. 

 
In a sense, I left the simple faith of my youth to seek the path of truth, only in the end to find myself back where I started. Although I still, like Paul, view the world through a lens that is not completely transparent, the prism of my faith is clear enough to see in the landscape of the universe the face of God. In the knowledge of His presence, I have found peace. 

Daily Quotations

Luke 17:5 RSV

Mark 9:24 RSV

¹I want to make it clear that the religion curriculum at the Christian college I attended was not, in my opinion, out-of-balance. Included therein were courses that cemented traditional beliefs as well as those that challenged them. The college professors who taught there remain dear to my heart. It would be an insult to them, and the furthest thing from the truth, to imply that they wanted to confuse and disillusion students preparing for the ministry. They were educators par excellence and considered a broad introduction to religious issues a requisite to service.

It was I, not the university or its teachers, who was out-of-balance. I entered college with no previous exposure to beliefs outside the narrow spectrum of evangelical Christianity. Although I was aware that atheists existed, I knew nothing of their arguments, much less any answer to them. If you could fault my religion professors any, they may have underestimated the impact such ideas can have on unsuspecting students, even those from solid Christian backgrounds. At the same time, they may have overestimated our ability to comprehend and internalize the counterarguments they offered and thus may not have spent enough time on them. If this was my experience in a Baptist college, I can only imagine the plight of students attending other institutions where no apology is made for a bias toward atheism. Little can one wonder why so many people today consider faith in God obsolete or irrelevant.

The solution, it seems to me, would be early (pre-college) exposure to atheistic and agnostic rhetoric and instruction in how answer it. We need not fear that such knowledge will make it more likely for high school students to abandon their belief in God. We, in medicine, know that mentioning suicide to the depressed patient does not make an attempted suicide more likely. In fact, just the opposite is true. It allows us to recognize and deal with the problem before it happens. In the same way, telling our youth about atheism, far from turning their hearts in its direction, will be a preemptive strike against over-zealous atheistic teaching in their college years. The burden of this early, broad theological education falls squarely on the shoulders of two organizations: the family and the church.