Painful doubts
Is there a single Christian on this planet who doesn’t suffer from doubt at least occasionally? I doubt it.
One of the greatest sources of doubt that Western Christians face: The clash between biblical and natural explanations for everything that exists. I struggled with this issue for many years after being saved.
I became a Christian as a freshman in high school. Up to that time, I’d been steeped in the certainty of evolution and the Big Bang. During an open discussion on origins in my eighth-grade science class, a fellow student had had the audacity to suggest that God had created all that we see. My intense, automatic, internal reaction was, “You can’t say that in school!”
As a young Christian, I knew I was supposed to believe in the Genesis account of our beginnings. But evolution made so much sense. There was a convincing logic and a sort of beauty to it. The evidence appeared overwhelming.
Shortly after graduating from college, an agnostic friend asked me point blank whether I believed that God had created all that exists in six days. I had to honestly say that I believed that He could have done it, but I was still uncertain about what had actually happened.
Evidence for creation
Over the next five years or so, God kept confronting me with this question—and with evidence for biblical creation. For the first time, I heard the argument that if humans came into being through evolution, there was no explanation for the Fall. No original sin. No need for Jesus to come and save us. No basis for my faith. That was pretty scary.
Another fact that hadn’t really registered in all my years of reading the Bible: Jesus always spoke about the events in the Old Testament as if they were literally true. Always. For example, when the Pharisees questioned Him about the laws governing divorce, Jesus asked them whether they had read that “at the beginning the Creator made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Jesus clearly supported the Genesis account. Who was I to question it?
God sent a brother in Christ to provide a good role model for me. He was an engineer, a critical and logical thinker, and a firm believer in creation. He was rarely able to accept something simply because the Bible says it’s true. He had to wrestle with it, to think it through and examine the evidence. If he could trust God’s Word in this area, maybe I could too.
I attended a class at my church on the case for creation. One night, we watched a video showing fossils with dinosaur and human footprints side by side, followed by an interview with an atheistic scientist who had examined the rocks and was asked for his analysis. After admitting that no animal other than a human being could have left such distinctive footprints, his feeble explanation was that they must be a product of erosion.
Which takes more faith: To believe in the pretty much impossible possibility that wind and water carved out several obviously human footprints in a perfect human stride next to equally clear dinosaur footprints—or to accept the evidence that people and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time? This experience was my first taste of the powerful bias of a supposedly objective scientist when confronted with facts that contradicted his own set views.
The class also addressed a sticky question: Why would God create a universe where it looks like natural processes have been at work over billions of years? Isn’t that deceptive?
They called it “apparent age.” Adam didn’t start out as a single cell. Plants and animals weren’t all seeds and embryos on the first day of their creation. Many of them were fully formed, mature beings. They had apparently passed through all the previous ages and stages.
In the same way, all that exists—rocks, planets, the light coming to us from distant stars—was created instantaneously, but appearing as if it had arisen through natural processes over time. This strategy provides the continuity we need to be able to study God’s creation scientifically.
Eventually, my faith grew strong enough to trust the Bible’s explanation for my existence. And I hope I’ve learned from my own experience to exercise loving patience toward other Christians who are struggling with painful doubts.
God’s goodness
One thing still bugged me, though. Our universe is expanding. The most obvious explanation for that expansion is the Big Bang. Why would God intentionally design a universe with something as seemingly unnecessary as its expansion, something that would undermine faith by pointing to a nonexistent Big Bang? I didn’t like that.
Sometimes God asks us to trust Him. Sometimes He wants us to accept what He says even when we don’t understand it as well as we’d like to. It’s called faith. But sometimes He graciously gives us a glimpse of the answers to our questions.
I was doing research for my last post when He unexpectedly provided one of those answers. All this time, I’d imagined that a stable universe was a real option. I had no idea that God knew better. The truth is that this universe must be expanding at just the right rate or it couldn’t exist.
I could have gone through the rest of my life without learning that fact. After fifty years as a Christian, I’ve reached the point where I can say that I don’t have all the answers, but I know that God does. When something puzzles me, I might face temporary doubts. I might even remain uncomfortable with it for years. But I know deep down inside that He has a perfectly good reason for it. Yet God, in His grace and love and kindness, granted me this opportunity to delight in His design.
Satan is always sending painful questions into my life to try to shake my faith. But God frequently responds with fascinating answers to build it up even more. (For another example, see “The Crucifixion.”)
*Mark 9:24 ESV. One of my favorite verses.
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