I’ll Always Have Doubts, So How Do I Really Know What Is True?

Have you ever played “devil’s advocate”? You take the other side of the argument to the max and see what happens. Try that with the doubts that are plaguing you. I think you will find that, while doubts are good at causing trouble, they are lousy at building a real alternative.

Take the most prevalent trouble-making argument out there: evolution. Sure, you can compare simpler life to complex life, find similarities, and suggest that the simpler became the complex. It seems simple enough. However, when you actually consider what it takes for a worm to become a butterfly, you realize that nature would have had to take major trips down blind alleys that would have destroyed the evolving intermediate forms before ever coming up with a design that would allow the transition to a butterfly. The caterpillar goes through a destroy and rebuild process that only a designer with a long-range view of the blueprint could have ever brought into existence. Nature would begin the destruction process and produced a lot of dead caterpillars, without ever blindly figuring out how to create the rebuild process. The leap is much too great.

The simple answer to handling doubts is to embrace them for a moment, and see just how well they do at explaining the mysteries of the universe. They may make effective critics, but they are usually worthless at forming a reasonable alternative. Look at John 6:68, where Peter gave one of the most wimpy responses ever after Jesus asked if he would leave: “…Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Talk about a back-handed compliment. Peter didn’t see any other real alternative to Jesus.

As we are very limited creatures, we can’t expect to understand everything. The great deception in this scientific age is to think that we actually know a lot. We certainly have learned a lot, but even so there is much more we don’t know. All the pieces won’t fit together for us. We don’t see things from God’s perspective. Not even close. But we can take arguments and let them run to their logical conclusion, and then see them for the pitiful substitutes that they really are. In future posts, I will often try turning around the arguments against Christianity and show how much worse they are at explaining much of anything.

Finally, consider this: God, if we can ever know Him and be in any way responsible for our lives and where we go after this life, must tell us about Himself. This means that one of the major religions has to be right, or else God didn’t find a way to communicate to us and we are left to guess. So it’s not so much a matter of if some belief system is right, but which one. We will spend a lot of time looking to see if Christianity really stands out against the others, or if others have just as effective evidence for them. I’ve looked down this path and am quite confident that Christianity is provable beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

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