Five Reasons I Still Believe (Even When My Faith Is Shaken)

In the final pages of my memoir, I describe how my faith was shaken after the untimely death of my close friend in 2012. Seeing her lying in a coffin, realizing she would never get out of it, I wondered where she had gone and whether she had ever had a soul to begin with. I wondered if there was any chance I would see her again.

These aren’t the musings of someone who’s losing his religion but a natural cry of the heart in the face of death. You’re not human if you don’t ask yourself these questions when confronted with the mystery of suffering and evil.

Nevertheless, for several years thereafter my faith was shaky. I read essays by atheist philosophers and Christian theologians in the hopes of uncovering a satisfying answer to the question of what awaits us in the undiscovered country. And today I still have questions. On my worst days I find myself wanting to jump ship as I contemplate the eventual annihilation of our planet and the ultimate heat death of the universe. But I’ve managed to hold onto my faith in the Christian God, though sometimes by fingernails only. Here are some reasons why.

The Existence of Humans

Back in the 1990s Christian apologetics was fascinated by the anthropic principle, this idea that the universe and our planet are perfectly fine-tuned for the existence of life. I find that argument less compelling than I once did—newer scientific models are suggesting that, given certain conditions, the emergence of life is not only possible but likely. Even the Vatican has conceded that there may be other planets inhabited by creatures like humans.

Yet the fact that over the centuries the basic building blocks of life would have evolved from single-celled organisms into primates and eventually into humans who can write books and design towering cathedrals remains impressive. In the words of Catholic film critic Steven Greydanus, “The riddle of existence is not a riddle the universe poses to us, but one we pose to ourselves . . . We are the riddle, and the very fact that we ask the questions we do is one of the best clues we have to the answers we seek.”

The Survival of the Jewish Race

According to legend, when the anti-semitic emperor Frederick the Great of Prussia asked his wise men to provide one irrefutable proof for the existence of God, they said simply, “The Jews.” The survival of the Jewish race into the present era has been called, even by secular writers, the greatest miracle of modern times. It’s all the more remarkable given the various attempts to exterminate them wholesale, and the promises in their scriptures that they would be protected and return to their own land.

The Survival of the Christian Church

When Attila the Hun was ravaging Italy in 452 and the nascent Christian faith was threatened with destruction, Pope Leo I personally confronted the invader and persuaded him to leave the peninsula and return to his homeland. The Emperor Napoleon threw Pope Pius VII in prison and allegedly said, “I will destroy your church.” Within a few years Napoleon was in exile and the pope had returned to Rome and the newly restored Papal States. Stalin is reputed to have said, “How many armies does the pope have?” but in June 1979 Pope John Paul II led a rally in his native Krakow in which over a million people gathered in the town square and shouted, “We want God! We want God!” This rally set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. “I will build My church,” said Jesus, “and the gates of hell will not prevail against it,” and he has been true to his word.

The Shroud of Turin

I’m generally skeptical of alleged miracles, but the Turin shroud is not easily dismissed. True, an early test of the fabric concluded that it was woven during the twelfth century, but subsequent analysis has found that the patch tested was not consistent with other portions of the cloth, and had in fact been added after a fire. Moreover, Shroud skeptics must account for the presence of pollen that is only found in the Jerusalem area in the spring, along with the growing scientific consensus that the image could only have been made by a single burst of ultraviolet light.

The Character of Jesus

If you read Christian apologetics books from the ‘90s, it’s obvious that amateur theologians were obsessed with this idea that the Christian religion is true because the Bible is a single perfect work written over a span of several thousand years that has been passed down to us in dozens of ancient manuscripts. There are problems with this argument, one of them being that it doesn’t matter how many copies of a text we have, if the text promotes and teaches terrible things.

I’ve lost friends for questioning the accuracy and wisdom of certain Old Testament passages where God commands the slaughter of innocent women and children. To its credit, the Christian church has always been troubled by these passages because they don’t reflect the image of God that we now see reflected in the life and character of Jesus. Even with all my questions I remain fascinated by the vision of Jesus presented in the four Gospels, by the only man who has ever led a lasting revolution of the human heart, the one man without whom the past 2,000 years of human history would be inconceivable. In many ways our world has not yet met his equal in wisdom. I’m reminded of the young atheist girl in Soviet Russia who, after reading the Gospel of Luke, said simply, “I fell in love with Him.” So may we all.

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