In an article entitled, What the New Atheists Don’t See , the British author Theodore Dalrymple shares his honest struggles with atheism. The subtitle of his article is fascinating, “To regret re...
“If there is no God, never was a God, why do we miss him so much?” asked one agnostic European Jew as he looked back on the horrors of the twentieth century.
Job 3:1-26, Psalm 94:19, 1 Peter 5:7, Matthew 14:22-33
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery? “The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to pre...
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation...
Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God,...
In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its...
Job 38:1-7, Isaiah 29:13-16 , Proverbs 14:12, Luke 1:1-4 , 2 Peter 1:16-21, Psalm 19:1-4
Some books were no more than assumptions piled on assumptions…. Conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all…. The whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem a...
My faith life, like that of every one else, fluctuates. There are ups and downs and hot spots and cold spots and boredom and ennui and all the rest can be there. And so I’m not asked on a Sunday morni...
The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy describes a view (not his own view, because Tolstoy was a Christian) of the human person, based on a theory of reality he saw emerging in his day. It is a narrative that...
I am ignorant of His designs, but I will not cease to believe in them because I cannot penetrate them. And I will prefer to doubt my own lights rather than His justice.
Genesis 18:10-15, Numbers 13:14, Job 1:42, Matthew 14:22-33, Psalm 73:
It is quite common for Christians to experience doubts from time to time. Unfortunately, doubts about our Christian beliefs are often treated in the same way we would treat a common cold. We wait it o...
Job 1:20-21, Daniel 3:17-18, Habakkuk 3:17-18, Luke 22:42, Psalm 34:18-19 , John 6:66-69
A few days ago I met with a young couple. Their toddler was injured in a car accident. When I visited them in the hospital, the child was on life support. As we stood outside the ICU and spoke, I saw,...
Scientist John Haldane once proposed to the English priest Ronald Knox that, given the vast number of planets in the universe, the emergence of life by sheer chance was inevitable. Knox responded with...
John 20:24-29, Mark 9:24, Job 42:2-6, Isaiah 55:8-9, John 6:68-69
Charles Templeton was a close friend and preaching associate of Billy Graham in the 1940s. He effectively preached the gospel to large crowds in major arenas. However, intellectual doubts began to nag...
In the Middle Ages there were theologians who wrote volumes on proofs of God. Anselm (1033–1109) came up with the ontological proof of God that there exists in our minds an idea of a being than which ...
John 20:24-29, Mark 9:24, Job 23:3-4, 8-10, Job 19:25-27, Psalm 23:4, Psalm 13:1-2, 5
When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...
Deuteronomy 6:16 , 1 Kings 18:20-40, Job 1:20-22, Matthew 4:5-7, John 20:24-29, Psalm 73:1-3, 16-17
Nine-year-old Leo Tolstoy , convinced God would help him fly, dove headfirst out a third-floor window and had his first major crisis of disappointment with God. Fortunately, Tolstoy survived the cr...
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge...
In a poignant tribute written after his son’s passing in a climbing accident, Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects: When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer he...
The New Testament scholar Craig Evans makes a compelling observation about how the academy can sometimes hinder the church through overly skeptical scholarship: Some scholars seem to think that th...
If the Book of Job reaches across two and a half millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignora...
Mark 5:36, Psalm 34:4, Isaiah 41:10, Matthew 9:22, Philippians 4:6-7, Job 3:25
Medical literature is replete with case reports of patients dying, not from actual illness, but from believing they were sick, from the fear they were going to die.
On the day I was born, the doctor who delivered me inscribed my birth records with a firm hand: seven pounds, eleven ounces, twenty-one inches. It was the first legally attested evidence that I was no...
In the novel The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien, there is a poem called the “Riddle of Strider.” One stanza goes like this: All that is gold does not glitter; Not all who wan...
In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...