A conversation with a deconstructing Christian questioning his faith

Recently, a young man contacted me in a great deal of distress. He was a lifelong Christian but was now questioning his faith. He expressed fear that scientific discoveries disproved Christianity because of the lack of evidence for events in the Bible. He also expressed an overwhelming fear of death. He wanted to reach out to people who are particularly knowledgeable about scientific theories, who could provide some comfort to him. I was touched by his asking for my help. The following are a series of responses I wrote to him over the course of a few days. For his own privacy, I have only paraphrased his responses to me. I have made a few minor edits to my own responses for clarity.

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Were you raised as a biblical literalist? Were you expected to accept the Bible as inerrant truth?

I ask this because this can be a stumbling block when you encounter scientific ideas that counter the events of the Bible actually happening.

Much of the Bible, particularly the early books of Genesis and Exodus don’t have much evidence for them. They are figurative language.

It is important to distinguish different kinds a truth when talking about the Bible. In our modernist culture post-Enlightenment, all forms of truth that are not measurable and evidence based are discounted as less than truth. This is however a modern belief system that has captured our minds. The litmus test of evidence itself is unsupported by evidence but a philosophical framework that at its most extreme becomes scientism.

Yet consider that in the near eastern culture of those who wrote the Bible there was as yet nothing like Greek philosophy or theology. These western inventions did not exist. Our relationship with God and God’s relationship with the world therefore took the form of narrative. The stories of Adam and Eve, the flood, and even the events of the Exodus have important spiritual truths to teach us about who the Creator God is and what he expects from us.

Thus while science can tell us the what of Creation: what happened. It cannot tell us the Who, and the Who is far more important. That is why Jesus came to tell us who God is not give us a science lesson.

The Bible tells us for example that God formed Adam from the dust of ground and breathed life into him while science tells us we evolved. Although we don’t really understand how life originated, i.e., there is no accepted theory of abiogenesis, we do know human beings evolved from apes. Does this make our creator mere blind forces? I think not because the universe and everything in it nevertheless derive by secondary causes from a Creator. Is this Creator merely another blind force? How then could that Creator endow us with a rational mind and create a universe that is intelligible to us? How could we possess what the Creator does not?

Provable facts in the Bible are in short supply. The only event that Christians must accept as having physically occurred in the Bible is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And this has quite a bit of factual evidence in the historical record. Even then we cannot apply rigorous scientific standards because facts of an historical nature have different standards since they are not repeatable. These are more like the standards in a court of law. Can we prove beyond a reasonable doubt? Can our mental jury come to a conclusion? This is something we do on a daily basis as Christians.

Yet consider that Christ was not terribly concerned with the factual events of the Old Testament. Rather his concern was what they said about God and that they pointed to himself.

Whatever you believe, you cannot avoid accepting a philosophical framework for your life. You seem to believe in evidence based, scientific thinking yet you are terrified that this thinking inevitably leads to agnosticism. I agree at its most extreme it does. Evidence cannot however account for questions like why is there something rather than nothing. Nor can you provide evidence that your own mind exists to another person. Evidence requires two things to work: objective observation and cause and effect. Take either away and it fails. Thus evidence is not the only arbiter of truth but rather a framework for evaluating facts when those two conditions apply.

A more effective philosophical framework for evaluating truth is one that expands the definition of evidence to include metaphysical arguments which apply when cause and effect and/or objectivity fail.

Fear of death is a powerful motivator but not all fears are rational. The atheist would have you accept a very narrow vision of reality in which you are emergent from a random collection of non-living material, your consciousness is an illusion, and your life has no meaning other than what you invent for it. Who would not find this a terrifying story? Yet to throw his own standards back at him, what evidence is there that any of this is true? Is this not just a philosophical framework designed to avoid God or the possibility of meeting Him or obeying him? I find it entirely irrational.

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In his reply, he told me that he was raised with a literal interpretation of the Bible and was in the process of deconstructing his faith. This had led him to have anxiety attacks as he considered that parts of the Bible might not be literally true, such as the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea. He mentions the historical dating of the Gospels being in question, as well as their authorship. He asked me how I approach faith, given that I am a scientist.

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I have heard about people, mainly evangelicals, deconstructing their faith. It sounds painful. People are just not properly formed as Christians. They are either not taught their faith at all or forced to swallow a lot of unBiblical nonsense. Unfortunately, many Christians are taught to place their faith not in God or Jesus, but in the [literal] inerrancy of the Bible. Jesus didn’t write the Bible. He founded a Church. The Church is our mother. The Bible is a spiritual tool [inerrant in teaching and inspired by the Holy Spirit, but subject to interpretation].

My parents were nominally Christian (Anglican on one side and Lutheran on the other) but not particularly religious. I spent my teen and early adult years as an agnostic. I came back to church first and then back to faith in my mid-30s. My experience was somewhat backwards from what you would think. I had very powerful spiritual experiences leading me back which then led me to try to learn apologetics as I realized my ability to counter arguments against my faith was very weak.

I’ve never worked as an experimentalist, but yes, as a scientist, I work to prove some, usually theoretical, hypotheses.

The first thing to understand is that science and faith are not opposing worldviews but complementary. They fit together like two parts of a hinge. The pin that holds them together is the Theistic metaphysical framework. This is like a strong, solid metal pin. The Atheistic metaphysical framework is like a weak plastic pin that just falls apart when someone tries to use the door. Don’t blame the hinge, blame the pin.

Agnosticism is just not being able to decide which pin to use. You never get to a working door.

A Theistic metaphysical worldview acknowledges that the universe demands a Creator and our rational minds demand that Creator have a rational mind. This is just logical. In fact, logic, not to mention morality, only exists in this framework. In the Atheistic model, logic is an illusion, and morality, relative.

A Theist must therefore ask: Who is this Creator? What does he want from me, if anything?

At that point, you have to ask what evidence there is for who God is.

Look at the Gospels. Now, I don’t buy the historical critical dating to 70 AD. This is largely based on the idea that the authors must have inserted the destruction of the temple into Jesus’s mouth as a prophecy. After all, Paul’s letters, which we believe predate the destruction of the Temple, do not mention this at all. On the other hand, Acts, clearly written after the Gospel of Luke, doesn’t mention Paul’s death, which we believe happened around AD 64. It’s a bit of a conundrum. There’s a lot in the Gospels that Paul doesn’t mention and vice versa.

I personally think that the destruction of the Temple was not that hard to predict in Jesus’s time, even if you weren’t the Son of God. After all, Judea was constantly on the brink of rebellion against the Romans, who were known for razing cities to the ground. The temple had been destroyed once before.

The Gospels could have been written much earlier. As to who wrote them, we have a tradition that says who the authors were. I don’t doubt that Luke wrote Luke, Mark wrote Mark, and the Apostle John wrote John. I have my doubts about Matthew writing Matthew, if only because the tradition also says it was written in Aramaic or Hebrew, and why would Matthew, an apostle, use the writings of Mark to flesh out his Gospel, since we find passages of Mark word-for-word in Matthew and Luke [and there’s no evidence Matthew was translated from Aramaic into Greek]? More likely, Matthew is some kind of harmonization of earlier writings by Matthew if the tradition means anything.

What about miracles? C. S. Lewis wrote an interesting book on this called Miracles. Also, Lee Strobel has a very readable book called The Case for Miracles. I also own a two-volume set all about miracles by Craig Keener, documenting many cases of miracles. There is quite a bit of evidence for them. This is particularly important because the resurrection is a miracle. Christian belief hinges on this event (while it does not on the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea). There is good evidence for the resurrection, which would fill a book. N. T. Wright wrote one. It’s about 700 pages.

I won’t go into all this evidence but rather explain how, as a scientist, I approach such evidence. Truthfully, I take it as any other evidence for singular historical events. Miracles are, by definition, not repeatable natural phenomena. People in ancient times didn’t believe people could come back from the dead any more than we do. Yet, the resurrection was recorded as a historical event very soon after it happened. It also launched the church, which would hardly have happened if Jesus had stayed dead. How can I reconcile this with my belief in science? I think that science has its place in enabling us to evaluate cause and effect, but, if we argue that miracles cannot occur because only natural phenomena are possible, and, therefore, the resurrection didn’t happen, then we are just engaging in circular reasoning.

David Hume argued this about resurrections:

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened…. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

What are we to make of this?

Firstly, yes, the vast majority of tales of resurrection from the dead are false. Just because we believe in one miracle claim doesn’t mean we believe in them all. Thus, the story of the resurrection of Christ needs extraordinary evidence. Yet, you cannot assume that the Gospels and other sources do not contain such evidence. Also, Hume makes a fatal mistake here in that he assumes it is possible to assign probabilities to resurrections and tales of resurrection, such that you can make this determination. You cannot. People need to carefully consider the evidence that exists and try to come up with a superior hypothesis, not simply weigh falsehood against truth in a vacuum or try to reject facts in order to support their preconceived notions. Science works by forming better hypotheses. If you reject a particular hypothesis, it must be in favor of a better one that explains all the evidence. I find neither a good explanation for the empty tomb nor the resurrection appearances in natural phenomena.

Is everything in the Gospels true? Probably not, but the core facts are there in all four versions, and that is just how eyewitness accounts are. We cannot reject them entirely based on our belief that miracles don’t happen because of science. That is just scientism. Nor should we accept them at face value because we believe that if we don’t believe it all, then we can’t accept their core claims. That is fundamentalism. The middle way is to have an open mind and explore the evidence.

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In his reply, he mentions having doubts about the Gospels, where the details come from and are they all made up? He also desires to have a spiritual experience to restore his faith and to go back to the way he used to be. I decided to get more personal by adding some autobiographical details first.

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I started going back to church shortly after my youngest child was born. Before she was born, I had visions of walking her into church. The visions were in the daytime, not dreams, and at this point, I had not been attending a Christian church regularly since I was about 5 years old. (There were a few times my parents tried to go back to church when I was a teen, but these failed as they couldn’t find a church they wanted to be at.) A couple of years later, I realized that this [walking my daughter into church] had happened. I have had other visions of the future. They always relate to my children or my wife. For example, when my wife decided to move to Wisconsin for seminary, I heard a voice in my head tell me, “You will go with her”. That was the only time I can say I heard God’s voice. We all went to Wisconsin after that.

My faith journey, even after I came back to church in 2015, hasn’t been all smooth sailing. I’ve certainly had moments when I cried out into the night sky and nothing happened. I also had a lot of stress and anxiety during the pandemic, and being separated from my faith community was not good for maintaining my faith.

I had a lot of struggles during our time in Wisconsin, partly from the stress of the move. My eldest son moved back to Georgia, too, which I didn’t like. I have mild OCD, which means that many of the things you would expect to help with one’s faith, such as reading scripture or praying for comfort, backfire horribly and create much greater anxiety. I had to learn to control my own mind with the help of a professional (who was himself an atheist) and not let it control me. I hope you have someone like that.

Doubts and objections to the Gospels occur to me all the time. That is quite normal for a healthy functioning brain. What’s important is what you do with those thoughts. If you fixate on them as a source of anxiety, then you aren’t being productive. When a doubt occurs, you need to just observe it and say, hmm, I wonder what the answer to this is? The best option is to take your questions to a trusted source. Unfortunately, the internet is not one. There is a lot of garbage. You can take it to a learned person if you know one. Pastors, in my experience, are mostly terrible at answering these kinds of questions. They are good resources for spiritual support, but they forget a lot of their seminary courses and won’t be able to give detailed answers. I would turn to some good commentaries. If you want something easy, N. T. Wright and Goldingay’s “For Everyone” series covers the whole Bible. There are more detailed ones on the Gospels. Raymond Brown and D. A. Carson have good ones on John. Trust me, no doubt that has occurred to you has not already occurred to some scholar. I can give you more recommendations from my wife’s library if you want.

On your question about how Jesus’s conversation with Pilate made it into the Gospels, I assume that either the resurrected Jesus told the disciples what happened, or they got it from a Roman convert later. Pilate was deeply affected himself. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of the Romans who witnessed Christ converted later. Some details about his birth probably come from his mother, Mary, but the details in Luke and Matthew don’t agree that well, so it’s not clear. Remember, there were lots and lots of people who witnessed the things that Jesus did and said, not just the 12 disciples. Who told them about his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well? Was it Jesus himself? Maybe so. Was it her? Possibly once the 12 arrived. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea may have told them what happened in the Sanhedrin, for example (even if they weren’t there personally).

Having many witnesses is, in some ways, worse than having only one because people rarely describe events the same way. You have to look at whether there are specific, core details that are the same. Now, did Jesus say all these exact words? Probably not, but then again, he may have said some things the same way multiple times, such as the Lord’s Prayer. It also explains why Paul’s letters are a bit vague on details. He didn’t spend a lot of time investigating them; at the same time, he is largely in agreement with the core details of the Gospels. As with many historical documents, we don’t know where the details come from. Most early Christians probably focused on Jesus’s passion, which is why those details tend to agree better than others.

I would also repeat my assertion that Jesus founded a Church. He did not write a book. This is what separates us from Islam. The Gospels are important, but they are not what Jesus wanted our faith to be grounded in. It is the Church, not your church or mine, but the universal Church, that supports our faith and makes us one body in Christ.

My attitude about faith is largely inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas. If any aspect of faith, e.g., the message of the Gospels, is true, then it can stand up to even the strongest objections. If the message of the Gospels can’t stand up to objections, then we can’t put our faith in what they teach. Our faith must be grounded in the objective truth, not in mere blind conviction. This is also what separates us from other religions. Aquinas produced statements on various aspects of faith and came up with objections. He would then demolish those objections. It’s very effective because we are often afraid to object to our beliefs, which leads us to continue in doubt since we have failed to face these objections head-on. These objections appear to us as monsters until we turn and face them. Once we do, we find that they are not as strong as they appeared when we were running away from them.

On your desire for a spiritual experience, while spiritual experiences are important, I don’t know that our faith should depend on them or that we should expect our faith to come from such experiences. They can get us to change course on something we are doing, but our faith must be grounded in our intellect, feelings, behavior, and social connections.

You say you want to be back the way you used to be. I would not expect that. It sounds like your prior faith wasn’t as strong as you thought it was. What you need to do is build a stronger faith now by facing your demons. Demons want you scared. They hate it if you just sit there watching them, even if you do nothing to them. Watch what scares you, and you will find it loses power.

You say you can’t help feeling like you are wrong in your faith, but you have to explore that feeling if you are to overcome it. You are very attached to your faith. You fear losing it. Yet that very fear is keeping you in limbo because you keep running away from it. It sounds to me like you were given a very corrupt version of the Gospel as a young person, one based on [absolute] inerrancy and harmonization. This is a good thing to let go of, as this becomes a weapon against faith, not for it.

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He responds with a litany of questions he has about the Gospels and his problems with the Old Testament, faith and science, and the problem of evil. He also laments that God has not given him a miraculous sign to help his faith.

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Sometimes God needs us to fight our own battles. There are deserts to be crossed before we come to the Promised Land.

I have probably at one time or another investigated all the same questions you ask. I can’t say I found satisfactory answers. Science sometimes proves things in the Bible are true that scholars doubted. For example in John he says the pool of Bethzaida had five covered walkways. Scholars said no way there was such a pool in Jerusalem. Then archaeologists found it.

In fact Biblical archaeology has not disproved anything in the Bible. At best it is silent on a great many things like Moses. (Be thankful you aren’t Mormon. Archaeology has been devastating to their beliefs, not that they pay attention.)

I think that it is perfectly natural to approach the Bible literally except when it contradicts observation or reason. This has been recognized since at least the 10th century. Honestly modern Biblical literalists are real oddballs. Most Christians including myself consider the Bible to be inerrant in its teaching. It teaches the truth. But not every fact in it is true. 500 years ago people were adamant that the Sun went around the Earth and insisted that Scripture supported this. Yet almost no one now is a geocentrist. Apparently no one has a problem with that anymore. John Lennox wrote a wonderful little book called Seven Days that Divide the World about this.

Also the Bible contains many different genres, so some books are metaphorical poetry and others describe things as factual. Even those that purport to tell history have a theological message to get across so they select what facts to communicate. That can lead to a lot of gaps. The Old Testament had many authors and editors over centuries but if you read it straight through you can see the overarching story. It is a story about who God is and how he is setting the world right through Israel.

I don’t really see how you can reconcile Atheism with science. Reconciling faith and science is relatively straightforward. Science doesn’t like to be forced to interpret literature which is what the Bible fundamentally is. It prefers straight lines. The Bible is curvy and intersecting. Nevertheless, we recognize who God is from both.

[On his question about why God waited billions of years to create the Earth.] God waited billions of years because our Sun had to be a 3rd generation star in order to bring about life. In other words our planet formed about as close to the beginning of the universe as it could. Gods timeline is not our timeline. The Bible doesn’t really say much about what was happening before the Earth formed anyway. It’s not part of the 7 days.

The problem of evil is the most difficult philosophical problem for Christians. Buddhists and Hindus can argue that it is all karma or that good and evil don’t exist. Atheists have no basis for calling anything good or evil which ends up being a problem for them when they want to insist on any objective right or wrong. For us it is hard to understand why the evil exists without also arguing away God’s omnipotence. Aquinas argued that evil isn’t a real thing but merely the deprivation of a need. Others point out that it was because of evil that Jesus had to die on the cross. God himself did not hold back his only begotten Son. Why if God is all powerful? Why not snap and remove evil from the world? Others point out that he did with the flood and that in a way we Christians are simply animals in yet another ark, a Church shaped one. Yet there are still innocent people who suffer all over the world and in many cases not because of anyone’s wrongdoing but simple happenstance like getting cancer at a young age. Where is God in the children’s cancer ward?

All I can point to is Revelation 21:4,

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

Somehow, God is setting it all right, and we have to be patient and understand that things won’t be alright until this world passes away.

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We agreed by this time that it was time for him to take a break. He needed a rest from his anxieties. I wasn’t sure what to make of all this. I had given him my best apologetics, but I’m not sure that is what he needed. He was trying to solve an emotional problem intellectually and going round and round in circles. This is often the case with problems we face in our faith and in our lives. We try to solve irrational anxieties with heaps of information when we only need a teaspoon of wisdom, and, unlike information in our culture, wisdom is hard-won through careful practice. It doesn’t come from a book.