I have a handful of friends in the world of theology and apologetics who have experienced serious and sustained doubts about the existence of God or the truth of the gospel. Some grew up in church, later became skeptical of their childhood faith, and embraced the label “agnostic” or atheist for a time, but were then drawn back to a more robust and intellectually satisfying Christian profession.
I have other apologist-friends who didn’t grow up Christian at all. They started out on the fence about God and only began to wrestle with the big questions of life once they hit their high school or college years.
One benefit these colleagues have in conversation with skeptics is their personal experience. They can address others’ doubts from a place of having lived with those doubts themselves. They’ve been there.
Unlike these friends, I can’t point to a time I considered myself agnostic or atheist, or even on the fence about Christianity. Though I’ve known seasons of suffering and disillusionment, I have no story of losing, then regaining, my faith. I first believed the gospel as a child, and my earliest confession of faith has only deepened over time.
But even if my testimony isn’t as dramatic as some of my friends’, it isn’t the case that I’ve never dealt with doubts about God and the gospel. I have. I still do.
Doubts I Encounter
In our secular age, faith is one option among many. All kinds of beliefs are contested. Charles Taylor describes our culture as “cross-pressured,” pulled in two directions at once—toward a materialist account of reality and a world of fullness and awe that points beyond itself.
It’s no wonder, then, that believers often fend off doubts and wrestle with faith commitments taken for granted in the past, and unbelievers are often haunted by transcendence that leads them to question their unbelief. In a cross-pressured age, we’re not surprised to see faith coexisting with doubt in some measure. Nor is it strange to see skeptics doubt their doubts.
My doubts regarding Christianity have never ganged up on me all at once, to pin me down and keep me in existential angst. They’ve never caused me to question my identity as a Christian or my place among God’s people. (I’m thankful that’s the case, especially when I hear the stories of friends who have traveled the hard road of faith deconstruction and reconstruction.) But I do deal with doubt on occasion, and new objections about God and questions about our world lead me to ponder Christianity’s veracity.
It’s often said that the ministry of apologetics is beneficial not only for showing nonbelievers the reasonableness of the Christian faith but also for strengthening the faith of believers, helping us remain faithful when doubts arise and linger. I’ve found this to be the case.
So I’d like to share three of the apologetic arguments I keep returning to, that keep drawing me back to the central truths of Christianity. They may not land as powerfully for you as they do for me, but I hope they provide signposts for a few well-trodden paths when your own doubts arise.
Argument for a Creator
The cosmological arguments for the existence of a Creator God lean heavy into logic—the tracing back of everything that is, until we attribute the universe to a cause beyond itself, some kind of necessary being to ground our reality. The ontological argument from Anselm still makes a strange kind of sense, no matter how much it has been pilloried over the centuries. Several arguments from human experience (consciousness, reason, desire, and universal religiosity) build a strong cumulative case.
But it’s the teleological argument that proves most persuasive to me. I can’t get over the design of this world and the level of fine-tuning necessary for human life. Surely the physical constants of the universe don’t fall within such narrow ranges by chance! And the more I consider the order, complexity, and purpose on display in nature, the more I’m convinced there is a mind behind it all.
The argument from design is often described with William Paley’s analogy of finding a watch on the ground. No one would assume the intricacy of the watch is the product of random chance, he says, although some argue this is, in fact, the case—it’s only the appearance of design, wrought by natural selection. (Richard Dawkins is in this camp.)
Others propose a multiverse hypothesis: Of course, we live in a universe amenable to life, because that’s the only kind of universe we could exist in! And if there are a potentially infinite number of universes, each with its own constants, then one like ours is bound to show up somewhere.
For me, the multiverse speculation just pushes the question further back without ever addressing the crux of the design argument. Who or what generates multiple universes, each with its own finely tuned laws? As fascinating as these thought experiments with string theory or inflationary cosmology may be, they avoid the central question.
But let me be more specific: It’s not the argument from design and fine-tuning by itself that draws me back to my belief in a Creator. It’s the teleological arguments plus the human experience of beauty pointing to something beyond the material world—that’s what resonates most with me. It’s the fine-tuning and design we see both in the world and in human cultural artifacts—and what this beauty stirs in the heart. I find all these points of light to be like pinholes in the ceiling of immanence, laying waste the claim that nothing exists beyond this material world.
Peter Kreeft sums up one argument from beauty this way: “There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God.” The point is that when we encounter beauty, our hearts are arrested. You’re compelled to love it and know it.
Why is this the case? There must be something about music that goes beyond the notes on the page, that touches the edges of the transcendent. (Not long ago, I heard a commenter on a podcast reference Whitney Houston’s show-stopping 10-minute medley at a 1994 awards show and say something like “I’m not religious at all, but I can’t help but believe in God when I watch that performance.” At first glance, that statement seems nonsensical, yet many people nod along because they know what it’s getting at.)
Something about the teleological argument from design, when combined with the way music works—the intricacy of what makes something beautiful and coherent—packs a powerful punch.
The more we learn about the inner workings of the world, and the more science reveals the complexity of DNA, the more we’re struck by the intelligibility of the universe, a rationality that suggests it comes from a rational Mind. And amid this fine-tuning, there’s music at the heart of everything—something gloriously mathematical, yet irreducible to numbers.
When I reflect on such order and beauty, I find my objections swept away and I’m drawn back to a simple, stunning conclusion: Design points to a Designer. Music points to a Music-maker. Stories point to a Storyteller.
Challenge of Suffering
But then, I press further, and though I’m persuaded by the existence of God, doubts about the Christian view of God arise. Just what kind of story is this? Now the problem of evil rears its head. There’s beauty in the world, sure! But also unimaginable suffering, so much of it unjust and unexplainable. So what if there’s order in creation? What about all the chaos? What do we make of death?
There are the natural disasters that cause so much human sorrow, but also the cruelty of humans toward other humans—all supposedly under God’s providential hand. Why would a good God permit so many heinous acts?
For me, the two most powerful pictures that lay out, in the bleakest terms, the despair and desolation of human pain and evil come from Elie Wiesel’s Night and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
In Night, there’s an awful scene where Wiesel and and the other prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp are forced to watch the execution of three inmates by hanging. One of them is a young boy. The chairs are tipped over, but the boy is too light for the rope to kill him quickly, and so he writhes in agony between life and death for more than half an hour as the prisoners are marched past and made to look in his face. “Where is God?” a man behind Wiesel asks. And Wiesel hears a voice in his heart answer, “Here he is, hanging on these gallows.”
In Dostoevsky’s novel, Ivan Karamazov describes, in horrifying detail, the abuse a little girl endures from her own parents and the torture of a boy thrown to wild dogs. Ivan cannot accept the Christian idea that the grand finale of this world will bring about a resolution that swallows up all such suffering and makes everything worth it. No, he argues, we would not wish such evil on a poor, innocent child even if we knew, in the end, all would be well. No future hope can make up for the child who experiences his flesh torn apart by wild beasts.
These two accounts are devastating expressions of the problem of evil. It’s no wonder we question either God’s existence or the goodness of whatever God exists. No other objection to Christianity feels as powerful to me as this one. When I’ve encountered inexplicable tragedy or senseless pain in the world, I look to the sky and wonder if I’m just screaming into the void after all.
But the more I reflect, the more these objections short-circuit themselves. They’re like a train barreling down the tracks, about to run over my faith, before suddenly running out of steam. For two reasons.
First, Christians are the ones who offer the strongest articulations of this objection, as is the case with Dostoevsky. Ivan the atheist may be communicating his objection, but it’s Dostoevsky the Christian putting those words in his mouth. Christians don’t shy away from the horror of human suffering, perhaps because the central symbol of our faith is a tortured man on a cross gasping for air.
And to the question posed by Night, in that scene with the boy being hanged—“Where is God?!”—the Christian answer transposes the words of Wiesel—“He is here”—into a profession of faith. The cross places God at the center of all suffering and evil.
Second, I can’t fully explain my revulsion to human cruelty and suffering apart from a moral sensibility that must exist objectively, outside myself, not just in my mind. The power of the problem of evil is magnified, not lessened, if I were to take the leap of faith an atheist like Yuval Noah Harari does, by saying human rights are mere fictions we live by, conjured in human imaginations. Or if I were to align with Phil Zuckerman, who advocates a secular life that’s still oriented toward the good, with morality made possible apart from any transcendent being or moral law. These proposals feel like castles in the air.
The reason the problem of evil delivers such an emotional wallop for me is because of the bigger problem of good—the gratuitousness of beauty and goodness in our world, and the consequent ache in our hearts that something has gone deeply wrong, that the world is both glorious and a ruin, that things are not as they’re supposed to be. Some may attribute this feeling to evolutionary instincts or sociological conditioning, but the Christian answer is more satisfying: We find the current state of affairs intolerable and wrong because we were created for something beautiful and right.
Whatever we may say about God’s plan for this world, the story of Scripture reveals a God who, in his love, enters our suffering and sadness so he can turn it inside out and give us something more glorious—a world once broken but one day restored.
I admit that Christianity doesn’t provide a fully emotionally satisfying answer to the problem of evil, especially for someone in the throes of pain or enduring the horrors of human cruelty. Better to sit with someone in grief than blab on with speculations.
But I don’t find other explanations any better. And I don’t find the Bible minimizing or explaining away suffering and evil. Job may get back everything he lost at the end of the book that bears his name, but that’s just one chapter after a slew of counterproductive dialogues and a guest appearance from God that shuts Job’s mouth but never answers his questions.
The problem of evil remains a recurring source of doubt for me, yet I find in the Christian faith a willingness—even enthusiasm—to look this objection square in the face and receive its blow, full force.
Resurrection of Jesus
Now comes the gospel’s central truth, already poking its head into these arguments: the resurrection of Jesus as the preview of the restoration of all things.
Can we acknowledge how strange it is to believe that a crucified man in the first century came back to life? Is there any surprise we would sometimes doubt this story?
As a college student in Romania, at the start of my theological studies, I devoured book after book on the person and work of Jesus. This was the waning period of the “third quest” for the historical Jesus, which reignited scholarly exploration of his first-century Jewish context.
I read up on what the Jesus Seminar claimed to be “authentic” in the Gospels, considered John Dominic Crossan on the parables, listened to Bart Ehrman pick apart the historical reliability of the Gospels, pondered Marcus Borg’s spiritual reading of the resurrection, dabbled in Elaine Pagels’s descriptions of early Gnostic Christianities, perused the works of Jewish scholars like Brad Young, and slowly made my way through tomes written by Ben Witherington, N. T. Wright, and Richard Bauckham.
I walked away from all that reading with a renewed assurance that something extraordinary had happened in Jerusalem in the first century. The only question was what? Was Jesus taken down from the cross and thrown to wild dogs (Crossan’s speculation) or was a mass hallucination responsible for belief in the resurrection (Ehrman’s take)? Did the church reinvent Jesus with exalted language and then dress up Jesus in the Gospels themselves?
The more I studied, the more the cumulative case for the resurrection made (and still makes) the most sense to me. A couple underrated lines of argumentation stand out. Take, for instance, the shift of Christian worship, very early, to Sunday over Saturday. It’s true the accounts of Sunday gatherings don’t imply these first-century Jews dispensed right away with the Sabbath, but the shift of giving priority to the first day over the seventh is gobsmacking when you consider how fast this alteration to more than a thousand years of tradition took place. The only thing that can account for such a massive move is a massive event.
Or take the Christ hymn in Philippians 2 that applies Isaiah 45:23’s declaration about YHWH to Jesus himself. For a people whose self-identity was wrapped up with the prohibition against idolatry—with the first and second commandments from Mount Sinai exalting God and God alone as worthy of worship, it’s unthinkable they would take a famous prophet’s words about God and use them to describe a human being . . . apart from some world-changing event.
A stolen body, the wrong tomb, the mass hallucination—these hypotheses may have varying degrees of merit, but reading the counterexplanations for the empty tomb and rise of early Christianity feels a little like crawling around inside a giant crater, trying hard to explain what impacted the terrain without drawing the obvious conclusion that a meteor hit. The resurrection is the meteor.
The Spirit Who Draws Me Back
I’m thankful to belong to a faith that doesn’t bypass the mind but takes seriously arguments for and against Christianity’s credibility.
Theologically, I recognize it’s not these arguments that have drawn me out of my doubts. It’s the Spirit, making use of God’s Word and God’s people. It’s the Spirit working in my mind through arguments articulated by apologists and theologians over the centuries. But these are just a few I’m thankful the Spirit has used to draw me back to the gospel and keep me believing.
(If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter, I’d love to know what arguments have proven most powerful when you’ve encountered doubts about your faith. If you’d like to subscribe and share your thoughts with me, you can do so here.)
