I don't know why I wasn't interested in this thread when it was active, but after reading through most of it I have a thought or two about why I believe what I believe that's maybe from a little different angle, or with a somewhat different emphasis, than what I've said before.
I came to believe in Jesus Christ as God, as Lord and Savior, in my mid-forties, after having been an atheist since I was a teenager, and a barely nominal Christian before that, who really couldn't have told you what the gospel was, or much more than a few things about some Bible characters.
I would never have come to belief if I'd had to reason my way to it. So all the discussion about how the universe came into existence, while very interesting to read now, would never have led me to a belief in God. Just as nothing about the physical universe itself would have. The Bible says that nature is full of evidence of God and I now believe that, but I never would have seen it before.
I believed originally because I believed the people who said they believed. I believed because so many others believed, I believed what they said about their belief and about their experiences. I found them to be sincere credible people. At first I believed almost everything people said about their experiences of God. Then after doing a lot of reading I was able to sort it out logically and realize that there were many contradictions between various beliefs so that they couldn't all be true. In the end I was simply persuaded by the Christians. They convinced me that only Biblical Christianity can account for all the other beliefs.
And by then I was having personal experiences of God myself which confirmed it all, and the more I believed the more I came to believe.
I didn't start thinking about the scientific questions for quite some time after that. I started out believing that God is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent and I'd read enough to know what those things meant so I didn't get snared in some of the logic traps people here fall into -- such as insisting that omnipotence means God has to be capable of evil.
I was completely convinced that the Bible was God-inspired from beginning to end, basically because of what I was convinced was true about the character of God Himself, and not because of anything I found in the Bible. If I didn't grasp something in the Bible, and I often didn't, I had the faith that nevertheless it was true because God inspired it, and over the years I gradually came to understand most of the parts I hadn't understood at first. That is how faith works. If you have some faith, and hold to it firmly, God gives you more, gives you enlightenment, improves your knowledge, and grows your faith.
You may, of course, not be able to convey much of it to anyone else, at least not someone who is not a believer. But then that's not how I became a believer either, as I started out saying. I didn't start out KNOWING anything at all, or even asking questions about things that could be learned. I simply
believed some people who said they knew God, eventually some people who wrote that they'd met Jesus Christ. And according to the Bible, believing is the key to it all, how we come to faith. Believing the witnesses to Christ. Believing Christ Himself. Believing the word of God.
But there are many different ways people come to believe. Although I'm sure I could never have become a believer by reasoning through scientific questions that challenge the Bible, it is always possible that God would use this kind of debate to persuade someone else to belief. The right word, phrase, angle on a question -- something no one can predict but God himself, who often uses things we inadvertently say and do, in order to show it is all His doing -- and belief may suddenly happen for someone. You never know.
This message has been edited by Faith, 03-31-2006 02:00 AM
This message has been edited by Faith, 04-01-2006 11:41 PM
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