In Defense of My Christian Faith

Preface: I typically dislike talking about Religion, so accept this as one of those gifts that I have lying around the house and really need to get rid of, and you are the lucky recipient.

I am a Christian. Now, you won't find me sitting in one of the front pews in church, raising my arms up to praise songs, or praying out loud in groups, but nonetheless, I am a Christian.

I am also a scientist. I like logic, facts, and evidence.

I am human. I have emotions, feelings, illogic, and faith.

Humans are thinking beings who have been trying to understand the universe in which they live for seemingly as long as they have lived in it. This curiosity has led scientists to discover the workings of many a thing, including such complex things as genetics and astronomy. The human curiosity has also led us to philosophical thoughts on how and why we exist at all. It seems that most civilizations came to the conclusion that there had to be something greater in the universe than ourselves. This was quite humble of us, in a way. But, the reason this is the big conclusion is that the mysteries of the universe are simply too enormous for us to comprehend.

Early philosophers and ethicists discussed the meaning of life, gave advice on how we should behave, and how we should treat other creatures. Throughout their works, we find them mentioning a god or several gods. So, even these people who we tend to separate from the religious realm because of their focus on logic could not escape the human affinity to believing in a higher power. Various civilizations have come up with brutal or apathetic gods to take responsibility for all of the universal mayhem. But, it is the Christian religion, and its Jewish and Islamic cousins, which assembled the positive aspects and aspirations of human nature.

Can we prove that there is a God, that his Son lived on the Earth for a period of time, and that the godly Spirit lives in us still? No. It is called “faith” because we have to simply believe. Humans have been drawn to believe for ages, admittedly in a variety of hideous forms, but the faith is always somehow in us. We can explain the universe to a great extent with our scientific discoveries, but what I learned in Calvin College's science courses is that we can also have a faith which does not contradict our scientific logic.

I took Calvin's Pentateuch course in which we studied the first five books of the Bible. The conclusion of the course surprised me a bit: a lot of the stories in the beginning of the Bible are stretched truths and fiction. A non-Christian may add to this, “don't other religions also have similar creation stories as Christianity?” And to this I reply, “that is why the fiction of the Bible stories actually makes sense!” It was not just this one group of Jews who thought up these stories. Rather, it is somewhere in communal human knowledge!

I also took a Christian Theology course at Calvin College. In this class we discussed the concepts of God being all knowing, all powerful, etc. People ask how there can be so much suffering and cruelty in the world if God supposedly has so much control. My pastor at North Hills spent something like 7 weeks preaching on how we simply don't know why, but that we can act in the best moral and Christian good way in response.

Faith is a mysterious activity. What we do know about it is that it makes us do morally good works and gives us hope for the future. You can tell me that I'm not a Christian because I don't believe the same certain things as you (has happened), or you can try to break down my beliefs because they are “illogical” (has happened), but you can't break my inner, human affinity to being a Christian. God has been working hard through our ancestors to open our eyes to Him, so why don't we just let Him in and stop protesting so much?