For many years I felt called by the LORD. Finally, a few years ago, I became a Christian and was baptized. While I was still young in my faith, I became troubled by all the hypocrisy I saw within our church. I got cynical about whether or not Christianity was true or merely a lie fabricated by the apostles for financial gain. My doubts led me to fall away from my faith. Ironically, even when I doubted the accuracy of the Gospels, I still found myself drawn to, yet perplexed by Jesus. Even as an agnostic, I knew that the teachings of Jesus represented the highest ethical standard to me. However, there's a big difference between agreeing with Jesus' moral teachings and accepting His accompanying claims. I still found myself waiting for something before being able to commit to faith in Him: Effectively, I awaited a sign from above. One day I was driving and I found myself praying, even though I felt uncertain as to whether or not there even existed a God to hear my prayers. I prayed for a sign that God was real and not just wishful thinking. Then I instantly realized that even if I were given a sign, I wouldn’t recognize it unless I already believed in the first place. I remembered what Jesus had said: "Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test." I remembered the last time I had bargained with God:

I remembered a prayer I prayed a few years ago. Back when Danielle Van Dam was missing, my husband and I participated in several of the searches for her body. It so happened that on the very day her body was found, I was the leader of a search team. At that time, I was still agnostic, but that morning I had prayed to God anyway. I promised God that, if we found her body, I would henceforth believe in miracles. It turned out that it was one of the other search teams that found her body, so I rationalized that I didn’t really have to believe in miracles, since it wasn’t my team that found her. Besides, she would have been found sooner or later anyway. . . . Here I had asked for a sign and--I believe--received one, yet I still weaseled my way out of giving God the faith that I had promised Him.

On that day in the car, I realized that if my faith were based on absolute proof, I would never believe, since science inherently assumes that phenomena have a naturalistic (i.e. non-deistic) explanation. For example, Carbon 14 dating led scientists to dismiss the Shroud of Turin as a medieval forgery. Now the scientific community is reevaluating previous conclusions due to pollen samples that have been lifted off it and due to the fact that the image of the face is on both sides of the Shroud. Nothing about the Shroud itself has changed, but science is fickle and goes back and forth based. If assumptions or measurements or testing techniques are flawed, incorrect conclusions can be made. If no one had bothered to lift pollen samples off the Shroud, the case would be closed based on the results of Carbon dating. If I based my faith in Jesus Christ on "proof," there would never be enough evidence for my satisfaction.

I realized that if my faith were based only on the strength of one argument over another, it would be wishy-washy and possibly misplaced. An argument is not true by virtue of the fact that it is eloquent and convincing. I ultimately committed to God that I would trust that Jesus Christ is His Son and that the Bible is His Word. I knew that I could not control whether or not a given argument sounded convincing, but I can control my trust. I choose to trust the Lord, to the exclusion of trusting any counterevidence against Him. That may sound narrow-minded, but I believe it is necessary. Jesus said that we will not enter into Heaven unless we are like little children in how we trust Him. Now that I am a mother, I know how completely little children trust their parents. We must trust in Jesus with the same narrow-mindedness that my daughter trusts in me.

At any rate, something happened once I stopped waiting for a heavenly sign. I realized that faith inherently relies on belief without absolute "proof." True faith is trust and obedience without logical certainty. The only thing that would remove all doubt regarding the accuracy of the Gospels would be the Second Coming, by which time it will be rather late to choose sides. (Even then, our ability to discern the real Second Coming from the Son of Perdition mentioned in 2 Thessalonians depends on our preexisting faith and knowledge of the Scriptures.) Regardless of convincing arguments for or against Christianity, following Jesus is still a conscious choice and commitment. That day in the car, I chose to trust the Lord in the face of all other arguments. Unexpectedly, once I made the commitment to trust Jesus, the doubt that once plagued my heart instantly evaporated: Every day since, I have felt the incredible, indescribable peace of Christ in my life. To me, that is proof enough that Jesus is indeed LORD.

It has become fashionable for Christians to cite scientific evidence in favor of the Bible. It can be appealing to point to scientific discoveries that seem to support Christianity, but I believe that it is ultimately dangerous to look toward science to justify one's faith. Since science and religion inherently rely on different presuppositions, science can never "prove" religion.

The scientific process is based the presupposition that there exist naturalistic causes for a phenomenon. From a religious perspective, this is assumption is flawed. Science tacitly assumes that the personal, interactive God of the Bible does not exist. Science looks at the most probable explanation for a set of data. Since miracles are infinitely improbable, we can never expect science to acknowledge them.

We have to remember that religious faith is incompatible with a conventional, scientific view of the universe. Science throws out anomalous data. Since miracles are by nature anomolous, science categorically dismisses them. Science cannot accept miracles because it cannot accept their cause--that they are deliberate acts of God.

Faith itself is based on believing eyewitness accounts that fly in the face of our everyday experience. It is against the normal order of things for a stick to turn into a snake and back again, but Moses testified that it actually happened. The Gospels tell us that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the third day after His crucifixion, but science tells us that dead people stay dead. Faith means believing the Bible over scientists. No number of experiments will reproduce a miracle. No amount of observation of the natural world will make us better able to establish laws predicting miracles. Science points away from faith, not toward it.

While it is possible for scientifically oriented individuals to have religious feelings, science itself only has room for a god that obeys (rather than writes) natural laws. The problem with that type of mindset is that it has nothing in common with the God of the Bible (in both the Old and New Testaments). God is Supreme, not secondary. He is above the law.

I believe that, when we pray to God, we are interacting with a conscious individual. Jesus rebuked Satan by saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7). We cannot scientifically test or prove God's existence. Those people that need proof of God will never get it (until it is too late). A good scientist does not accept anything on faith, but in order to enter into the kingdom of heaven, we must be as trusting as little children (Matthew 18:3. Therefore, science has great potential to be a stumbling block to one's salvation.

Ultimately, science is the religion of skeptics. For a long time, science was my religion too, making it impossible for my hardened heart to grasp God. If we demand that God prove Himself, we’ll never believe. Faith requires childlike trust on the part of the believer. Faith is hard. Take it or leave it.

It does not take a great leap of faith to believe in gravity. We are reminded of the supremacy of gravity every time we spill a drink, trip, or drop something. Personal experience demonstrates that gravity is real. We can test gravity any time we choose to: Yep, gravity still applies. It is one of our modern tendencies to only accept as real that which can be touched or proven or observed. Yet, we know that there are unprovable truths. There are questions that science, try as it might, cannot answer. One of these is the identity of Jesus. Regardless of what we believe, there is only one right answer and the stakes are high.

The Bible, unlike gravity, cannot be proven or disproven. No one can replay history to prove one version or another. We can collect artifacts and analyze primary documents, but this is a poor substitute for first-hand observation. As such, we can either accept the Bible as accurate, dismiss it as superstitious nonsense or see it as somewhere in between. We can say that our careful observations are consistent or inconsistent with it, then (based on which we trust more) throw one out.

There are different reasons people tend to take issue with the Bible, especially the New Testament. For "educated" people, perhaps the greatest difficulty lies in believing in scientifically impossible things. The idea of Jesus feeding five thousand men (not counting women and children) with a few loaves and fishes seems patently absurd. What gave me trouble--even as a small child--was the very idea of miracles. Didn't these people understand the laws of physics? Walking on water is impossible. Moreover, the idea of the resurrection of the dead was simply beyond comprehension, even as a kid. Instead, I reasoned that maybe Jesus was (to borrow from "The Princess Bride") merely "mostly dead."

It is only if one is willing to entertain the idea of a supreme deity, who (for reasons of His own) chose to reveal Himself to mankind, that Biblical faith is possible. If God were real, how would one expect Him to prove His identity? He would have to do things that were absolutely impossible for anyone but the God-of-the-universe to do. Miracles, almost by definition, have to be absurdly impossible. How do we determine what is possible or impossible? What shapes our understanding of reality? Experience, for one. When I was a little girl, I didn't know if fairies were real or not. I read about them in stories and poems. I had one first-person account of a fairy which, for a while, I believed. After long enough, I realized that I had been had. Experience told me that there was no such thing as fairies, leprechauns, unicorns, and so on. The beauty--and danger--of education is that it allow us to gain knowledge beyond our direct experience, beyond what we have earned (or discovered for ourselves).

An educated person has learned or absorbed our society's intellectual theories. An educated person is knowledgeable. The danger of education, however, is that we might think we actually know something. Science may attempt to gives us answers and knowledge, but these answers are inevitably incomplete. Science, like any other logical pursuit, is based on presuppositions. If any of those presuppositions is incorrect, down comes the house of cards (or at least the part that rests on error). Because of the educated person's logical nature, believing in something without proof is difficult. The problem with believing in God is that we cannot test God in the way we can test gravity. We cannot ever be completely certain that He is real. Not only can we not be certain, but we are asked to believe in absurdities which are that much more absurd the more educated we get. Faith is, therefore, that much more difficult for the educated.

However, there are a good many things that we already accept on faith, absorbing through the educational process. I have never seen an electron, but I believe in them because I was taught about them. The bits of light given off due to static electricity in the dark, the workings of a light bulb, the burning of fire--we are told that all these processes depend on the existence and behavior of the electron. Even the educated person accepts on faith that if we learn enough we can understand physics. Do I know any of this for sure? Do I know for sure that those twinkling things in the sky are really great burning balls of gas? I don't really know, but I believe based on the evidence. I believe in photosynthesis. I believe that diamonds and graphite are both made of Carbon. I believe that the Earth has a solid Nickel core. All of these beliefs are based on evidence, testable, and provisional--but they are still theory. Science precludes the certainty that is the very basis of faith. At the same time, the process of education that teaches us not to take things on faith feeds us new beliefs. How many people remember how Galileo demonstrated that not all celestial bodies go around the sun? The average American has never looked through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter, or paid attention to Venus's retrograde orbit. Who remembers the proofs showing that the world is round? Only sailors notice that the sail of a ship is the last part visible as it disappears over the horizon. If a person doesn't know the steps to a conclusion, he has merely adopted a belief, even if it is belief in science.

Because there is no instant replay feature for reality (unlike a football game), it is nearly impossible to accept one-time events as representative of a greater truth. In fact, if a scientist gets a result once but can't replicate it, he or she will likely throw out that data. While witness testimony may be persuasive in a court of law, it carries little weight with a scientist. Science demands replicable evidence. However, we must realize that this is a limitation of the part of science. Science is useful for measuring phenomena that can be observed under controlled circumstances. The events of the Bible cannot be repeated at will or examined under a microscope or understood rationally--they demand taking a leap of faith (which science forbids). The more a person has developed his or her dependence on reason, the more difficult it is to take the truth of the Gospel on faith. My brother, for one, is unconvinced by my point of view. Of course, my very point is that convincing a skeptic is pretty much impossible. There are many benefits to education, but becoming skeptical involves a hardening of the heart that makes it difficult to see truths that are obvious to those with less schooling. If you do not believe in the possibility of a personal God, nothing I can say will convince you that Jesus is Yahweh, God of the Hebrews, come in the flesh. If you do not believe in the reality of good and evil, nothing I can say will convince you of its existence. Education involves gaining knowledge and losing our ignorance. The skeptical person may no longer be gullible, but neither can he believe in unprovable truths. We all must make a leap of faith; disbelief is itself belief.

So, it is difficult to be a thinking person and to also have faith in the unseen, in the unproven and unprovable. For those who can believe in God, the Bible offers some explanations as to why this is. "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty" (1 Corinthians 1:27). God likes to exalt the humble and humble the exalted. We all know how much of an advantage it is to have high SAT scores and a good analytical mind. However, God has equalized things by giving spiritual advantages to the otherwise disadvantaged. It is frightening to think that intelligence, which is so advantageous in this world, might really be a huge spiritual disadvantage. God must have a mysterious and mischievous sense of humor, since those with the greatest faith are not usually the most intellectually minded.