Unanswered questions, unshaken faith

When I was in seminary, one of the areas of service I participated in was working as a writer and “letter answerer” for gotquestions.org, which is a great online resource dedicated to providing biblical answers to spiritually related questions. Because my focus in seminary was initially apologetics, I ended up penning some of their in-defense-of articles on why Christianity is true, along with other related posts that served to validate the Christian faith.

When I started answering some of the individual inbound inquiries to the ministry, I noticed a repetitive pattern among a few of them.

Believers new to the faith had questions presented to them that they couldn’t answer. Some were more intellectually centered, such as why does evil exist, what about evolution, was everything created by God in six literal days, etc. Others were more emotionally driven: how could God let this happen to me?

Before long, as the questions without answers started to pile up, they got to the place where they weren’t just questioning some things; they started to question everything. And at that point, they confessed they were a stone’s throw away from completely bailing on the faith and were looking to me for help.

No pressure!

Ever been there? I’ll admit I’ve headed in that direction a few times, which is why I was able to toss those believers the lifeline they needed — something for which a number of them expressed thanks. Let me share with you what I told them.

Thinking about Christianity vs. doubting it

If you haven’t already, you’ll have questions come up about the Christian faith that aren’t easily put down. Maybe you have a few that are rolling around in your head right now. And that’s OK.

Unanswered questions cause you to think about the faith, which is a good thing. What you don’t want is for issues to build up so that they lead you to doubt Christianity. In his book, Hard Questions, Real Answers, Dr. William Lane Craig makes this distinction between doubt and thoughtful examination of belief:

“When I was an undergraduate at Wheaton College, an attitude was prevalent among the students that doubt was actually a virtue and that a Christian who did not doubt his faith was somehow intellectually deficient or naive. But such an attitude is unbiblical and confused. It is unbiblical to think of doubt as a virtue; to the contrary, doubt is always portrayed in the Scriptures as something detrimental to spiritual life. Doubt never builds up; it always destroys. How could the students I knew at Wheaton College have got things so totally reversed? It is probably because they had confused thinking about their faith with doubting their faith. We need to keep the distinction clear.”

When it comes to unanswered questions, keep in mind that every scientist has them about the science with which they’re engaged, and you can expect the same with theology (once referred to as the queen of the sciences). The reason the scientist in another discipline doesn’t jettison their science is that there are foundational principles and beliefs that keep them anchored and drive them to learn more about their field of study.

The same is true of Christianity and us. And this is what I told those writing into gotquestions.org who were fearful that their faith was about to fail.

I relayed to them the important distinction between essential and non-essential doctrines in Christianity. The essential ones are deal-breakers, while the non-essential ones are not.  

And what are Christianity’s key essential doctrines? Although believers will differ in what those are, I doubt many will argue that there are two foundational bedrocks (on which I’ve written extensively elsewhere) that anchor us to our “science” of Christianity:

1. God exists.
2. Jesus lived and rose from the dead.

Simply put, if those two doctrines are true, then Christianity is true and anything opposed to it is false. End of story.

But what about questions like the age of the earth, the problem of evil, and so on? Solid answers for them exist because the aforementioned two essential doctrines are true. They may take a while to settle in our minds and hearts, but they don’t trainwreck our faith during our journey. Just like a scientist in the natural sciences keeps researching and learning to overcome their questions, so do we, all the while never forgetting the foundational reasons that keep us grounded in the faith.  

In a recent podcast, Dr. Craig relayed an account about a friend of mine — Dr. Michael Licona — who approached his theological mentor about lingering questions that wouldn’t leave him alone:

“My colleague Michael Licona, who is a congenital doubter, once told me a story of how he was sharing some of his doubts with Gary Habermas. Habermas simply retorted, ‘Mike, do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead or not?’ Since Mike had thoroughly studied the historicity of the resurrection, he replied unhesitatingly, ‘Yes, I do.’ Gary said, ‘Well, then … ?’ Mike insisted, ‘But what about ... ?’ And Gary repeated, ‘Did Jesus rise from the dead or not?’ The point is that if we have good evidence for the truth of the resurrection and thereby for the person of Christ, then doubts based upon highly speculative questions can be overcome.”

Very true. When you focus on the essentials and keep learning, eventually you’ll get to the place that J. Warner Wallace describes:

“As a theist and as a Christian, I am far more comfortable with my unanswered questions than I used to be as an atheist. My questions are fewer and less foundational. They are related more to non-essential issues than critical, core claims. The evidence I have points me in a given direction, and the gap between what I have and what I would like is much shorter than it used to be.” 

One last thing: remember that doubt is never purely an intellectual problem but is part of our spiritual warfare. The “has God said?” enemy showcased in Genesis 3 is relentless in his attack against our faith and is dedicated to stealing, killing, and destroying (John 10:10), so it’s our responsibility to put on the full armor of God (Eph. 6:11) and resist his attacks on our heart and mind.  

When you do that, you’ll have unshakable faith even in the midst of unanswered questions.