Questioning God - 7 Reasons To Doubt - Christ City Church Dublin

We all have questions. Christians have questions about God or the Bible or their experience of God. And those that don’t believe in God often don’t believe because they feel the questions they have are unanswered… and therefore their objection to faith remains.

At Christ City Church we have always gone out of our way to ensure that sceptics are welcome. Additionally we have tried to provide an environment where people with differences of opinion can discuss, even debate, their views – without losing respect for the other, nor courtesy in the discussion. That’s what The Intro Course is all about and why we go down the pub after the service.

So for 7 weeks, we’re going to look at 7 of the biggest questions/objections people have to faith in God and see if we can bring some clarity on them, or at the very least promote healthy discussion. But firstly…

(1) Am I allowed to doubt?

Many people either feel that they shouldn’t doubt (because that shows they have weak faith) or they were never allowed to doubt. I remember speaking to a friend about the latter of these two a few years ago. He was raised in a church school and in his teenage years he started to have lots of questions about what he was being told – about God, science, abortion and suffering, and why Priests couldn’t marry and so on and so forth. He was told to shut up. When he persisted and was repeatedly ignored or silenced he wrote a letter to the headmaster asking if he could be allowed to absent himself from Religious Education as his questions were not even being considered, let alone answered. What was the school’s response? To make him sit at the back and not open his mouth. It is no surprise that he is sending his kids to an Educate Together school.

Whether your experience has been as severe as his, the feeling that it is wrong to ask the tough questions or the feeling that when you do ask them nothing of substance comes back, is one that many people experience. And even today (and I am sure even in our church!), Christians often feel it is wrong to doubt and to question. However when you look at the scriptures you find that the characters are often questioning God, and are often quite heated when they do. The book of Habakkuk is one such place, as the prophet wrestles with God and chapters 1 and 2 are God’s responses to Habakkuk’s questions. And the Psalms tell a similar story. In fact, even Jesus questioned God when on the cross, “My God, My God why…?”

So yes you’re allowed to doubt and ask questions. And yes you’re allowed to ask the feisty questions. And church should never be a place where you can’t ask “that question”. If there is an elephant in the room, God knows about it, so we might as well start discussing it!

(2) Just have faith

One of my colleagues at work often says that when he was growing up and there was no clear answer to his question he was told to “have faith”. This in some way suggests that faith and reason are opposed and falls nicely into Richard Dawkins’ idea of what faith is. He says:

Next time that somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: “What kind of evidence is there for that?” And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say*

And in another place he says:

I think that a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion**

In other words, he takes faith as standing in contrast to reason and evidence… though one has to ask: what is the evidence that faith is not based on evidence? He supplies no evidence for his claim! But aside from his inconsistency in providing no evidence for his claim, Dawkins sums up what many feel is the answer they are given when the questions get tough…”just have faith”. However, if you take John’s Gospel for example, the writer wants us to have reasons to believe. At the end of his book he says in chapter 20:30-31:

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John wants our faith to be based on evidence. So whilst there are points where we cannot grasp or explain or understand everything (something the scientist and philosopher also have to admit), and whilst having faith in God is something we are commanded to do, the Bible doesn’t set faith against reason or against evidence. In scripture faith is contrasted with works (we are justified by faith and not by works) and faith is contrasted to sight (we believe in him even though we do not see him). This leads me to my next point…

(3) True and Reasonable

In Acts 26 Paul is on trial before King Agrippa*** and has just retold his Damascus Road conversion and starts to talk about Jesus’ death and resurrection, at which point Festus**** interupts Paul and says:

“You are out of your mind, Paul!” he shouted. “Your great learning is driving you insane.”

To which Paul replies:

“I am not insane, most excellent Festus… what I am saying is true and reasonable. The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner.”

Paul wants to show that what he is saying is true and reasonable because it was not done in a corner. Jesus’ death and resurrection are history. They are things that have happened in front of 100s of eye-witnesses. And Festus mustn’t just dismiss them because (a) he doesn’t like them or (b) he hasn’t given the time of day to actually look into them. Paul wants to persuade people that what he believes is credible, and therefore he invites the challenge and the debate and is not swayed when people write it off… people he knows have never really investigated the evidence.

(4) Everyone is a doubter

Whilst Christians shouldn’t shirk the questions and challenges that those who don’t believe ask, we must make sure that people realise that everyone is on a level playing field, whether you’re a believer or not. Tim Keller in the introduction to his book The Reason For God puts it like this:

Even believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, sceptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts; however sceptical and cynical they may be, are really a set of alternative beliefs… my thesis is that if you come to recognise the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs- you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.

Let me give you three quick examples:

The Scientist cannot tell us what energy is… yet believes in energy because of the explanatory power that it gives us (and the same goes for consciousness). Just because we can’t fully explain them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
The humanist who denies God’s existence firmly wants to hold on to the idea of human rights… yet their atheism really gives them no grounds to protect humans. If humans are no more than a collection of atoms, nothing really more valuable than a tree, why should we object when people chop them down?
The person who says suffering disproves God… yet if there is no God suffering has no meaning and their anger is ill-founded, something I tried to explain in my response to Stephen Fry’s comments at the end of the Gay Byrne interview.

Yes the Christian has to give an explanation for their belief and show it to be reasonable. But so does the agnostic and the atheist. Everyone is in the same boat and everyone has a set of beliefs that, if put under the microscope, are often not as well argued as it first appears.

(5) 7 reasons to doubt

So here are the 7 topics we’re going to discuss:

Do all paths lead to God?
Has science buried God?
How can God allow suffering?
Isn’t the Bible unreliable?
How can a loving God send people to hell?
Isn’t christianity a straitjacket?
But the church has caused so many problems?
?

The series starts on 8th May and finishes on 19th June. We may do one extra week (and 8th topic) on 3rd July if further questions come up that we are not scheduled to look at (if so, we’ll run a poll on the question that people would most like to address).

There’ll be an opportunity each week to continue the discussion with a drink in the pub after the service, 6-7pm in The Bleeding Horse. Additionally we may put on additional seminars after the services, or a Q&A session if there is the demand.

(6) Prepared to give an answer

For those that were with us for our Aliens & Strangers series we looked at 1 Peter 3:15 which says:

In your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,

So even for those who do follow Christ and are convinced and convicted that he is the source of life and salvation, there is the command/calling to be prepared to answer the questions that people ask you as to why you follow him. Sometimes those questions will come because people are attracted to your faith (“e.g. wow… how do you have such joy in suffering?”) and sometimes they will come because people are hostile/perplexed to your faith (e.g. wow… you think the bible is the word of God?!). Whatever the context and motivation for the question, we must be prepared to give an answer, and give it with gentleness and respect. So this series will equip those of you who are Jesus-followers to give an answer. We’re encouraging City Groups to follow along the series with The Reason For God DVD Study Guide with Tim Keller

(7) A person not an argument

In 1 Corinthians 1 Paul is trying to respond to the Greeks who want rhetoric and the Jews who want signs and wonders, and Paul says… I give you a Christ crucified. This seemed foolish to the Greeks and weak to the Jews. Now we know Paul was a man of great learning and was able to persuade both Greeks and Jews that Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God. However, in the end he says I don’t present to you an argument or a set of beliefs; I present to you a person, someone to know and love. Someone who loved you so much that he came down to die in your place.

Now this also gets to the heart of many of the questions people have. When I speak to my friends about why they rejected God what I get back is an answer as to why they rejected the church (even my friend’s story of the R.E. class at school is more about his rejection of the institutional church, than God himself). Now we’re going to look at the failures of the church (week 7) but ultimately we must remember that Christianity is about a person, it’s not a philosophy or an argument. This is how C.S. Lewis once put it:

If there is a God who created the world and created us, I could no more “meet” Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. If Hamlet wants to prove there is a Shakespeare, he’s not going to be able to do it in a lab, nor is he going to be able to find Shakespeare by going up into the top of the stage. The only way he will know something about Shakespeare is if Shakespeare writes something about himself into the play.

Jesus is the central message of Christianity. It’s all about a relationship with God, not about adherence to a certain denomination or religion.

Questioning God – 7 Reasons To Doubt