Have you ever faced a season where you were tempted to quit believing? Even the biblical writers offer real talk about this level of doubt. Just read Psalm 73.
For some in our day, the season came after yet another public relations campaign to offer a Christian leader a plausible — though false — cover up story to keep his job after most normal people would have lost theirs. I’ve lived through one of those. Or maybe it was the result of the politicization of faith that has caused a lot of younger folks to drop out of church in recent years. We’re all living through that.
Or maybe something less dramatic, just an ordinary drive, a stray thought, or the sudden, cold realization that you can’t really prove any of it. Not the resurrection, not the empty tomb, not the goodness of God in a world filled with child cancer diagnoses and senseless car wrecks. As someone whose been involved in apologetics for a long time, I can assure you there are good arguments for God, but I’d be lying if I said they chase away the shadow of every reasonable doubt.
Faith requires more of you than just ticking some data box. If I’ve learned in anything over the last thirty years in speaking and writing and doing apologetics, it’s that raw evidence isn’t enough to lead anyone to faith or to keep them there. Evidence always has to be interpreted, and interpreting is a role of the interpreter.
I bring this up because Elizabeth Bruenig, writing recently in The Atlantic, described her own version of interpreting — wrestling with belief and doubt while the New Atheists were touring the country making biblical faith look childish, and at her school, young earth creationist teachers making it look even worse. She argues that searching for scientific proof for God is a categorical error. Her piece is a response to and review of a new book that claims science has finally, rationally proven God’s existence.
But the real heart of her essay is something else: a moment at a bus stop years later, as a young adult, when she felt, without any warning or argument, that she was being seen by something vast. She was overwhelmed by a sense of the divine. She didn’t reason her way into faith that day. She just chose to believe what she felt, knowing full well she might be wrong. As she puts it, “Having faith is a vulnerable thing.”
That line has been sitting with me all week. Faith is vulnerable, isn’t it?
We like our faith buttressed. We want the archaeology to check out, the manuscripts to line up, and the fine-tuning argument to close the deal on our skeptical friend sitting at Starbucks. And there’s nothing wrong with evidence — I’ve built my life on the conviction that Christianity holds up to scrutiny. But evidence was never going to be the whole house. At best, it’s scaffolding, not the foundation.
If you build your faith entirely out of arguments that could, in principle, be answered by the next decade’s data, you’ve built something that can be un-built the same way. Bruenig points out that this is exactly how a lot of the last few centuries went: people staked belief on claims that better science later dismantled. The fix isn’t a better argument. The fix is admitting that faith was never meant to be argument-proof. It was meant to be a decision you make with your whole self, evidence included but not exhausted.
Here’s what I don’t hear often enough from either side of this debate: the skeptics don’t get certainty either. Richard Dawkins can’t prove a universe with no God underneath it any more definitively than the rest of us can prove one with. Everybody standing at that bus stop is taking a risk. The atheist risks being wrong about the silence. The believer risks being wrong about the voice. Neither of you gets to opt out of vulnerability by being smarter about it.
And yet — something keeps doing this thing to us, interrupting our errands and our midterms and our commutes with wind through the trees, or a powerful line in a poem that catches you off guard, or a song that undoes you in the car, and for half a second you feel looked at.
C.S. Lewis called this stab of longing “joy” and spent his life chasing down what it was pointing to. I don’t think that ache is proof in some scientific sense. You can’t peer-review it. But I don’t think it’s nothing either. I think the world is haunted. Not in a spooky sense, but in the sense that transcendence keeps leaking through the seams of ordinary life, and it keeps asking us what we’re going to do about it.
I love this takeaway from Bruenig’s experience: the reality of God implies something powerful about existence itself. “If God is real,” she writes, “then perhaps other things—goodness, righteousness, beauty—that are usually dismissed as matters of subjective experience might also be objectively real.” Maybe God will use the wind, the poetry, a song lyric, or some other stop-you-in-your-tracks moment to overwhelm you with his reality too. Like when Dorothy arrived in Oz, the world turns from black and white into living color.
Scripture doesn’t pretend this is a tidy business. Paul says we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7) — which is another way of saying we walk without the thing we’d most like to have in hand. Hebrews calls faith “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1), which is a strange kind of assurance: not proof, but trust that holds its ground in the absence of proof. That’s not a loophole in the Christian faith. That’s how it works.
So if you’re out there gripping the steering wheel some ordinary Tuesday, wondering whether the whole thing might collapse under its own weight — I’d just say this: you’re allowed to be unsure and still believe. You’re allowed to stand at your own bus stop, feel the wind, and choose to trust even though you can’t file it as evidence. That’s not a failure of intellect. It’s just what faith has always cost. And it’s a price worth paying for a God who, as far as I can tell, keeps showing up in the wind anyway.
For most of us, our faith didn’t begin as a response to hard evidence. And it’s not running on that kind of fuel now. But one day, it will end with sight. Until then, let those holy interruptions continue to point you towards the heavens.
