Deconstruction stories are all the rage right now. Apparently when something happens to damage your faith, the appropriate response is to share it with everyone you can so that your doubts can become their doubts. So it seems I am obligated to tell my story for all the world to hear.
The source of my troubles was, as is so often the case, the internet. Debating skeptics on the web can be fun and educational, but you run the risk of one of them actually making a good point. The vast majority of the alleged contradictions and errors skeptics claim are in the Bible are simply passages taken out of context, maybe metaphors that use different pictures to describe the same thing, or places where cultural biases make us concerned about details that simply didn't interest the original audience.
But then someone presented me with a contradiction that couldn't be just flicked away. These two passages clearly seemed, when read in context, to explicitly contradict each other on a simple matter of fact.
My world was rocked. If these two passages contradict each other, then at least one of them is wrong. If one passage in the Bible is wrong, then more could be. Which ones? How do we know which ones can be trusted? Can any of them be trusted? Maybe the whole thing really is just make-believe.
Our faith is built on the Bible. If the Bible isn't trustworthy, then all of Christianity is in doubt. I had to stare the question in the face: Can I be a Christian anymore? What can I believe?
It became necessary to deconstruct, to tear all of my beliefs down to find out what, if anything, I could stand on.
Of course, no one deconstructs their faith without reconstructing it. Everyone believes something. It's only a question of what. What would I rebuild upon?
OK, full disclosure: These events occurred in the late '90s. Sorry if that ruins the drama: My faith obviously survived. But how? To answer that, we have to look back even farther, to the mid '90s.
There were three events, moments really, all happening within a year, that set the stage for so much in my life to come. The first was in my college astronomy class. I loved the class, but only one thing still stands out in my memory: The professor told us that there should be no matter in the universe today. The Big Bang produced nothing but energy; when that energy cooled enough to create matter, it should have created the same amount of matter and antimatter. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they come in contact, so there should be no matter left in our universe. The fact that there is means, for some inexplicable reason, slightly more matter was created than antimatter.
The second was in a guest lecture at my university by the famous Stephen Hawking. He was a great speaker, even though he couldn't speak. (He was very good with his speech synthesizer.) I still remember a couple of his jokes, told in that robotic voice. I also remember that he said, "If the universe's rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even 1 part in 100,000,000,000,000,000, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size. If it were just that much greater, the matter in the universe would not have collected together; there would be nothing but hydrogen in the universe."
The third was in my advanced mechanics class. We were talking about gravity. The gravitational force scales as one over distance squared (1/r2). The professor told us that there was no particular reason why it had to be r2, but if it were not an even whole number, stable orbits would not be possible, and if it were not 2, the behavior of gravity would be so complex that we would never have been able to figure it out. There was a guy in my class who was ... the physics major version of a biker. He was the smoker/drinker. He was the cynic loaner. In the silence that followed the professor's statement, this guy spoke for all of us when he said, "Gee, I feel like I need to go to church now."
(At this point in my life, I had never heard of apologetics, much less the argument for God from design (aka the teleological argument). But because of these three events, I was primed for it. When I encountered it, my reaction was something along the lines of "oh, of course!")
So, just a couple of years later, when I had to answer the question "what can I believe," I whittled my beliefs back as far I could go, but I ran into something I couldn't get past: There is a God. I could not look at the laws of physics and not see a mind behind them.
If there is a God, then a whole world of possibilities opens up, including that he may choose to reveal himself to humanity. That let me pause, take a deep breath, and keep looking for answers. It took many weeks.
I'm not going to go into what the alleged contradiction was. It's immaterial. As it turns out, Josh McDowell had addressed it in one of his many books. His answer didn't seem like a perfect solution, but it was plausible enough. Over time I've come across a more satisfying answer to that "contradiction."
More than that, I learned that there's nothing new under the sun. People have been studying the Bible for 2000 years. No one's going to find anything new today. Dan Brown, Bart Ehrman, and Richard Dawkins can only put a new spin on something the Church dealt with centuries ago.
Another thing I've learned is that the Christian Faith does not depend on an inerrant Bible. It depends on a risen Savior. And as Gary Habermas has ably shown, you do not need inerrant, inspired, or even historically reliable gospels to prove that Christ rose from the dead. If Christ is risen, then the gospel is true.
The problem is that we don't do a good job of sharing these things.
I thank God that those three physicists planted those seeds in me. Most people don't get that. Where would I be, who would I be if they hadn't provided that?
Lots of people today are running into intellectual and/or emotional issues with their faith, and they're basically floundering alone in the dark because they haven't been prepared, haven't been equipped. One recent high-profile "de-convert" said, "How many miracles happen? Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place, all ‘coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it." We do talk about it. We talk about it all the time. Whole books have been written about some of these things, but many people don't know that. They don't know where to look. And we never prepared them, never told them that their "childlike faith" was going to need to grow up.
We, the 21st Century Church, have to do better. Jesus didn't tell us to get little kids to pray the sinner's prayer. He told us to make disciples. It is up to us to equip the next generation to take the gospel to the world.
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