Truth is messy, especially when it comes to religion. Many of us are genuinely trying to know the truth about God, Jesus, and life after death. We are aware that these questions matter; we cannot afford to get them wrong! But maybe you feel hopelessly stuck in your such for truth. It’s not just frustrating. It’s overwhelming. It’s also really, really frustrating.
I’ll never forget the first time I sat with an individual who (as far as I could tell) was genuinely seeking to know if Christianity was true. He was smart. He knew the arguments Christians use to defend their faith. He even thought they sounded pretty good. The problem: Arguments against Christianity sounded pretty good, too. He was stuck, unable to push through the endless sea of competing ideas to reach a decision.
If that person sounds like you, this article is for you.
Stuck in a Loop
I hate to break it to you, but there is no silver bullet to unglue you from the feeling of hopelessness in your search for religious truth. But if you’ve spent countless hours trying to find that “special piece of evidence” that will solve everything, it’s probably not that. Perhaps a better way forward is to change the way you think about this journey.
My side hobby in computer game programming has taught me a thing or two about stuck-ness. One of the common reasons a program will freeze is because a chunk of underlying code gets stuck in an infinite loop. The programmer’s job is to figure out what part of the code is endlessly repeating itself and fix the issue so the program can finish its task. Likewise, I have observed many people feeling hopelessly lost in their search for truth because they are stuck in some sort of “loop.” Let’s see if we can debug the issue.
Hopeless Loop 1: Misunderstanding of Certainty and Doubt
Some people have the impression “If I am going to believe in Christianity, then I must be absolutely certain about it.” The problem is that 100% certainty for anything is difficult (if not impossible) to obtain for almost any belief, including religious ones. Thus, we get caught in a loop, constantly trying to gain more certainty but never attaining the desired result.
Don’t misunderstand me: High-level confidence is important for the Christian faith (1 Cor. 1; Rom. 1:19–20, 8:16; Eph. 1:7–9). But Jesus’s own students experienced doubt (Matt. 11:2–3, 14:31–31; John 20:24–29). That never stopped them from making a decision to follow him. At the end of the day, I find that Christianity makes the best sense of this world, it does the best job answering objections against it, and it leaves the fewest questions left unanswered. This implies that there are still challenges! But if I’m right about this, wouldn’t it still be reasonable for us to accept Christianity, even with those remaining issues?
Hopeless Loop 2: What-Abouting Yourself to Infinity
Not long ago, I spoke on why God allows pain and suffering. While I don’t claim to have the perfect answer for this age-old question, I believe the content is sufficient to show that we can trust God has good reasons for allowing all kinds of pain and suffering, even if we don’t understand it completely. After I finished, a woman from the audience asked me, “What about when babies suffer?” I felt her discomfort with the question. Even still, the content of my talk addressed suffering in general, for all ages, so I began my response with, “Well, as I said earlier…” She seemed to follow along. Then she said, “But what about this…”
“Well, as I also said earlier…”
On and on we went.
It became apparent that she was stuck in a loop, what-abouting herself to infinity. Again, I’m sure my presentation wasn’t perfect, but her questions were not related to any imperfection of my presentation. They came from a desire to think through every conceivable scenario. I believe this approach is misguided. We can’t think through everything. And we don’t need to. We can think through the big stuff generally so that we can trust God with the specifics.
Hopeless Loop 3: But There’s So Much Out There!
I get it. No matter what you read, watch, or listen to, no matter how convincing it may sound, a part of you wants to suspend belief because of the mere fact that there’s so much out there. What if you’re missing something important?
The objection “but there’s so much out there” will always always always get you caught in an infinite loop. No matter what you learn and no matter how convincing it may sound, the so-much-out-there objection puts us back on the drawing board. If we want to get past that, we have to stop using that tired argument. Just as we can’t think through everything, we can’t know everything. But we can know enough to trust God with the stuff we don’t know.
Hopeless Loop 4: Too Many Smart People Disagree
Sometimes, the mere fact that disagreement exists is enough to paralyze us from coming to our own conclusions. This issue is a deep and complex discussion among philosophers called “peer disagreement.” It’s like the “so much out there” argument, but even scarier. I have wrestled with this one a lot myself, digging into the philosophical discussions and writing my own, somewhat technical paper on it and producing a two-part response video (Part 1, Part 2).
Let me just express one discovery from my research. Whenever someone disagrees with us, we often think, “Why does the other person not see things the way I do?” This is difficult to answer if the person you disagree with is just as smart as you are and working with the same evidence you have. But the Bible tells a different story: Sin clouds human judgment, and the Holy Spirit illuminates the truth. This gives the Christian thinker an edge because their worldview not only gives them reasons for belief but also reasons why others fail to believe those reasons. While this observation does not provide a knockdown answer for why Christianity is true, it helps to show the stunning coherence of the Christian worldview.
Moving Forward with Paul
These were four of many different loops we may find ourselves stuck in when we feel hopelessly lost in our search for truth. If you find yourself stuck in one or more of them, I encourage you to take a hard look at the “bad code” and give it a rewrite.
Before we wrap up, however, one point from the previous section deserves special attention. The Holy Spirit illuminates the truth. In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul talks about how knowledge of God is spiritual knowledge, and spiritual knowledge comes as a gift from God, the Holy Spirit. Of course, finding this verse in the Bible does not mean Christianity is true. But if Christianity is true, we will never come to realize its truthfulness unless it is gifted to us by God. This is why, as you continue to explore Christianity, do not neglect to fall to your knees, turn up your head, and make that age-old, tried-and-true prayer: “God, if you’re there, and Jesus is your Son, would you reveal that to me?”
Perhaps it’s time you start praying that prayer right now.
