Thanks for your comment. I apologize for my delay in getting back to you. I do believe in a God whom I can not see, though I can see a perfect reflection of Him in the life of Jesus Christ presented in the gospels. I can hear Him through His Word (the Bible), and I can communicate with Him through prayer. I hope that we can have an informed and graceful conversation about these things. Though we may disagree (I am certain that we do actually), I value your time and your thoughts. I will not discount them, but I will try to answer your questions.

Before I tackle some of your issues, let me give you a little background on me so you know where I am coming from. 12-15 years ago, I might have made an argument very similar to yours. I did not grow up in church. I only started going to church and learning about God when I was 30 because I felt like I owed at least that to my children. 15 years ago, I didn’t know what to believe. My journey has not been one pressured by external forces, but led by a sincere desire for truth.

Let me tackle your issues one-by-one in the order that you raised them. You allude to the face that prayer has been “scientifically proven not to work.” I would be interested in reading those studies as I have seen the positive effects of prayer in my own life and in the lives of those I know and love. That is, of course, not to discount these studies. I haven’t seen them. But, assuming they exist, I wonder what their definition of “work” is. I would gladly review them and give you my thoughts if you can point me to specific studies. My faith is not a tenuous faith but one that is strengthened and reinforced by questioning. It is a process that I go through constantly, and I would welcome the opportunity to have a look at these studies.

You asked (and I’m paraphrasing so please let me know if I got it wrong) “What makes me believe in the God of the Bible rather than all the other deities invented by men through the centuries?” My answer is simple, and it was my deciding factor in deciding to accept Christ when I was 30 because I had this same question. My study started first with the Bible – could I even believe it? It is our starting point for understanding who God really is, so if I couldn’t rely on it, I was out of luck. For a number of reasons, many of which I’ve written about here on the site, I came to understand that the Bible is reliable and represents the Word of God. If the Bible is true then, by definition the God of the Bible must be true and must be as He is described in that book. The “tipping point” for me came in my study of prophecy of the Bible. The Old Testament particularly is chocked full of prophecy of future events. These are not the types of prophecy you see from Nostrodameus (sp?) or other modern day psychics. These are very specific prophecies about future events including numerous prophecies about the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ written hundreds (and thousands) of years before Christ was born. Of all the prophecy in the Bible, NONE of it has ever been wrong. In fact, God himself sets this as a standard in the Bible when He explains that the test of a true prophet of God is whether or not they are ever wrong. The Bible says if they are wrong, they are not from God. Only God can predict the future with 100% accuracy. If you study other deities made up by the human mind, you will see that there holy books either do not include such prophecies or have been proven wrong by false prophecy. God, the God of the Bible, stands alone in that respect. That is what convinced me that He is real and the Bible is true. I would encourage you to take an honest look at these things and evaluate them for yourself. The Bible says to “test everything, hold on the the good.” The Bible invites you to test it, but you must do it honestly and with an open mind.

Finally, you mentioned the issue of light and creation. I don’t have a clear answer to your question. I have seen multiple explanations, and I believe one of them is likely true, but the Bible doesn’t say for sure so I don’t presume to offer a hard and fast answer to the question. I do know that God is light. The Bible says that those who choose to follow God will someday live in His glorious light. The Bible does not say what the light was when God said “Let there be light,” though it does seem that the verses are more focused on God’s creation of time (morning and evening) than the light itself. It does seems clear that the sun, moon and stars were created later perhaps as a means of replacing the light mentioned earlier. This later creation seems to have more to do with creating seasons which we understand to relate to the Earths position relative to the sun.

I hope that this answers some of your questions. I would love to continue the conversation. Feel free to post further comments here for discussion and thanks for visiting the site.

Yours truly,

Wayne

I appreciate how you are able to take such complex ideas and state them simply.

God bless you and keep doing your thing.

John

God created man in his own image. Sin entered the world through man’s disobedience to God and man has continued to sin against God ever since. Sin is defined as anything that we do against the will of God. Despite the fact that God knew this would happen before he ever created the world, he still (out of his love) opted to create man. In his holiness God cannot just accept or dismiss sin. As a just God, he hates sin and must demand justice from those who sin (that’s all of us). The point is not that God “magically dismissed sin” but that he had a plan before he ever created to the world to pay the price for our sin by coming to earth as a man and taking that sin upon himself by dying on the cross. All ew have to do to take advantage of this gift is to admit our sin to God, give him his rightful position as the Lord of our lives, and ask that he apply the payment he made on the cross to our lives. In his death, burial and resurrection, God satisfied the requirement for justice and provided the ultimate demonstration of his love. Far from “sick,” the cross is the moment in history that demonstrates both the fullness of God’s love and his mercy.

Let me start by saying God Bless you! Mothers do not get enough credit for everything they do and everything that they deal with.

My first reaction to your post was that this is actually a good thing. While it is unfortunate that your daughter is dealing with anxiety, the Bible tells us to work out salvation with fear and trembling, and it sounds like that is exactly what she is doing! I think that God wants us to be comfortable in our faith, but at the same time he wants our faith to continue to grow and mature (see versus re: meat vs. milk in Scripture). In order for something to grow and deepen, it must change, and sometimes that is not a comfortable process. I posted an article several weeks ago on teaching children how to think instead of just what to think:

http://blog.stocksohio.com/2009/06/19/22-ways-to-teach-kids-how-to-think-and-not-just-what-to-think/

The whole basis of that article is that we need to teach our children how to take the faith the grow up learning about and make it their own. Part of this process is working through doubts.

Secondly, let me reassure both you and her that these doubts are perfectly normal and nothing to be anxious about. All Christians have them, but many are so uncomfortable with them that they won’t admit it. I know that, as comfortable as I am in my faith, I still find the what if questions racing through my head from time to time. I’ve learned not to avoid them, but to embrace them. Instead of focusing energy on “putting the thought out of my head,” I focus my energy on figuring out the answer and the basis for my faith. I find that this exercise of intentionally questioning my faith, along with teaching, are the two things I do that lead to a deeper and stronger faith. As I’ve written elsewhere, we serve a big God and he can take the questions. He actually encourages them! The verse 1 Thessalonians 5:21 which says, “Test everything. Hold on to the good” was instrumental in my coming to Christ in the 1st place (http://blog.stocksohio.com/my-testimony/) so I am a little bit passionate about this.

As for what you can do, I have a couple of comments. Number 1, I think you’ve done a wonderful thing in trying to research the questions that you can’t answer about faith. Many parents, and teachers, try to fake there way through it afraid that admitting they don’t know the answer will somehow damage the child’s faith. Quite the contrary, I believe that working through such questions and finding the answer together teaches a child how to question, and consequently strengthen, their own faith. Secondly, many kids at the age need someone other than their parents to reaffirm things for them. If there is an adult that your daughter trusts, and that you trust will be saying the same things you would say, I would encourage you to have your daughter talk to that person as well. Sometimes they just need to hear the same thing from someone other than Mom or Dad. That person can be a Children’s Ministry worker from your church, a friend of the family, or anyone else that shares your values and beliefs.

In terms of encouraging your daughter, continue to take her back to the cross of Christ. Remind her that doubts are a ploy of Satan, and the Bible tells us to resist him. In other words, she should not flee from her doubts, but face them head on.

Now, on to her specific questions. I’ll start with the second because it is easier to answer. If God does not exist and Christ did not die on the cross and rise again, we are to be pitied more than other men (1 Corinthians 5:19). If there is no God, everything happens by chance, and we should live for today and live for ourselves. There are no moral absolutes and there is nothing greater than ourselves. There is no such thing as real love. We are all some sort of cosmic accident. I think this paints a picture of a sad world to live in. Thank God that is not the world we live in!

The first question she asks “how do we know God exists since we can’t see him?” is a very common question. To borrow from ReThink (a curriculum provider we use in my church), “faith is believing in what we can’t see because of the evidence of what we can see.” There are plenty of things we can’t see that we believe in and rely on every day. We can’t see the air, but we breathe it in and out to live. We can’t see gravity, but it keeps us from floating into space. Likewise, we can’t see God, but he sustains us in every moment. God gives us plenty of evidence of his existence. If you look at the world around us (stand by the oceans, pet a dog, hold a baby, fly in a plane, examine the clouds, look at the stars in the night sky) it is impossible not to see the fingerprint of God in all of it. Without going into the scientific details, the world we live in is so fine tuned for human life (i.e., if one little thing changed like the speed of the earth’s rotation, or the distance from the sun), it is mathematically impossible that it could have happened by chance. Furthermore, God has given us a book that tells us all about him. Not even Santa Claus has done that! The Bible has withstood critical analysis for thousands of year and comes up accurate every time. Archaeology has tested the Bible over and over again, and nothing has ever been found which contradicts an account contained in the Bible. Furthermore, God used prophecy in the old testament to prove the divine origin of his book. All of this taken together allows us to rely on the book that tells us the truth about our God.

Finally, I would encourage your daughter to pray. Have her take her questions to God. He can handle it, and our faith is a gift of grace from him in the first place.

I’ve rambled on, but I hope something in this reply helps you. I think that your daughter’s question is a great idea for a future “Questions Kids Ask” installment. Perhaps I will crystallize my thoughts a little more and post that in a couple of week after my Dark Week (http://blog.stocksohio.com/2009/07/13/im-going-dark-join-the-challenge/). I’ll keep you and your daughter in my prayers.

God Bless You,

Dad in the Middle

I think she is now learning the truth about all of these things she once thought were true…santa, easter bunny, greek mythology, etc. So, these doubts in her mind have really been very scary for her.

Thank you so much for any help, answers, etc. you can provide.

As promised, the next entry in this series is entitled “Why Did God Make Us?” You can find it here:

http://blog.stocksohio.com/2009/06/17/why-did-god-make-us-questions-kids-ask/

I hope it helps to answer your question!

Best Wishes,

Wayne
aka: Dad in the Middle
http://blog.stocksohio.com

Any abstract infinities (such as an infinite big and an infinite small) would exist within God’s creation and therefore be a subset of his infinite. He is the ultimate infinite of which there can only be one. See my reply to Jeff above.

Thanks so much for your comment.

Regards,

Wayne
aka: Dad in the Middle
http://blog.stocksohio.com

Thank you very much for your comment. It caused me to really think through my argument which I always appreciate. Let me take a shot at an answer. By way of disclaimer, I do not believe that we are capable of fully understanding the infinite of God. The limited understanding that we do have of infinite is given to us by the grace of God. That said, let me take a shot at answering your question.

I think that the real problem is one of definitions. There are two different types of infinities. There are mathematical infinities. This would be an abstract concept which postulates infinite sets of numbers (such as all odd numbers, all even numbers, all prime numbers, etc.) This mathematical type of infinite is not actually possible because it is always possible to add one more number at the end of any list. Another type of infinite would be an infinite of time or space – a physical infinite. It is actually impossible for any physical thing to be infinite because a physical thing is the sum of its parts, and you can always add one more part.
When we speak of God’s infinity, we are speaking not of a mathematical or spatial infinity, but of God’s infinite perfection. God’s infinite is a metaphysical infinity in that God’s essence is infinite. It means that all of God’s attributes are infinite. His love can’t be improved upon, his knowledge cannot be increased, etc. The infinite or God is not a quantitative infinite as much as it is a qualitative infinite.

The Bible refers specifically to three attributes of God as being infinite. Those are his knowledge (omniscience), his power (omnipotence) and his presence (omnipresence). Rather than supposing that “infinite needs to have a form or shape,” I am actually asserting that God is not limited by time and space. He is transcendent. He is greater than his creation and independent of it. He lives outside of time and space and is therefore not subject to it. God is spirit and can therefore be infinite without precluding our existence in time and space. In terms of your argument, it is possible for us to exist within God’s infinite essence without limiting that essence because our physical existence does not conflict with his essence. God’s essence is the ultimate infinite from which everything else proceeds. Given this definition, it is impossible for some other being or thing to have a similar infinite.

I hope that this clarifies the comment!

Thanks,

Wayne
aka: Dad in the Middle
http://blog.stocksohio.com

Thank you for your question. It is a very insightful question and logically follows from the discussion. The short answer is that we were made for God’s glory. That said, I like your question so much, that I intend to answer it in the next installment of Questions Kids Ask as I think many people who do not read these comments but read the articles would benefit from the answer. I hope to get that posted some time next week, and I will let you know here in these comments once it is posted. Thanks again for your question! God bless you!