The above cartoon from David Hayward makes a wonderful point. And I love how different ideas about truth, including ultimate truth, can be substituted to bring the point home in specific contexts.
Reality is stronger than you. Reality can handle your questions.
God is stronger than you. God can handle your questions.
But the clincher for this to work in practice is this: it is crucial to love truth more than creeds, worldviews, and beliefs. If the world is revealed as ugly where you thought it was beautiful, or beautiful where you thought it was ugly, you need to pursue the evidence. If the concept of a deity you hold to cannot be maintained after close examination, you must let it go, confident that you are at last relinguishing an idol. If your faith was in that idol, then you may describe that as “losing your faith.” But you are surrendering a false god in order to discover a much larger Reality, one that is not only stronger than you and able to handle your questions, but one that your questions will never manage to exhaust or explore fully within your lifetime, if ever.
Of related interest, see the account of one Christian’s wrestling with the evidence for evolution and for young-earth creationism on the BioLogos website. Its author, Stephen Blake, writes:
Squirmy though it made me, I accepted that as in any situation, getting to the truth meant being willing to have my presuppositions challenged – even dismantled (Proverbs 18:17).
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In