I’m Not Convinced — Where Do I Start?

Maybe you’re open to the possibility that God exists.

Maybe you’re not.

Perhaps Christianity makes sense to people you respect, but you’ve never been able to make the jump yourself.

Or maybe you grew up around Christianity and eventually realised that you knew what you were supposed to believe without being sure why you believed it.

If that’s where you are, I don’t think the answer is to try harder to feel convinced.

Not being convinced is a real place to start

Christianity makes some enormous claims.

There is a God.

Human beings were created intentionally.

Something has gone wrong between us and God.

Jesus really lived, was crucified and rose from the dead.

And what happened through Jesus changes what is possible between us and God.

Those aren’t small things to ask someone to believe.

Wanting reasons is reasonable.

The Bible itself includes people asking questions, struggling with uncertainty and wanting evidence.

John the Baptist had publicly told people that Jesus was the one they had been waiting for. Later, sitting in prison, he sent people to Jesus to ask, essentially, Are you really the one?

Thomas, one of Jesus’ own disciples, was told that Jesus had risen from the dead and responded that he wanted to see for himself.

Jesus didn’t disappear because Thomas had questions.

He met him in them.

Questions don’t necessarily mean you’re moving away from faith.

Sometimes they are how you work out whether there is anything there worth trusting.

But it helps to know what you’re actually questioning

“I’m not convinced” can mean a lot of different things.

Maybe your question really is about evidence.

Is there any good reason to believe God exists?

Can we trust what we know about Jesus?

Did the resurrection actually happen?

But sometimes the question underneath the question is different.

If God exists, where was he when this happened to me?

Why should I trust Christianity after what Christians have done?

Why does Christianity say something I think is okay might actually be wrong?

Does believing in God mean rejecting science?

Those aren’t all the same question.

And they shouldn’t all get the same answer.

If somebody has been badly hurt by a church, giving them an argument about the beginning of the universe can miss the point completely.

If someone wants to know whether Jesus really rose from the dead, telling them to “just have faith” isn’t much help either.

So before trying to solve Christianity, it might be worth asking:

What is the thing that actually stops me believing it?

You don’t need absolute certainty

There are very few important things in life that we know with absolute certainty.

Most of the time we gather information, decide what we think best explains it, and then act.

When I get on an aeroplane, I don’t ask to inspect the pilot’s licence.

Usually I don’t even know their name.

I haven’t checked the maintenance history of the aircraft or interviewed the engineers.

But that doesn’t mean my decision to get on the plane is blind faith.

I have evidence.

I know something about the airline. I know something about its history. I know there are systems for training pilots and maintaining aircraft. I may have flown with them before. Other people have flown with them safely.

I don’t personally possess every piece of evidence.

I have enough to trust.

Christian faith is much closer to that than to closing your eyes and believing something for no reason.

Faith is not pretending to know what you don’t know. It is trusting what you have good reason to believe is true.

That doesn’t mean there are no unanswered questions.

I have some.

It means I have reached a conclusion about Jesus that is strong enough for me to trust him.

Evidence usually comes together rather than arriving as one knockout argument

People sometimes talk as though there should be one piece of evidence that proves God.

I don’t think it works like that.

There are different questions that point in the same direction.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why is the universe ordered in a way that makes life possible?

What do we do with consciousness — the strange fact that we don’t simply exist but experience ourselves as persons?

Why do human beings talk as though some things really are right or wrong, not merely popular or unpopular?

Why do meaning, justice, love and human value seem to matter to us the way they do?

None of those questions by itself forces somebody to believe in God.

People offer different explanations for them.

But Christianity says they belong inside a bigger picture: a universe created by God, populated by human beings who bear his image.

And then Christianity does something much more specific.

It points to Jesus.

Christianity eventually has to stand or fall on Jesus

This is where Christianity becomes unusually concrete.

Jesus lived in a particular place, at a particular time.

He gathered followers.

He taught publicly.

He made extraordinary claims about God and about himself.

And he was executed by crucifixion.

Then something happened.

His followers began publicly claiming that he was alive again.

Not that his ideas lived on.

Not that they felt his presence.

They said he had risen from the dead and that they had seen him.

Paul understood how much Christianity depended on that claim:

I find that remarkable.

The Bible does not say, Even if the resurrection never happened, Christianity still contains some lovely ideas.

It says the opposite.

That means there is something to investigate.

What do our earliest sources actually claim?

Why did Jesus’ followers become convinced he was alive?

What alternative explanations make sense of what happened?

What did Jesus claim about himself in the first place?

I believe Jesus really was raised from the dead.

But you don’t have to start by agreeing with me.

You can start by asking whether the claim deserves to be taken seriously.

Evidence doesn’t interpret itself

There is another thing worth acknowledging.

None of us approaches these questions completely neutrally.

A Christian can want Christianity to be true.

A sceptic can have reasons for wanting it not to be true.

Our experiences affect us. So do our assumptions, the people we trust and the things we’ve been taught.

That doesn’t mean nobody can know anything.

It just means we should be prepared to examine our own position as carefully as we examine somebody else’s.

There is one sentence that makes a genuine investigation possible from either direction:

I might be wrong.

I have to be willing to say that about what I believe.

And someone investigating Christianity has to be willing to say it about what they currently believe too.

Otherwise we aren’t really investigating.

We’re gathering reasons to stay where we already are.

Start with Jesus rather than trying to solve everything at once

You don’t need to answer every Christian question before you can investigate Christianity.

You don’t have to settle creation, suffering, sexuality, church history, miracles, heaven, hell, evolution and every difficult Bible passage before Tuesday.

Start somewhere manageable.

I would start with Jesus.

Read one of the Gospel accounts rather than only reading what Christians or critics say about him.

Ask fairly simple questions.

What is Jesus actually like?

What does he claim about himself?

Why do people respond to him the way they do?

Why is he killed?

What do the writers say happened afterwards?

Then follow the questions that genuinely bother you.

If suffering is your biggest problem with Christianity, investigate suffering.

If it is science, investigate science and faith.

If it is the reliability of the Bible, look at that.

If it is Christian morality, don’t pretend that isn’t the issue.

If a church hurt you, that matters too.

You don’t have to investigate someone else’s objection just because they think it should be yours.

Read people you disagree with

I think Christians should be willing to read serious criticism of Christianity.

I certainly am.

I regularly read people who disagree with what I believe, because if Christianity is true, serious questions and criticism are not something it needs to be protected from.

And if you’re sceptical, I’d encourage you to do the same in the other direction: read serious Christians rather than only people describing what Christians supposedly believe.

There are bad arguments on both sides.

There are also thoughtful people who have spent years wrestling with these questions and reached different conclusions.

Read them.

Check what they say.

Notice when somebody avoids the strongest version of the other side’s argument.

And wherever you can, go back to the source.

Especially with Jesus.

What if I investigate and I’m still not convinced?

Then don’t pretend.

God is not helped by you saying words you don’t believe.

Keep asking.

There may be something you have misunderstood.

There may be evidence you haven’t considered.

There may also be questions for which Christianity gives us part of an answer rather than everything we would like to know.

I don’t think being a Christian means every mystery disappears.

For me, that comes back to Jesus.

I believe the evidence gives me good reason to believe he lived, that the accounts of him deserve to be taken seriously, that he was telling the truth about himself, and that God raised him from the dead.

And because I believe that, I trust him.

That is faith.

Not believing because I stopped asking questions.

Not believing because somebody told me Christians aren’t allowed to doubt.

Trust based on what I have come to believe is true.

So where do you start?

With the question that’s actually yours.

You don’t need to manufacture certainty.

You don’t need to force yourself to believe.

And you don’t need to solve all of Christianity in one go.

Ask the question.

Look at the evidence.

Listen to people on both sides.

Be willing to discover that something you assumed was true isn’t.

And keep coming back to Jesus.

Because eventually Christianity rests on a surprisingly simple question:

Who was he?

If Jesus was simply another religious teacher, Christianity has badly overstated its case.

But if Jesus really was who he claimed to be — and if he really did rise from the dead — then the question changes.

It is no longer simply:

Do I find Christianity convincing?

It becomes:

Can I trust him?

And that is where investigation begins to turn into faith.