Drew,

Don’t talk to me about puny. I know all about puny. I guess our brains are just not big enough to comprehend the truth of creation yet. Scientists seem very confident when they say it all started from a “big bang”, but how did the elements that caused the big bang come into existence? As far as I can see the jury’s still out on that one?

You mention the Bible, Drew. Well, I’ve been reading a bit – Genesis, to be exact. You mentioned in an earlier email that you believed this version of creation. It tells us some pretty unbelievable things, in my opinion. Are we expected to believe that the world was actually created in 6 days and a man, a woman and the world were created fully formed “just like that”? What about dinosaurs, neolithic man etc? How could Noah get all those animals in one boat? Are we expected to believe all this actually happened? Can you be a Christian without totally believing these things?

Jack Be Nimble,

You can certainly claim to be a Christian and not believe the incredible miracles in the Bible, but I would respond that your god is too small. If God spoke the world into existence ex nihilo (from nothing), is it too much for him to put animals on a boat or speak through a donkey (as found in the story of Balaam)?

I have a book entitled I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and it gives the interesting argument that it takes more faith and more believing on the part of the atheist/naturalist to claim that all that you see came from an explosion millions of years ago; that life has no purpose, rhyme or reason and the universe is one big cosmic accident; and that everything you see just happened randomly overtime without any intelligent being behind any of it.

Can you be a Christian without totally believing these miracles and things? Yeh, sure, but you’re not going to like it because the very act of salvation is a miracle. And, isn’t the act (miracle) of salvation by faith and grace alone the crux of Christianity? Indeed it is. I personally find it hard to believe that a perfect, holy, content God would take the time to rescue us rebellious people, but that doesn’t make it any less true that he did just the thing. I also find it hard to believe that we’ve been to the moon and that I came from my mother’s womb. The world is full of miracles.

Keep asking,
Drew