ecn-pa:scott (03/30/83)
I had a *lot* of questions to which I wanted answers before I would become a Christian. Some of them were important (and also classics). For example, (and I'm *not* trying to start a discussion about this) if God is fair, then how come people who never get to hear the gospel go to hell without even a chance to be saved? That's only one of a whole bunch of questions that I had. So what do I mean by breaking through "all that intellectual mung"? Well, first, and this one took me awhile, I had to get to the point where I realized that God's smarter than I am. In other words, just because I don't currently understand something doesn't mean that it can't be true. There have been things that at some time I just plain didn't see how they could be true. Some of those things I now understand. Second, I realized that a lot of the questions were a smokescreen. I really enjoyed asking Christians questions that they couldn't answer and then watching them squirm. I didn't really (*really*) care about the answers. Deep down, I suspected (and I was right) that if I became a Christian I would have to do a lot of changing, and I didn't want to. The questions that I had were a convenient way of keeping God at arms length. Third, it finally got through to me that the only one capable of answering the questions that I had was God, and that I was being kind of silly. what I was saying, in effect, was, "Okay God, I don't believe that you're out there, but if you were, what would be the answers to these questions?" It came down to a choice. I could choose to give up on my questions and forget being a Christian, or I could, based on the evidence that I'd already seen, become a Christian and hope that after I did my questions would be answered. I had seen enough of the lives of Christians to know that I couldn't just dismiss it. (I'm talking about real people that I really knew, not people on television. That bothers me as much as it bothers you.) So I chose to become a Christian. Since then, some of my questions have been answered. Some haven't. I believe that there are good solid intellectually satisfying answers. I just haven't gotten that far. If you had to understand all of sub-atomic physics in order to start as an undergraduate in physics, you wouldn't get very far. You may or may not end up understanding it by the time you graduate depending on what's covered during your four years, but you're *surely* not going to refuse to even look at Newton- ian mechanics because you don't understand what a pi muon is.