Overview

If you are considering these ideas, you will surely have doubt. You will have doubt and skepticism as you are exploring the idea. But, I promise, you will have doubts even after becoming a believer. Every sane person would and should! After all, we live in this very “real”, tangible, physical world.

So, it’s almost like we have to have “two minds” about these ideas. On the one hand, I have to remember to put gas in the car and pay my taxes, but on the other hand, we are living in this reality where good vs evil is playing out all over the place via the supernatural world, and the Good God wants me to use my free will to choose His side?! That sounds like a plot from a sci-fi movie – so, how do you reconcile this?

This was a big problem for me, for decades. The problem was that when doubt crept it, I didn’t really have a solid worldview that stopped the freefall. So, I’d regress back to my comfortable, physical world. I would fallback to a worldview where I simply trust the world around me; what I can see with my eyes.

How real is the world?

Before we start attacking how “real” this “God stuff” is – how real is our physical world? We put so much stock in our “reality”, but how real is it – really? Without sending anyone into an existential crisis, let’s just dip into a few topics.

Solipsism

How do you know other people, are real? I mean, they seem real, but how could you ever KNOW there is a person in there? Maybe you are living in a universe all by yourself and those people are just Non-Playable Characters (NPC’s), like in a video game. Maybe you are the god of your own universe, and those other people on this planet just exist to not-make you feel lonely. This philosophy is called solipsism, where your own reality is the only thing that is “real”, but you can’t even prove that. You simply experience it, and assume it’s what you think it is!

There are all sorts of philosophies around the nature of our existence, and they all get weirder than that. The concept of life “just being life” as we experience it, is one of many, many viewpoints.

Visible Light

“I can look around and see the world around me, so that makes it real!” you’ll tell me. But here are just a couple of things to consider:

Color does not exist

Color, as you know it, is simply light of a different wavelength bouncing off things. The perception of “red” or “blue” is purely a figment of your brains perception. So, color – which is so fundamental to our understanding of the world, doesn’t exist in reality – it’s entirely in our brains. It’s just the way that our brains show us that there different wavelengths being reflected, and we perceive that as color – but “red”, objectively, does not exist.

We see a minuscule spectrum of reality

Similar to the color issue above, in this reality that we’re in, we experience just a ultra tiny spectrum of all of the wavelengths that exist. There are orders of magnitude wave lengths in BOTH directions, that we can’t perceive:

What other elements of this physical reality exist, which we can’t even perceive?

Physical matter is almost completely empty

First, think of that stone or wooden table near you. That is made of atoms. Atoms are not hard spheres. They are “fuzzy quantum probability clouds filled with electrons spread out into waving cloud-like shapes called ‘orbitals’.” (source) But worse is that these fuzzy clouds are really far apart from each other and they are weird!

1. Density – The volume of an atom is 99.9999999999999% nothing. (source)
2. Atomic Dimensions – If the nucleus of an atom was the size of a golf ball, the electrons would be about 1.5 miles away (2.5km) (source).
3. Scale – For the most dense, cold objects, those atoms can touch – meaning their electron clouds would come close to touching. Which means the most dense thing you know, if the atoms were the size of golf balls, those atoms would be 1.5 miles away from each other, made of 99.9999999999999% nothing (13 nines, there). They are much farther away as you warm up from absolute zero, and you start talking about regular objects.

The point here then is: the thing that seems so “real” to you, like that table next to you, is made of up atoms that are like miles away from each other (at that scale), and then the atoms themselves, aren’t made of anything solid. They are clouds of energy. That is what that table is made of!

So how “real” is this life we’re living in, after all? It’s weird, to say the least.

Dimensions

This reality that we think is so “real”, is actually quite limited compared to what is possible. We live in 4 dimensions. We have 3 physical dimensions (up/down, left/right, forward/backward), plus a dimension of time that appears to move in one direction.

If you’ve never seen it, the late Carl Sagan explains masterfully the concept of how multiple dimensions work. The result for me is realizing that since we are limited to 3 physical dimensions, what is going on in the potentially, up to 11 dimensions that presumably exist? This is about :10 minutes but worth your time:

More about facts & logic

Hopefully you get the idea that this super-solid, physical, real reality that we live in, is really much weirder than we realize on a typical day. With that in mind, how do we reconcile this spiritual world view? Also, considering the zany reality that we live in, does this “God stuff” still sound so far-fetched?

For me, this is why those books I discussed over in Facts & Logic were so significant, and likely would be to other people that might approach this topic from this same direction. These books gave me a “backstop” of reinforcement. What I mean is, when doubt sets in, my brain starts questioning my worldview, and I instantly remember things like:

• Based on the concepts of logic, we know a created universe must have a creator.
• Based on the concepts of logic, we know that creator necessarily must live outside of our time and space, since He created time and space.
• If the Creator lives outside, we can assume the Enemy lives within these space-time limitations, which means that Enemy is the inferior.
• Secular history shows an amazingly-compelling history of the New Testament which leads right back to Jesus’ day. The New Testament is the most well-document writings in all of the ancient world, by an enormous margin.
• If the New Testament (the writings) are valid, even by secular standards, they constantly reference and validate the Old Testament.
• The Old Testament gives an unbelievably accurate view of the world, has countless prophesies, etc.
• That same Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures plus the New Testament explain, logically and in great detail the nature of our existence, the offer that is being made by both God and the Enemy.
• Those writing were so perfect, and so perfectly cross-referenced that the smartest minds who have ever existed on this planet, have been pouring over this book for thousands of years. We STILL find new meaning and cleverness in it, to this day. If this was a hoax, it was perpetrated -literally- by the smartest human(s) who ever lived.
• This Creator God isn’t a “God of the Gaps”, as atheists call it because unlike other gods of this world, whom we passively ascribe attributes to, this God actually introduced fundamentally new things like “love thy neighbor” in a time when humans were almost feral. This was in a time where murder, rape, pedophilia, bestiality were commonplace and accepted – where humans were basically animals. Not only did this crazy teaching survive for 2000+ years, it fundamentally influenced the entire Western world including our laws, justice, and governments. No other god (lowercase “g”) did that or came close to doing that.
• Irreducible Complexity exists. Things like the flagellum are fundamentally unexplainable with the theory of evolution. In the same way that a mouse trap requires a wood board, a spring, and a metal snap to be useful, a design like that cannot be explained by evolution. Those 3 elements are useless on their own, it’s only when they are combined intelligently that they turn into a new, 4th thing. There are several notable, observable things like this in nature.
• Macro evolution (species spontaneously turning into other species) has never been observed, and there is not a single shred of evidence in all of science that it happened. It’s a baseless “guess”.
• Etc., etc., etc.…

In my head, I have a long, long list of things like this – all gotten from these books or from the Bible, itself. My point is, nowadays when a thought of doubt enters my head, it’s quickly quashed because my beliefs are built on a very solid foundation of things that are either factually provable, or they simply make the most logical sense.

Again, this isn’t a comprehensive list by any means at all, but I kind of think of my foundation of understanding, to be something like this:

When I’m faced with doubt, I start to review all of things which I already spent a lot of time on, vetting and verifying. THAT, is how I eliminate doubt, as soon as it shows up.

Recommendations for dealing with doubt

In the end, my recommendation for you is to invest the time to get educated – both in these secular writings, and in the Bible itself. Consider starting with those books over in Facts & Logic, and actually get a Bible, and/or download a Bible app on your phone.

If you are new to reading the Bible, start reading in the book of John to get started!

Really, this concept is the whole point of this website. If you are ignorant on a topic, then you can’t effectively defend it – even from yourself. So, take the time, learn about it. What I was surprised to find is that this education gave me a very solid “response” to when those thoughts of doubt would creep in. As I’ve mentioned, this “whole God thing” is not some flimsy topic, it has an amazingly solid foundation, if you just invest the time to evaluate it.