Imagine yourself being questioned by a friend or family member in the following way:
“Isn’t ‘faith’, by definition, believing something without evidence? Is it possible to become a Christian because of the evidence rather than in spite of the evidence?”
Here’s a response I gave to Bobby Conway at the One Minute Apologist:
“Let me be careful how I answer. This is what I experienced, so I can explain to you from my perspective. It’s clear that God does something first; and he called me to this. He removed the hostility I had. Because I’m going to tell you, my hostility was not really evidential resistance at first; I simply didn’t want there to be a God that would change my life in a dramatic way. I was happy being my own god. The ‘god of Jim’ was big enough in my world. I was fine with that.
And the ‘god of Jim’ also got to decide what was right and what was wrong. It was really a volitional position I was in. I had a certain dislike of God; I didn’t want to even look at the evidence fairly.
But I think what God does first is he opens the door so the evidence can be seen. If you’d approached me with this evidence a year earlier, I don’t know that it would have had the same impact on me.
I think what happens is at some point God does something in our lives to move us to a place where we can see the evidence. It’s all His evidence anyway.
God uses evidence as a means. It’s the means by which God introduced me to the gospel. I’m a detective; I’m a skeptical detective. That’s who I am. I had to enter through the evidence.
God uses evidence as a means. It's the means by which God introduced me to the gospel. Share on X
The great thing about my belief in Christianity is I’m not finding evidences I have to ignore. There’s not a bunch of evidence on the table I have to ignore in order to accept this.
It turns out God is the God of truth. He called me and then provided me with all this evidence to verify the very things the gospel authors claimed. It’s all God’s world. And it turns out everything in scripture resonates truly with everything outside of scripture. The Bible describes the world the way it really is.
And once I realized this was the case, it made a sense for me. God does something first, and then I’m able to use the evidence God provides to make a decision and make the case to others.”
For more conversational response to the objections of atheists, please visit our “Quick Shot” section.
J. Warner Wallace is a Dateline featured cold-case homicide detective, popular national speaker and best-selling author. He continues to consult on cold-case investigations while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He is also an Adj. Professor of Christian Apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, and a faculty member at Summit Ministries. He holds a BA in Design (from CSULB), an MA in Architecture (from UCLA), and an MA in Theological Studies (from Gateway Seminary).