Do You Ever Doubt God Exists?

How a Harvard Agnostic Found Answers and Peace...

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The following is an excerpt from Al Nichols’ verbal testimony, Convincing Proof, minimally edited.

I met my wife, Melissa, a little over nine years ago. She was a Christ-follower, I was not. Obviously we had to have some serious conversations -- marriage was not something that either of us wanted to enter into lightly. It was important to me that she understood I may never believe. I didn’t want her to go into marriage predicated on something that might never happen and then be disappointed. But she did agree and I guess she had faith that God would draw me to himself.

Basically there were five big questions standing in the way…

1. Is there a God?
2. If there is a God, is He the God of the Bible or some other god?
3. Is the Bible even true?
4. Do I believe Jesus lived, died and lives again?
5. Am I really a sinner who needs saving?

God began to work on me, one question at a time…

Is there a God?

I’ve always loved nature. The ocean, the trees, everything about it. It’s just that I believed that we were the product of evolution.

One summer, several years before I came to Christ, I read the book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Dr. Philip Brand. It dealt with the wonders of the human body, Dr. Brand is a pretty amazing guy if you ever get a chance to read it. He’s the guy who discovered what leprosy is, in India. People knew about it, but they didn’t know how it worked, and he figured that out. Anyway, he was talking about the immune systems, the systems within the systems in the body, and how all that works, and as we continue to discover with medical science and how we will never fully understand it.

Then one time, driving back from men’s retreat, a doctor who goes to the church was telling me about the cone cells of the eye they confer no competitive advantage from the Darwinian sense, so how could those possibly just evolve all at once. All together, that put me over the edge on intelligent design. I thought somebody has to have figured this all out, and done it, and I guess you call that entity a god. So at that point I did believe there is a God.

If there is a God, is He the God of the Bible or some other god?

I didn’t have any good way to figure this question out, and then I turned to the Bible. That’s the only way that I could see to really resolve this question, by testing the validity of the Bible, the ‘source’ of information on the Christian God…

Is the Bible even true?

When I was a kid, one thing that was common in first grade was that the teacher would whisper a story to one person in the class and that kid would whisper it to the next one and you would tell it all the way around the room. By the end it was a totally different story, it had nothing to do with what the teacher had said by the time it was done. I thought, if you can do that in ten minutes, how could a story have remained true over thousands of years?

Then you look at the newpapers and T.V. news around us today, and look at how they spin stories instead of reporting; you know, sex isn’t sex, lying and immorality don’t matter as long as the economy is strong, and other wonderful things that were taught. History is written by the winners. It gets written differently depending on who won the war, whoever is in power, whatever the popular views are at the time. So with all that it didn’t seem the Bible could be true.

On the other hand, there are so many specific events recorded in the Bible, that were written at the time by people who saw them, and yet there was nothing written at the time that disputed any of the key events of the Bible. Why would that be? It really doesn’t make sense that somebody wouldn’t say, hey that’s not so, that’s not true, I saw it and you’re wrong… But there’s nothing surviving that says that. Certainly the Romans, and the Jewish leaders at the time had everything to gain by disproving the key events of Jesus’ sinless life, death and resurrection. If someone had ever seen Him doing something wrong, they would have talked or written about it. 

The disciples went to their deaths insisting that Jesus was who He said He was. If that were a lie, would you die to uphold a lie? Maybe it would be fun propagating it, but I don’t think you would go to your death for it. That really seemed unlikely to me.

Then there are the accounts of hundreds of miracles in the Bible, and none of those are disputed. There are independently written historical accounts with many of the same events in the Bible, and they’re consistent on all the material facts. This is the time before Google, before the library of congress. How could so many facts have been kept straight if they were a lie?

Finally, there are many of the aspects of Jesus’ life that, if you’re telling a story, you try to make it easy for people to believe if you’re selling it. But Jesus was humble, when people looked up to proud people. He didn’t have wealth, people looked up to the wealthy. He didn’t have physical power, people looked up to people with power. He was espousing equality, which wasn’t popular then either. So if you were going to lie, if you were going to make up a story that you wanted people to believe, why would they put in all those things that make it harder for people to believe? That didn’t seem to make sense to me either.

Considering it all together as a whole, I came to believe that the Bible is true.

Do I believe Jesus lived, died and lives again?

If you accept the Bible is true, you have to believe what it says, and it says the Bible is God’s Word, it wasn’t just penned by man. It says God is what the Bible says He is. It says Jesus is God’s son, He did die, He was resurrected, and He did submit to death to save us from our sins. While many of the sub-points are confusing and I know I’ll never understand them this side of heaven, the key points are very clear. How else, if you accept the Bible as true, do you explain the undisputed accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection?

Am I really a sinner who needs saving?

By human standards, I’m a pretty good guy.  That’s the reason I never felt what some people describe as a hole in their heart that needs to be filled with Christianity. I never felt that, and for so long I didn’t think I needed to be saved from anything. I’m a tremendous optimist, I’ve always felt that every day is a gift to be treasured, even before I realized that the giver of those days was God.

Once I started to compare myself to God, there was no question. I’m a sinner in need of saving, I don’t even like the comparison. To me it’s worse than a first grader competing with a pro athlete, the game’s rigged, there’s no way you can possibly rig that one. While I don’t like it, I do accept it, it’s in the Bible, and I do believe the Bible, and the Bible tells us that God does what’s best for us even if it’s difficult for me as a proud person to accept. I count this as just one of the mysteries that I’ll never fully understand this side of heaven.

Science still has a lot to explain, about the world as we know it, the natural world, and I think it’s silly to think one day, the scientists will say “ok, we’ve just got everything, no more research, we’re done.” You know that will never happen, but just because we don’t understand some things yet, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means we don’t understand them yet. To me it’s the same thing with the mysteries of God and the Bible, we don’t yet understand.

Thanks for seeking out this additional information on my story. If you would ever like to talk with me about any part of it, or share any of your story with me, please let me know, . It would be a honor and a pleasure to talk with anyone at anytime. God bless you.