Faith

I believe that there is one true and living God. The Bible is His word which informs us about origins, on how we are reconciled to Him, how we should live before Him, and how we should live with each other.

Faith is not necessarily blind. There are several reasons for my faith that I think are compelling and exclude narratives other than the Bible. I'm most concerned here with demonstrating good reason to choose what the Bible teaches over the materialistic worldview since materialism is the prevailing paradigm in modern western culture. I say that materialism prevails here and now because peer-reviewed science is widely considered the only objective source of information regarding the origin of the human race and what it means to be a human.

Here are my reasons:

The personal experience of consciousness and agency defies explanation by the laws of science. My experiences, thoughts, and decisions can not be the result of biochemical reactions in the brain. The fundamental processes of physics are either deterministic (classical physics) or random (quantum mechanics). Free will, sense experience, thought, right and wrong, and even emotions transcend necessity and chance.

Science ultimately fails to explain anything. The fundamental laws of physics (on which the rest of scientific reasoning relies) are descriptive, not prescriptive. The apple doesn't fall to the ground because of the law of gravity, we have the law of gravity because the apple falls to the ground. There must be a personal Prime Mover that acts out of free will to cause everything we see through our microscopes and telescopes.

The inevitable growth of entropy (a mathematical imperative) and the low-entropy state of the universe means the physical universe had a beginning. There must be an Eternal Person who created time, space, and matter.

Living organisms are too complex to be the result of random actions. Life requires multiple coordinated systems, and individual systems require multiple compatible parts. Such systems do not spontaneously emerge from a primordial soup, or even expand their complexity without intelligent intervention.

Finally, I choose the Bible over other theistic narratives because the Bible provides a satisfactory explanation of how God can be both perfectly just and perfectly merciful through the atonement offered by His Son, Jesus Christ.