Evidence for intelligent design in nature may be clear to you, while other matters relevant to faith remain far more perplexing. Our physicist colleague Brian Miller talked with Jana Harmon on the eX-skeptic podcast, in a very personal conversation, and offered a helpful analogy. He agreed that, for him, there are “tensions” and “unanswered questions.”
But here’s the difference. When you have, let’s say, a magnifying glass and you use that magnifying glass to see the small print on your medicine bottle, what happens is that [with the] magnifying glass, what’s in the center is very clear.
What’s in the center makes a lot of sense, but in the periphery, there’s fuzziness, there’s uncertainty.
So, when I look at the Christian faith, the center claims of the faith are very clear…. But on the periphery, the secondary issues, there’s still complexity because God is [so far] beyond us.
The key is the blur at the edges versus the blur everywhere. Dr. Miller continues:
When you look at the world through a different lens, through the materialist lens…, it’s not just the periphery that’s fuzzy. It’s the center that’s fuzzy. There’s inconsistency everywhere.
So what I find is that my faith gives me clarity of reality, but there are unanswered questions and that’s fine, and I think that’s deliberate.
Why is it there are so many denominations? Well, part of it is that God is beyond our comprehension and people are in all sincerity trying to explain God the best way they can. Yet God is so beyond us that we won’t get everything right. We can’t fit everything into a simple puzzle.
We sure can’t fit everything in that way. Some details aside, I think many people will find that an enlightening way of looking at faith.