By the time I was in high school, I had heard many sermons on how "you can know today with absolute certainty that you are saved" — but I never had that kind of assurance. Many good men through the ages have come to different conclusions about who Jesus was, or whether God exists at all — wasn’t it rash to be certain about such things? In my church, it was enough to know that "God said it, and that settles it." Where did God say these things? "In the Bible." But how do we know that the Bible is true? "The Bible is true because God says it’s true." Well, I thought, at least that’s helpful to people unfamiliar with the concept of circular reasoning.

In college, the questions grew more urgent. Losing your faith in college is a cliché, and despite my nagging doubts I was not one to join the crowd of outspoken atheists who rejected their church upbringing. One night at an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship meeting, a student told me that he could never doubt his faith. "I know Jesus as a person," he said, "just like I know you. I don’t doubt you, and I could never doubt Jesus." I had to admit that I was far more certain of that student’s presence than I was of the Son of God’s. If such Christians were right, I concluded, I was probably one of the unlucky multitude predestined to Hell.

Reluctant to give up on Christianity too quickly, I determined to read through the Gospels with an objective eye and decide for myself whether Jesus truly is the Risen Saviour. I wanted to read them as if for the first time, not filtered through any church dogma. The word "Trinity," for example, was not in the Bible; so I tried to approach the text as though I’d never heard of it. Reading the Bible in this way only increased my confusion — the slight discrepancies in between the various accounts (such as the different genealogies of Matthew and Luke) and the difficult passages (such as Jesus telling a crowd that some of those present would not taste death before he returned) left me more uncertain than ever.

Around the same time, I read Herman Melville’s monumental work, Moby Dick. Though literally about the hunt for a great white whale, Moby Dick really concerns the quest for eternal meaning — that is, God. Throughout the novel, characters come to widely divergent interpretations of the same sensory data — none can see objectively, for they are all tainted by their beliefs and past histories. In one chapter, Ahab nails a golden doubloon to the mast, and the markings engraved on the coin mean something different to each crewmember. All meaning is subjective, Melville suggests. Confronted with an object — be it a whale or a coin — humans will come to different conclusions. In the end, Ahab’s hopes for finding meaning in the universe sink along with the Pequod — and after reading Melville's novel, I felt my hopes sinking too.

It became apparent to me that the Bible was like Ahab’s doubloon. Reading it through our own individual eyes, it will mean something different to every person. At one InterVarsity prayer meeting, a student said, "I prayed for a car and God gave me one." I considered the raw evidence: this fellow prayed for a car, looked in the newspaper, found one he liked, then bought it. Was Providence necessary here? If he hadn’t prayed, would he not have found the car? No, that’s simply one possible interpretation of events. As in Moby Dick, everything is subjective.

Well, almost everything. Reason and logic, I knew, could not be subjective. The world is not random and purposeless — experience and commonsense prove otherwise. In a world without order, without spirit, without a God, my own thoughts would be no more than the result of senseless chemical reactions in the brain. Logic would be illogical. All comprehension would be illusory. There’s one thing most skeptics aren’t skeptical about: they don’t question their ability to rationally examine the evidence and reach a conclusion (of unbelief). I was too skeptical of my doubts to be an atheist. But when it came to questions like the truth of Gospels, finding God’s will, and whether God answers prayer, I saw no way to find the answers. I kept praying, but my prayers were like shots fired into the night — I had no feeling that anyone was listening.

During my junior year, I began reading C. S. Lewis, who was once called "the apostle to the half-convinced." His apologetic writings were intriguing — particularly his slim book The Abolition of Man. But it was his children’s fiction series, The Chronicles of Narnia, that impressed me most.

In the first book of the Chronicles, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, four children enter the magical land of Narnia through a wardrobe in an old mansion. Lucy, the youngest, is the first to discover Narnia, when she is transported there while hiding in the wardrobe during a game of hide-and-go-seek. Upon her return, she tries to convince her siblings that she has really been to another world; but when she shows them the wardrobe, the magic is gone and its back is solid. Yet a few weeks later, when she and her brother Edmund are again playing in the wardrobe, they find the entrance to Narnia — when they are not looking for it. Similarly, faith can sneak up on us when we least expect it. The evidence of things unseen cannot be found with a flashlight or magnifying glass. Indeed, we don’t find faith at all — faith finds us.

The Chronicles of Narnia left me with a sweet longing for the world beyond this world. In my favorite book of the series, The Silver Chair, a witch who lives underground tries to convince several characters that Narnia — the land above, with its sun and grass and its king, Aslan — doesn’t really exist; "tis a pretty make-believe," she says. After listening to her persuasive arguments, one of the witch’s captives answers: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things," he says "Then all I can say is, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. . . . We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right," he concludes. "But four babies playing a game can make a play-world that licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as a Narnian even if there isn’t any Narnia."

Beauty, as Lewis suggests here, is a signpost to truth. Glimpses of beauty — in everyday life, in the Christian revelation, and in art and literature — nudged me toward belief in quiet ways that were more persuasive than any argument.

The "wardrobe" of faith opens up for people in different ways. I was helped in my journey by the witness of Christian authors who lived long before I was born. Nowadays, "Christian writing," "Christian music," or "Christian fill-in-the-blank" usually means a substandard imitation of what’s popular in the secular word, with a biblical moral tacked on. It’s easy to forget that for many centuries, the very best literature, philosophy, science, and music was all thoroughly Christian. I was surprised to learn that many of the great writers of the 20th century were also Christians — including G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Russell Kirk, and Walker Percy. They showed that one can squarely face the modern world — with its theories of Darwinian evolution, Marxism, Freudian psychology, and more — and remain a believer.

A passage in the letters of Flannery O’Connor particularly stood out to me. O’Connor, one of the greatest fiction writers of the last hundred years, wrote this to a friend struggling with doubt: "When I ask myself how I know I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter, ‘Lord I believe, help my unbelief.’ And all I can say about my love of God is, ‘Lord help me in my lack of it.’ I distrust pious phrases, particularly when they issue from my mouth."

O'Connor's prayer became my own. "I believe O Lord, help my unbelief!"

One of the most important things I’ve learned is that belief has little to do with feeling. John Henry Newman once said, "Belief will follow action." If we wait for absolute certainty before acting, we’ll never leave our easy chairs. Conviction will often lag behind doing the right thing. Truth is not dependent on our emotions. Emotions can deceive.

Feeling "near to God" is not an accurate measure of the distance between God and ourselves. In fact, we may be closest to him when we feel farthest away — this is exactly what Lewis asserts in The Screwtape Letters. Under the guise of Screwtape, an experienced demon writing to his apprentice, Lewis addresses the relationship between faith and feelings. "[God] will set [human beings] off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation," Screwtape writes. "But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. ... He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles."

Screwtape concludes that Satan’s cause is never more in danger than "when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys." Christ was the incomparable example of this. The Bible never tells us if he ever doubted his Father, but we know that at the moment of death he felt profoundly alone and forsaken — emotions that accompany doubt.

I believe that God understands our skepticism. He gave us five senses to aid in our perception of reality, and we can only learn of "spiritual" things through those physical senses. For example, though love cannot be seen, I know my wife loves me because I can see it in her actions and hear it in her voice; through her, love touches me. We are physical beings in a physical world, and are severely limited in our ability to comprehend what we cannot physically experience. Perhaps that is partly why God had to become man in order to save us, and why he left us physical signs — most particularly baptism and communion — through which he still touches us.

As the apostles Peter and Thomas proved, even Jesus’ closest followers could doubt him. For those of us who weren’t alive during his short lifetime, faith in Christ is even more of a challenge. Jesus is not literally here, holding out his hands for us, as he did for Thomas. But he was speaking to those of us waiting for faith when he said, "Blessed are those who do not see, and yet believe."