I’ve already posted a few questions here before I realized that I should have introduced myself first. I’m a high school senior in Nebraska and have a deep passion for all things school. I don’t mean to be cocky or boastful but I have a bit of an above average intelligent (something I sometimes see as a curse). I’ve taken college mathematics classes while still in high school and have score fairly high on the ACT. I was also raised in a loving Christian household, and love Jesus dearly and want to walk in his ways.
However, before I got to this somewhat stable position in my faith, I often felt a lot of collisions between my love of God and school. My first major doubts would arise from a Pre-Cambridge International Biology class. In this class, I was first introduced to Florida. For a while I had been flexing a higher-than-average intelligence, but I was still learning. When I was first introduced to this, like many other Christians, I felt as though my faith was under attack. However, I shoved my fears down and watched a couple of videos online saying how obviously “wrong” evolution was, so I was happy.
However, pangs of doubt would persist and would eventually culminate one night, when I was watching a satire video from the Christian sits the Babylon Bee. It was a video that humorously portrayed the scenario of “what if Jesus’ resurrection was a hoax?!” Obviously, they intended to turn it around and bring people closer to Christ. However, when reading the title, I somewhat began to internalize what this could entail. All of a sudden, the thought “Is God real?” Popped into my head. In a sudden burst of anxiety, I began searching up evidence to prove that evolution was a lie. This may sound foolish (and, in retrospect, it was), but you get me didn’t realize that trying to prove God with science was a very bad idea. I searched for videos only in the heavily Christian areas of the web, to no avail.
Then one spring break, on a trip to Nebraska from where we were currently living (we were looking for homes and trying to plan moving houses), my father put on a podcast episode from the Shawn Ryan Show. Occasionally, this former marine would include Christian talkers in his show. This episode, he brought John Burke on. In case you don’t know who he is, John Burke is an engineer who studied Near Death Experiences to find that there was compelling evidence for the existence of not only an afterlife but also Jesus, who was present in many experiences (even in non-Christian ones). When I heard this podcast, I cried for hours. As it turned out, God was real! For about six days afterward, I was probably the happiest I have ever been in my life. Everything n was bliss. I could live in peace! All my questions answered!
Sometimes I like to think of what happened next as Satan trying to pull me away from Christ. Do I actually know it was the Enemy who did this? No. However, it makes me feel a little better about my reaction to my own thoughts, and the anxiety that would steam from my actions afterwards. About halfway home from the trip, we were approaching a hotel to stay at. My father was talking about some absurd conspiracy theory he heard about where the ISS was being held in the sky by cables (???). In that moment, for whatever reason at all, a new thought popped into my head: “Do we live in a simulation?” Again, I have no idea where this thought originated from. I think the only time I have ever see this theory in my life was in the thumbnail of some video that I didn’t even watch. Nonetheless, young me, in a desperate and naïve attempt to remove the anxiety that this thought produced on me, began digging into the internet again to find definite proof that the simulation theory wasn’t real. Unfortunately, the broad of vipers the internet is, I would never really find the conform to had hopped to find. Half the videos either provided evidence that didn’t satisfy what I was looking for, and the other half was clickbait news articles or videos that scared people into watching or reading more and more of the content.
Eventually, I tried to push it down and forget about it; treat it as though it was one of those conspiracy theories that sound so convincing but we all knew where big fat lies. And, for a while, this worked. I was able to live a somewhat anxiety-free life, with only minor doubts occasionally. Sometimes, the thought of that big question, of what reality was, would pop into my head again, and I would pray fervently for them to go away.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2025 that I would have another major faith episode. I was scrolling Apple News for any interesting science stories. One article popped up that talked about “scientists finding God in the brain.” There was two major problems with what I did next. First of all, I was still naively convinced that science proved God, so this article obviously is just the manifestation of this fact coming true. I now know that science is unbiased, and such an observation would go against the tenets of being objective. Second, I should have realized that the article, which was from Popular Mechanics (or maybe Popular Science) was just more clickbait. When I clicked on and read, I found something that shocked my teenager brain: scientists read scripture to patients and used brain scans to see where the brain activated when they heard those words. A third big question then popped into my head: “Is God just in the brain?” Still learning nothing, I hopped onto the internet and tried to prove God with science again. This time, though, I felt as though I was loosing. I couldn’t sleep at all that night. At one point, I even started reading quantum mechanical theory regarding restructures in the brain that connect our consciousness to the structure of the universe. I laid down and thought, “so, I believe in quantum mechanics now?” I felt I was a mere inch in my head from becoming an atheist. However, I was stubborn, and continued to fight this battle of God and science. Unfortunately, many Christian sites I went on didn’t help. I vividly remember one Christian post saying that if you believe in evolution, you believe that God is cruel to his creation and thus not a true Christian. This greatly disturbed me and made me feel this fight was all the more important.
Everything changed the day I found my way onto Biologos. I watched the intro video on reconciling science and faith and cried again. Not quite as happy or resolved, but still glad. I continued to read through the resources available and found that, after all this time, my crusade against science was pointless. I didn’t need to choice between a love of God and a lot of science. They could both exist peacefully. The next major step came from another Shawn Ryan Show episode, this time with Lee Strobel, explaining the Case for Christ. It took me a while to internalize the evidence provided (in which time the simulation fears returned), but when I considered the historical case for Jesus and the resources provided by Biologos, I felt confident in my faith. I had matured, no longer chasing my tail with pointless fighting. I could now learn about the universe and love God at the same time.
I’m still developing a bit. I no longer want to rely on heavily biased Christian evidence (which wait the other side way out of proportion), nor do I want to twist science to how I think God should operate (as one Biologos article stated, we shouldn’t put God into a box that we make). I’ve gotten better with the simulation theory (it basically just implies a higher being’s existence, and they have to love us since a simulated reality wouldn’t be cheap to silly-Billy create), and it no longer bothers me as much. The one thing that sometimes gets me is the online vigilantes, where I struggle to find people to internalize my views with. Jorge Guerrero Pires, a small poster in Medium, made some hostile claims about Christianity but I couldn’t find refutations anywhere. TGrogan, an X account that does something similar, is very similar in that I can’t find refutations to see how Christians respond. On top of this, small questions that came up regarding reconciliation (I.e. do we live in a cyclical universe?) couldn’t be answered by any of the people around me. For the longest time, I felt a tiny bit hopeless on my faith since no one I knew could under The complicated questions I asked. Finally, we end up here on this forum. I’ve finally found those people I’ve been looking for. I’m really hoping to develop my faith here, admit a community of highly intelligent people engaging in this important discussion. So, thank you all for the help so far, and I look forward to hearing what everyone has to say going forward!