All that one really needs to know.
Actually, there are different infinities in mathematics. Which infinity should we equate with the God of the Bible? It seems to me that math could just as easily be said to teach polytheism…
One problem with evangelicals is making the “born again” conversion experience normative, so that if you cannot offer testimony of a changed life on cue, people look at you as if your faith is questionable. Personally, I grew up in the church, and I walked down the aisle to be baptized at the age of 12. Now, the sarcastic side of me wants to describe how that decision for Jesus totally changed my life, how I stopped taunting my little sister and stealing cigarettes from my parents to smoke in the alley. But, even that would be a lie. The lesson, I suppose, is that God deals with us as individuals. There may be similarities in many of our stories, but none of them are identical. Walk your own path without apology. The signposts are there for you to follow. The narrow, uphill trail with few travelers leads to life. The broad, crowded boulevard leads to destruction. Choose well.
This is how I spent my 20s. I thought I could argue people into the kingdom. It was a salesman’s approach – defeat every objection, and the customer will have to buy. It was both fruitless and spiritually deadening. Jesus is not a consumer product. (Although, with all the emphasis on church growth, we seem to think of him in those terms…)
I experienced a crossroads, as well. Skipping the details, everything changed for me when, at the ripe old age of 35, I finally discovered that faith was far more than a set of “correct” beliefs stored in my head, all for the purpose of punching my ticket to heaven. Christianity is not a philosophy, and it is far more than just a worldview. Belief means nothing without action. Jesus summed it up in one question: “Why do you call me Lord, and do not do what I say?”
I discovered the same problems that you detail. The only apologist that I can read anymore is Pascal, probably because his work is 350 years old. I also think he has the only proper attitude toward the world, which is that it is ambiguous. God has so ordained things that there is enough light for those who wish only to see, and enough darkness for those of the opposite persuasion.
Amen. And that was Pascal’s conclusion, too:
"We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The sceptics, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose. We know that we do not dream, and however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. … This inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason, which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason were capable of instructing us. Would to God, on the contrary, that we had never need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and intuition! But nature has refused us this boon. On the contrary, she has given us but very little knowledge of this kind; and all the rest can be acquired only by reasoning.
“Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate, and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human, and useless for salvation.”