2/25/26

Today I had a few interesting conversations, but one that stood out to me was my conversation with two high school boys who were visiting our campus today. The question on the whiteboard today was, "What is the most important thing to know?", and these two gentlemen came up to answer. One of them wrote, "peace", so I asked him what he meant by that and he clarified that it was internal peace that he was discussing. I continued to ask them how you can get this internal peace, and they essentially landed on the answer that internal peace comes through introspection and meditation. This is a fairly common perspective from what I can tell, but I don't believe its roots run much deeper than enduring external chaos. So, I asked the boys to help me understand what they meant by looking at a hypothetical situation with me. I asked them if it was possible for someone to get internal peace after doing something truly horrible like murdering or raping someone? They thought about this for a minute, as now the issue is an internal issue in itself and can't merely be escaped through introspection. Arguably, introspection would only drive a person further from peace the more they face the unreconcilable fact that they've done great evil. One of them said that the scenario was super extreme and hard to engage with due to its "unlikely nature". I'm afraid that neither of these are rare occurrences, but even if I were to grant that, there are many smaller evils we can commit which likewise bring the feelings of moral responsibility unmet. The other guy responded by saying that the person in the theoretical scenario could call to Jesus to be forgiven. I asked him if he was religious, but he said "no" and that he'd only heard that some people in prison have turned their lives around after becoming Christians. I was very interested that he said this and then asked the other guy if he was religious, to which he also said, "no". I then asked them questions about why they think people are religious and why they themselves are not religious. One of them said that he simply didn't know of any evidence of Christianity and he didn't want to believe in something he didn't have complete certainty in. I pressed in on this response, and we discussed how nobody makes any decisions or judgements based on 100% proof, but rather degrees of certainty derived from the available evidence. I gave the example that none of us could be fully certain that the whiteboard actually is a whiteboard, but, based on the present evidence, it is overwhelmingly more plausible that it is in fact a whiteboard and not merely an illusion or something deceiving us. There are competing evidences which support the various theories which must be weighed and compared. For example, the fact that the whiteboard is next to a cup of expo markers and erasers, has the same color of writing on it as corresponds to the markers, has a shine in the sunlight as a whiteboard would, etc., compared to the merely speculative possibility of it being mere illusion results in an overwhelming degree of certainty that this is in fact a whiteboard. In the very same way, we should not expect our evidence for Christianity or God to magically be 100% certain when we don't operate that way in any other matter of truth and reality. Instead, we should carefully weight which makes a more compelling case and bet on the more plausible explanation.

They agreed with me here, so I put my cards fully on the table and told them that I am a Christian and believe there is really compelling evidence that there is a God who created everything and that this God chose to reveal Himself in the form of the human Jesus. Before trying to convert them to the Christian God, I find it helpful to arrive at the clear reality that a God does exist and created the universe. For this I described to them the cosmological argument for God's existence, which goes like this:

1.  All things that begin to exist have a cause.

2.  The universe began to exist.

3.  Therefore, the universe had a cause.

4.  *However, this cause must be independent of that which was being caused - that's to say that God can't make the universe while simultaneously being made up of universe material because He hasn't made it yet. Usually this is pretty straight forward thinking, unless you are pre-committed to believing that Jesus is a created being (shoutout to JW theology and reasoning).

I pointed out to the two boys that everything we can observe is causal. No, not "casual", but "causal" - meaning that something acted upon it to cause it to exist as it does. Everything we have ever been able to observe in our universe has contributed to this line of thinking - that things happen because something came before it to cause it. Science was literally produced from this commonsense understanding - that men expected to find law in nature because they acknowledged a cosmic Lawgiver. Things don't "just happen" but rather are caused. The boys agreed with me on this, and one who previously said that he believes in science already affirmed that the universe began to exist, so I concluded that it is exponentially more reasonable to hold the belief that there is a creating God than to hold the belief that everything just magically happened to begin existing. I asked them what they thought about that line of reasoning and they both said that they hadn't heard that before and were convinced that there is some sort of creating God out there. Having made two theists, now I wanted to tell them which God it is, but they would be needing to leave soon, so I took the accelerated program with them. I told them that the Christian claim is that this God who made all things desired to reveal Himself to humans in a way they could understand and easily engage with, so He came in the form of humans in the man Jesus. The Christian claim is that Jesus is that God who caused everything to exist, and His teachings and life are recorded in the gospel accounts. I offered them copies of the gospel of Mark that have a journal built in and told them that they can discover for themselves who the uncreated Creator is by reading and understanding the life of Jesus. Who better to reveal Jesus than the Man Himself? Very grateful for our conversation, they headed off with their gospels - which Nick told me later he saw them with in the Titan Student Union. May God continue to draw these high school boys to Himself as He has already drawn them into theism in one brief conversation!