How Can I help my children have a strong faith in God

Part 1: Seeking that their faith is reasonable.



We should never tell our children that having faith and believing in God is something that doesn't make sense, that flies in the face of reason. God created our intellect and our ability to reason, and he doesn't require us to check them at the door of faith.



Jesus appealed to people's intellect and reaosn repeatedly, even when it came to believing:



"Do not believe me unless I do what my Father does. But if I do it, even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father" John 10:37-38



Peter and Paul used arguments of reason when trying to convince others to believe, including reminding them of JEsus miracles, which many in the community either had seen or knew of, and using the testimony of the more than five hundred people who had seen Jesus after he rose from the dead.



Showing our children that their faith is reasonable also prepares them for the inevitable onslaught of conflicting information they'll receive from others. There are many good resources available that can assist you in this task, but I offer her a few simple facts that you can use in discussions with your children. Just knowing some of these basics will help your kids see that their faith is indeed reasonable.



Have your children imagine that your family is walking through the forest. There, beside the path, you see a beautiful gold watch. You pick it up and say, "Wow! This is truly remarkable; this watch just came together all by itself over thousands of years through a remarkable string of chance happenings." As you try to convince your children of your conclusion, they'll try to convince you of how ridiculous you're being. Now help them see that they automatically assumed that the intricate design of the watch was a sure sign that it had been designed and put together by someone.



The odds of everything in creation coming together through a remarkable string of chance happenings are so astronomical that there are no computers big enough on this planet to calculate them. One thing is for sure: it's many, many times more likely that the watch came together by itself. Saying that the earth aand all of creation came into existence without a creator is like saying that the Mona Lisa is the result of a paint spill of that the dictionary is the result of an explosion in a print shop.



The odds of all the components that make up a singe-cell creatue coming together by themselves in just the right way to form life have been calculated to range from 1 with 40,000 zeroes after it! And those are the odds from a single cell life form! Not only is a human being made of millions of cells which compounds the odds astronomically, but each cell in our bodies must work in absolute harmony with every other cell.



The picture of the origin of humanity that's usually presented in popular books about evolution involves a series of life forms from beginning with a single cell in the ocean. That single cell creature evolves, via fish that crawl up on shore, to apes and then to humans in a nice, continuous parade. But there are two things missing in this picture: time and transitions.

The earth, according to evolutionists, is four billion years old. That's a long time by our standards, but as a time frame for evolution from inert matter to human beings, it's inadequate. Some scientists realize this. One solution, proposed by respected scientists, involves the assumption that life forms evolved on another planet where there was enough time, and that their seeds were transported to earth on meteorites and comets (I'm not making this up!). But this doesn't solve the problem; it simply extends the boundaries and finds more time elsewhere, with no additional proof.

The second thing that's mission is transitions: the socalled missing links. If al life evolved from simple molecules to human beings, one would expect to find transitions between, say, reptiles and birds and between apes and humans. These transitional forms haven't been found. One solution, again proposed by respected scientists, is a theory that argues that species existed for hundreds of millions of years without any significant change and then a bunch of change happened in only a few million years. The result, they claim, is an abundance of fossils from long periods and very few from short periods of time. It's a litte neat solution, but it begs the question. It assumes that the fossil record of change is there, evey though we haven't found it yet.

So what do we mean by a "reasonable faith"? Having such a faith doesn't mean that we can or have to prove to everybody's satisfaction that God exists or that everything we believe about God is true. Rather, a reasonable faith is simply a faith that doesn't go against reason. Here's one way you can illustrate this point to your kids.

There are extremely smal, short lived, subatomic particles that no one has ever seen. They were believed to exist before anyone had ever observed evidence of them, because everything else known about particles indicated that they should be there. Later they were shown to exist by trails they left behind in highly sensitive equipment. Was it reasonable to believe, before they had been proven to exist, that these particles were there and could be found? Of course. Is it reasonable to believe that these particles really exist evey though no one has ever seen one? Of course. The effect they have on their surroundings, which can be observed, is enough to make scientists accept that they exist.

The odd thing is that the same logic isn't applied when we talk about the origin of the universe and of life. No one can go back and prove what happened at the beginning of time, neither the people who believe that either there is no God or that God had nothing to do with whatever happened to bring about time, space, matter, and life.

Yet either God stands at the beginning of time or he doesn't. The choice, either way, is a matter of faith. And if, by faith, you accept that God wasn't there, then you have to work hard to find alternative explanations that make sense.

It's important to help our kids understand that we all believe things we can't prove, though some are more reasonable than others. But we don't have to be put on the defensive because we have faith in God. Based on the available evidence and the effects we can see, faith in God seems a whole lot more reasonable than any of the alternatives.