Faith on Trial by Pamela Binnings Ewen

Preface
    T his book was written for those on the outside looking in—those who seek the comfort that religion offers but who also need a rational foundation for belief. It is the result of a fifteen-year search for truth, which I began as an agnostic.
    Imagine yourself looking through a window at a garden. You’ve seen this garden before many times, and it is dull. Flowers bloom everywhere and yet they have no color. That does not disturb you because, actually, life is like that too, you think. You’ve always seen things this way. But later when a friend mentions the same garden, remarking on the dazzling colors of those flowers—the depth of the red, red roses, the daffodils so yellow shining in the sun, and the deep lavender-blue of the morning glories—to you this sounds absurd. You smile and shake your head. She’s a dear friend, but your own eyes and consciousness have told you otherwise. Her perception of that garden was pure whimsy.
    Still, you do wish the flowers had colors, as your friend describes. You want to believe.
    But the will to believe is not enough to overcome one’s perception of reality. The heart will not accept what the mind rejects. And then one day, casually, the friend mentions that when she was looking at that garden, she’d lifted the window to see clearly. It was merely the glass obscuring your view, she said—the glass was clouded with a substance like old smoke, a shield obscuring the light.
    The heart won’t accept what the mind rejects, but through reason doubt can be cleared away and truth illuminated. Perhaps you, too, can see those colors.
    My hope is that this book will help you lift that barrier or assist you in helping a friend or loved one do the same. Here is a new way to look at religion. The evidence set forth in this book was left for us and preserved over thousands of years, I believe, to provide a foundation for belief for those who doubt—a start. Perhaps after all, those colors do exist. As you turn the page, we’ll begin to search for illumination together. We will carefully examine the evidence on which Christianity is based, as if this is a trial and you are the jury, measuring each link in our chain of proof against standards applicable in a court of law in the United States of America.

Introduction
    F aith is a wonderful gift, but it was not given to me. At the point that one begins to wonder what life is really all about and when the music will stop, this becomes an unacceptable state of affairs. Without faith in a loving God and eternal life, we must eventually face our most primal fear—that this is all there is. Are we merely here for a meaningless moment? Perhaps it really is true that our days on earth are like grass, that like wildflowers we bloom and die—the wind blows and we are gone, as though we had never been.
    But all that I have implied is a desire to believe in God and life after death. You cannot will yourself into a position of faith, but you can open your mind and search for the truth. A search like that will lead you to fascinating avenues of information—science, the arts, archaeology, medicine. All contribute small pieces of the puzzle, which together present an intriguing picture of the Alpha and the Omega; all contribute to the formation of a rational basis for belief that something greater than the treasures of this life exists.
    Mysteries surround us today in science, in art, and in nature. The Sloan Foundation has granted millions of dollars over the years to researchers in fields such as economics, oceanography, historical linguistics, computer science, population genetics, cell biology, and anthropology to study the “unknowable.” The president of the Sloan Foundation stated the reason for encouraging such research: “We are all taught what is known, but we rarely learn about what is not known, and we almost never learn about the unknowable.” 1
    In science we have questions raised by the unknown and the unseen like