We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Faith, Doubt and Agnosticism
Hartwig HKD via Compfight
Greg was recently interviewed by Premier Radio in the UK for the program Unbelievable? along with Andrew Whyte (an agnostic) on the topic of faith and doubt. They discuss their personal journeys of doubt and how this led them on vastly different paths. You can find the interview by clicking here. You can get a feel for Greg’s process of coming to question the prevailing notion of faith from the quote below taken from his book Benefit of the Doubt.
As I studied issues surrounding Scripture, however, I occasionally encountered data that seemed to undermine the historical veracity of certain narratives. When this happened, I would feel pressured by my belief in inspiration to spin the data in a way that would instead support the narrative’s historical accuracy. While I was aware that evangelical and non-evangelical scholars frequently do this, it felt disingenuous to me. Is this really what God would want me to do, I wondered?
Over the years, I have increasingly felt there is something amiss with a concept of faith that inclines me to be anything but totally honest with whatever my research uncovers. At the same time, I have gradually seen less and less reason why my belief in inspiration should require that every story conforms to our modern concept of historical veracity, and even less reason why my life-giving relationship with Christ, which has come to form the very core of my being, should be affected by how I evaluate the evidence for any particular biblical story.2 There is, I concluded, something fundamentally wrong with this “house-of-cards” model of faith, as I shall call it.
Category: General
Tags: Agnosticism, Benefit of the Doubt, Doubt, Faith
Related Reading

Everybody’s Got A Hungry Heart [Sermon, 7/1/12]
Check out Greg’s latest sermon!
Description from WHC website:
Paul wrote the Colossians to confront a false religion of invoking angels. These invocations were being done because people thought Jesus wasn’t enough. This same type of thought pervades our own society, where people with hungry hearts are searching for more than what Jesus offers. In this sermon, Greg talks about the fullness that Jesus brings.

What We Long For
Augustine once prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.” We all have an unquenchable yearning in our hearts, a yearning for nothing less than to share in God’s own eternally full life. This is why our deepest desires cannot be permanently satisfied by…

Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 3
This is the third of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? If you missed the first two installments you can find them here and here.

Lighten Up: You Gotta Believe In Something, Man!
Two things here: 1) How does this philosopher not see that “not believing in believing” is itself a belief? 2) Is that a turtleneck or is that philosopher just really hairy?

Podcast: Can a Person Come Back to God if They Lose Their Faith?
Greg considers the nature of faith and unbelief and offers some enlightening insight that may surprise you. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0316.mp3

Faith and Mental Illness
Greg talks about mental illness. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0055.mp3