When I started college five and a half years ago, I had a goal in mind. I was going to get out of Vegas and change the world. How am I doing? Ha.

Aaron is leading worship this weekend for the D-Now event of a local Baptist church here in town and his two band members are, like me, CCU grads. One of the band members was talking last night about how disappointed he is that one of his best friends from college is now a full-fledged atheist. I’ve seen it happen too. It really does kind of hurt a little bit when it happens.

I went to the D-Now session this morning. The weekend is designed to teach the kids how to defend their faith out in the world. And they posed an interesting question:

How would you live differently if you knew that God did not exist?

In the session they used a lot of examples that didn’t have two feet to stand on (were you aware that Katy Perry single handedly introduced the idea of homosexual experimentation into our culture in 2009?! It did not exist before that in our culture. All her.) But it did get me thinking. If I knew 100% that God did not exist, what would I be doing differently?

For one thing, I find my purpose in my faith. I have something to live for, an eternal life to look forward to. If I knew that it was all a farce, my life would look completely different. I see it going one of two ways at that point: 1) I have no purpose to live, I drive my car off a bridge because it doesn’t matter, I’m going into the ground anyway. Or 2) would find something else to have faith in because we have to believe in something (even atheists BELIEVE in the idea that God is not real.)

It lead to the discussion among a small group of us (band members and wives) of what would morality look like. If we have no one to hold us accountable, no “higher-power” making us feel responsible, would we have a moral compass at all? Would we have the same values and ethics that we have now or would we completely different people. The speaker used the example of Jeffrey Dahmer (not sure why, two of the kids had heard of him) and a clip from and A&E show about him in which his father said that Jeffrey believed that he had no one to answer too so it didn’t really matter that he was murdering all of these people – that we were all just going to die eventually any way and that was the end of our world. So without any concept of God in our world, would we follow in the footsteps of Mr. Dahmer? I mean, the 10 Commandments would be a nice story, but would they be anything more?

It also raises the question in my mind that if God were not real what about Science as we know it would be real? Most of the world probably wouldn’t have been underwater at one point in time thousands of years ago because there would have been no flood – and for that matter, dinosaurs would probably still be roaming the earth. Darwin came from a devout religious background, so what about his theories would have been different? Even if evolution was the only thing that we had the option to believe, with God’s absence, how would it change?

These questions fall on my ears differently than they fall on the ears of the students they’re designed for because I am 23 and have already been through several years of discerning what this faith is that I have. I’ve only just recently come out of my final cynical phase (have you noticed how the tone of my posts have changed? Aaron apparently has, he asks about it every time that I make a new one.) But it is something that I know that these kids will have to wrestle with within the next 5-10 years.

Aaron and I have talked before that it seems that just about every one of our Christian friends our age has gone through this period of seeking, of discerning, of being cynical, of doubting. And the ones who haven’t don’t always feel as though they’re as vested in their faith. Great if they never had to question, but I think it’s an essential part of faith.

When we were talking last night, the same band member who was so broken and disappointed for his friend said this about our college experience: Freshman year you come in and they challenge you to live your own faith and to believe your own thing, Sophomore year is great, Junior year you completely lose your faith, and Senior year you decide how you’re going to handle that. And we went to a Christian school.

I talked a few weeks ago about that idea of children growing up to leave Christianity and how my father-in-law asked the question of why do people think that happens. The overwhelming answer was Proverbs 22:6. It would appear that this is happening world wide regardless of the type of school you attend or if you don’t attend at all. But I’ve seen plenty of my peers who were trained up in the way that they should go and they have departed from it.

Why do we leave? Because we can’t discern for sure that God really does exist and if there’s a chance he might not then we would rather live the life I could have without all the rules. Why do we leave? Because we can’t defend our parent’s faith and have never made it our own (hmm… seems like maybe they trained us up in the way THEY should go…) and then we see another idea and don’t know how to defend that one either so we don’t bother.

It’s so funny to think back on myself five years ago – who I thought I was, what I was so sure of. I’m not sure any more that I will save the world but I’ve learned how to try. I’ve learned who I am and what I believe. In the heat of the moment I am not sure I could defend every part of it without wavering, but I do know that God exists and that gives me something to fight for.