The question: “Is God real?” Is the skeptics question. It is the question that, since at least Descartes, people have asked.

We should keep in mind, however, that no one in the Bible asked if God was real. Rather, like Simon, they acted in faith.

Leslie Newbigin says that Descartes reversed “the method of Augustine. Doubt, not faith, was to be the path to knowledge. By relentless skepticism, the famous ‘critical principles,’ every claim to truth was to be put through the critical sieve in which only the indubitable would be retained. This was the body of knowledge. The rest was belief, faith, or at most probability” (Proper Confidence, 21).

What people fail to see is that even the doubter’s claim to certain knowledge rests on an act of faith. We must trust—we must trust the evidence of our eyes and ears and, if we are being taught, we must trust what our teachers tell us.

“Is God real?” is not a question that can be answered with empirical references alone. Rather, it is a question that is answered first and foremost with a faithful commitment to God or to someone/thing else.