It happened. I was strong in my faith and I have fell into doubt. I am doubting Christianity and the Bible. I see some many things speaking of false religions and I am wondering what if Christianity is really a false religion. Is Christianity the true religion? How do you know it is? Regions like Islam claim they are true. What if Christianity is really the deception, which I don’t think it is. I am trying to pray hard to get a confirmation from God that Christianity is true. Hopefully, sometime soon God can reveal the truth to me. Can someone help me.
People have doubt simply because humans in general don't know or don't understand what human witnessing is.
Human witnessing is the fundamental way for a truth of any kind to be conveyed among humans. There are several key factors in the process of human witnessing. In the end when taking a closer examination, only Christianity can be the truth, or there's no truth at all.
Under most circumstance, humans are incapable of doing direct examination of a truth (though they themselves don't realize this). They have to rely on a "middle man" to get to a truth indirectly. Our history, our science, daily events of this world all operate this way. Thus you don't need direct evidence to treat the existence of black holes as a scientific fact. 99.99% humans don't examine scientific evidence, only the 0.01% scientists do. In this case, our scientists stand as the "middle man" between a truth and the 99.99% majority of humans. The majority of humans only need to put faith in our scientists to get to a scientific truth.
Of course, we can examine the direct evidence of a scientific truth if we want to, as the nature of science is that it subjects to repeatable examinations. History however doesn't bear such a repeatable nature. We can't examine the evidence of history under most circumstances, especially about the deeds and speeches of a historical figure. The only way for us to get to the deeds and speeches of a historical figure is by putting faith in what have been written down by our past historians. This is how a historical truth can be conveyed.
Similarly for daily events of this world, we don't examine direct evidence of each occurrence. We instead put faith in our media (with reporters and journalists as the "middle man") to get to such a kind of truth.
What we actually examine is rather the credibility of the "middle man" (who is standing between the majority and the truth itself). We can get to reliable scientific results simply because our scientists are reliable "eye-witnesses" of the scientific truths. Their works are subject to repeatable examinations anyway. Similarly we can examine the works of our media of reporters and journalists if what reported are recent occurrences. We however can't query the reliability of our media, say, 100 years ago, simply because we can't examine events occurred 100 years ago to tell how reliable our "middle man" is.
That's actually why, it is generally difficult to query or question history written long ago. History is something "rare". It means that if we choose to reject what have been written due to the fact that we can't examine the credibility of both the "middle man" and the occurrences themselves, it could mean that we have no history.
Now how can we trust the Bible with its authors (the "middle man")? There is nothing better can be done when the following being done,
1) 10 out of the 12 Jesus' direct disciples (they are eye-witnesses) martyred themselves to testify the truth of Jesus.
In the ancient world, nothing can be made more credible than the "middle man" being willing to die for what has been witnessed.
2) Bible is a multiple account witnessing
One of the factors makes our media reliable is that we have multiple free media for us to do the cross-referencing. CNN, Fox News and etc. they don't report a single occurrence very differently. They may have different opinions on how this occurrence shall be explained though. Usually they are consistent in terms of reporting an incident by acquiring information from the eye-witness accounts of that incident. Say, in reporting a car accident they all say the same. However, they may have different opinions on what caused that accident. One of the reliability evaluation comes from the cross referencing of multiple accounts of these "middle men".
In the same fashion. The Bible was testified not by only one "middle man" martyred himself, but by 10 out of the 12.
3) How consistent the contents are
Human documents usually can't last across the border of paper invention. It means that under normal circumstances, after information being transplanted to their paper form, humans lost almost all the original documents which were on ancient scrolls or tablets. Thus we can't compare today's version at hand to its original version written in scrolls and tablets. We may find discrete scrolls but not the scrolls of the whole book. For an example, a history book of 1000 pages was written 2000 years ago. We can have our current version of this book in paper form. But we should have lost its original copy which is supposed in ancient scrolls. we may find some discrete pages of this book but we can't find all the 1000 pages of the same book in scrolls.
This is the usual situation of ancient human documents. However, the Bible doesn't belong to this "usual situation". We have a whole library of Dead Sea Scrolls for us to compare today's OT Bible against its ancient version in scrolls. We can be assured that the same information we read today from our OT Bible remain the same information as they were written some 2000 more years ago. This consistency is needed or otherwise it only means that "God doesn't say the same to today's humans as He said to ancient humans 2000 more years ago".
NT Bibles goes a similar route. We have plenty of ancient scrolls for us to be assured of a consistent NT. The NT scrolls may appear to be discrete, but since we have plenty of them for us humans to convey the same "gospel" consistently.
This is about the process of human witnessing from eye-witness accounts, those who martyred themselves for a truth to convey. Nothing else can be done better after the above being done, in terms of conveying a truth among human across a long history and from before the invention of paper till after.
Now Islam,
1) Mohammed is not an eye-witness of God. Moses is an eye-witness of God as he acquired his information directly from God. All the OT prophets behave this way. They are eye-witnesses of God Himself. Mohammed however claimed to hear from an angel. What he has written thus is not human accounts of witnessing but angel account of witnessing at best. Seemingly Mohammed was clueless about what human witnessing could mean.
People have doubt simply because humans in general don't know or don't understand what human witnessing is. Mohammed didn't make a difference.
2) Quran was written after paper invention. Humans are capable of keeping documents after that point. Bible however requires the Dead Sea Scrolls as a miracle for today's humans to be assured of its consistency. There's a possible divine action involved in the case of Bible but not Quran.
3) There is an intangible guardian assigned to "protect" the contents of the holy book.
In Christianity, we can't add anything to or subtract anything from the Bible as we have a Church acting as a guardian. Mormon tried but it can't be deemed a success. God has assigned His earthly authority on earth in terms of protecting His Word. There is a process we call canonization, which was seriously and carefully done.
The first earthly authority is the Jews. Thus the Jews today are still keeping a correct OT Canon.
The second earthly authority is the Catholics. That's when the Jews failed to function as God's earthly authority. Thus the Catholics are still keeping a correct NT, but not OT Canon.
The last earthly authority is the Protestants. Thus the Protestants are keeping both a correct NT Canon and a correct OT Canon.
Again, this is another possible divine arrangement for only the Bible but not Quran. There's no such an earthly authority was assigned to guard its contents.
At last, Quran is a single account document from Mohammed alone.
