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    Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith
    Unavailable
    Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith
    Unavailable
    Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith
    Ebook278 pages19 hours

    Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith

    By Christina M. H. Powell

    5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    How can we know if God is real? Does God truly care about us? Why does God create people he knows will reject him? Why did God allow my friend to become a rape victim? Should I switch jobs? Is this person the one I should marry? If you have pondered these doubts, you are not alone. Sometimes we have intellectual questions about the plausibility of God. Other times we go through difficult life experiences that cause us to question our faith. Sometimes we simply struggle feeling confident with day-to-day decisions. Christina Powell knows what it's like to grapple seriously with challenges to faith. A trained scientist and cancer researcher, she struggled with the mysterious claims of a God who exists beyond what the scientific method could detect. Using personal stories from her own life, she explores how faith can be rooted in rationality, knowledge and facts, while coming to recognize the limits of science in evaluating matters of faith. Asking good questions can help us clarify and refine our faith. We can think critically about our doubts and learn to discern the true and the good. Powell probes the hidden factors that fuel our doubts to help us move beyond skepticism, disillusionment or painful life circumstances. We can live deeper into our questions in the context of Christian community. Ultimately we can work through challenges to faith and find a renewed confidence in our beliefs. It's okay to question your faith. But don't stop there. Question your doubts as well.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIVP Books
    Release dateOct 3, 2014
    ISBN9780830896714
    Unavailable
    Questioning Your Doubts: A Harvard PhD Explores Challenges to Faith
    Author

    Christina M. H. Powell

    Christina M. H. Powell (PhD, Virology, Harvard) is a biomedical research scientist who conducted research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. She has been a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and a research associate at Boston University. She is also an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God and a frequent writer and speaker on bioethics and issues of science and faith.

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    Reviews for Questioning Your Doubts

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    • 5/5
      Question your doubts, says Powell. An interesting twist, isn’t it? Research on metacognition, the process of thinking about one’s own mental processes, shows that doubting your doubts can lead to more confidence, while second-guessing yourself can lead to immobilization.Powell, a biomedical research scientist with a PhD in virology from Harvard, hardly sounds like a person who should question anything that passes through her brain. Yet, even with all her learning, she struggles with doubts about God.Truth is, I struggled a little with her struggle … in the beginning of the book. No, the book isn’t poorly written or unintelligent. That’s far from true. In fact, I’m pretty sure Powell could think circles around me. It’s just that often I couldn’t relate to her examples, and other times I felt like no example was necessary. In discussing our doubts about God, Powell often referenced practical situations from her post-graduate work. She discussed the influence of others, the decision-making process, the role of doubting in producing quality work, and so on. The instruction she gave for the most part seems intuitively obvious, and so the topic remained flat.But the time came in the book when Powell’s story grew personal. She wrote of her mother’s faith, which Powell concluded was flawed. Her mother felt that denying logic was a measure of the strength of her faith. When faced with cancer, Powell’s mother put her faith in God’s healing power to the exclusion of medical treatment. Her death was inevitable, which then shook Powell’s father’s faith. His faith never recovered and he remained resentful of the teachings which cut his wife’s life short until his own death.Powell’s story came alive for me in those pages. The research she conducted at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute suddenly carried more meaning; her position of ordained minister with the Assemblies of God carried more clout; and her journey into doubt and how she learned to question her doubts kept me riveted for the second half of the book.Says Powell, “a world of faith that mocks the advances of science breeds spiritual arrogance and plants the seeds of destruction in the lives of vulnerable people.” Today, her faith remains strong, and she encourages us to build a bridge between faith and reason.Definitely a book worth reading.Intervarsity Press, © 2014, 208 pagesISBN: 978-0-8308-3678-9