Doubt « The Clever Badger

26Aug/090

Doubt

I've come across a couple of different, but related, posts in the last few weeks that I wanted to call attention to. (When I started writing this post, that read "last couple of days", but I've gotten seriously sidetracked.)

The first is at Exploring Our Matrix, where James discusses the role of doubt in faith:

Some will object that the church in the story above made a bad choice, because people with doubts are dangerous. It's true: we are dangerous. But there is only one other category of people, those who never doubt, and they are far more dangerous still.

The second is at Accidental Historian, where Geds writes on the homogenizing effect of religion leading people to not discuss the things they struggle with, like doubt:

Doubt rarely gets discussed. Fears about not evangelizing enough don’t come up, but I know lots of people have them. There are others, but, really, it’s been a while. Perhaps someone else can think of something. The fact is that the specific sins that don’t get discussed really don’t matter. What matters is that they don’t get discussed.

There is, I think, a significant point here.

Doubt is a very human thing, but it isn't a bad thing. It shows that you're thinking. The thing is, when we experience doubt in most aspects of our lives, we do something about it - we change, we investigate, we consult. If I doubt that my car is working properly, I take it to a shop and find out for sure. If I doubt that I can repair a leaky water heater, I consult a plumber. If I doubt a politician's claims, I look into the record. Most people, I suspect, act in much the same way.

Religion is different. By and large, we're conditioned to suppress our doubts. We're taught in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that doubt is bad. (In fact, some time ago, I tried to get James' book The Burial of Jesus approved for use in the Sunday School class I teach, and was told in effect that the book was inappropriate because it might confuse the kids - make them doubt.)

If we recognize, for example, that the archaeological and historical records don't support the tale of the Exodus¹, we may be told that the scientists and historians involved are just wrong, or that "Satan" is trying to deceive us, or some other non-answer to avoid dealing with the ramifications of that information.

If we learn that a vastly diverse group of disciplines ranging from astrophysics to chemistry to geology to biology indicate that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and that life has been evolving gradually for about 4 billion years, we may be told that all of the consilient evidence supporting those views is wrong or mistakenly interpreted or put in place by God as a test of faith, rather than confront the fact that the creation accounts in Genesis aren't literally true but rather metaphorical etiological tales that reflected how writers several thousand years ago understood the world.

If we encounter a troubling story in the Bible (and there are many²), we might be told that we aren't interpreting it properly (who decides what's proper?) and that we need to study it more. What we probably won't be told is to go look outside the Bible for some scholarly commentary that might help us better understand the context in which the passage was written.

Now, working through our doubts can have some consequences - most notably that we might learn something that we can't rationalize away. If that happens, then we have to consider the possibility that what we previously believed was wrong. In such a situation, intellectual honesty demands that we not discard that possibility just because it's uncomfortable, but that we rather adjust our views in light of information that we didn't have before.

James mentions that people with doubts are dangerous, but that people who never doubt are more dangerous. He's right on both counts.

The folks that have doubts, and give voice to them, and dig into them and sort them out are the ones who move things forward. That's true of religion as well as social justice, science, and just about any other field of endeavor. Doubts mean that we acknowledge that we don't know it all yet, and that we have room to grow and change. That's scary for some.

When you never doubt, or when you allow your doubts to be brushed aside with the wave of a hand, you're shutting off your ability to learn new things. You are, in effect, saying "I know that what I know is right, and nothing that anyone else can say or do will convince me otherwise."

That's not good. That leads to what I've seen called "the arrogance of ignorance", and it comes from not knowing (or acknowledging) what you don't know. I see a lot of people that fall into this trap. Often I see it in discussions of religion or politics (or evolution). There are a lot of reasons why someone might slip into this mode, but in the end they all stem from being in a culture that encourages credulity.

When I was a child, my mom used to use the term "doubting Thomas" to chide us when we questioned something she told us. This is a reference to the apostle, Thomas, who appears in the Gospel of John (and only in the Gospel of John).

Thomas gets a bad rap, and I'll close by briefly explaining why I think this is so.

When Jesus appears to the disciples, sans Thomas, in John 20:19-20, he shows his wounds to those who are gathered with him. He does this apparently of his own volition, and there does not appear to be anything negative associated with this. In other words, seeing the physical evidence of Jesus' identity wasn't a problem, indeed Jesus volunteered the evidence. Then in John 20:24-28, Thomas simply wants the same evidence that everyone else had. He's not asking for any special consideration or displaying any extraordinary hard headedness.

Now, Jesus follows this up with verse 29, where the author of John has him say "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."³

This verse often gets interpreted as a directive to simply take things on faith, but I don't think that's quite the right way to look at it.

Here's why. The Gospel of John was written most likely somewhere in the range of 90 - 100 AD, which puts it decades outside of an eyewitness account. By the time the Gospel of John was written, Jesus' ministry and life would have largely passed from the living memory of the early Christian communities. There would have been a number of compelling reasons for the author of John to seek to bridge the gap between those who could have been alive during Jesus' activities and those who couldn't have been, and Jesus' words in John 20:29 serve to bridge that gap.

I don't think that the intent here is to tell Christians to believe whatever they're taught without thinking about it, or in other words to never doubt, but unfortunately that's how a lot of folks seem to take it.

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¹This is really a topic for another group of posts, but there are a lot of reasons to suspect that the ancient Hebrews arose from native Canaanite populations, and that the entire Exodus and conquest cycle is little more than cultural mythology. For additional information, see the work of William G. Dever or Israel Finklestein. If you really want to get down into the guts and feathers of the topic, Tom Higham's The Bible and Radiocarbon Dating is an interesting source, and Kathleen Kenyon's Digging up Jericho remains a seminal work on the subject if you can find it.

²I like 2 Kings 2:23, 24 for this example, where Elisha invokes the wrath of God to call forth bears to maul the kids that made fun of his bald head. What possible valid point could this little detail be trying to make? Coincidentally, while I was composing this post, James posted this one at his place, which led to some rather heated comments.

³Jesus' words here actually apply equally as well to the other disciples. They had, after all, seen his wounds first hand too.

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