Doubt and faith

We’re ambivalent about doubt, I think. On the one hand, we admire the person whose faith is so robust that they seem to be able to act with complete trust and confidence. Other the other hand, we tend to be a little bit afraid of the person whose faith is so robust that they seem incapable of entertaining the possibility that they might be mistaken. In the old days (maybe – I wasn’t actually there) we think that doubt was frowned upon in the Church, perhaps a sign of unfaith or an unconfessed sin. These days we’re likely as not to see doubt as a good thing, even an inseparable part of faith. We say that doubt is part of “a mature faith.”

So, what role does or should doubt play in the life of faith? Is doubt something that should ideally diminish over time, something we should strive to get rid of? Or is it a constant companion since we “walk by faith and not by sight,” at least in this life?

Our modern (and post-modern) culture teaches us that every claim to knowledge or belief is suspect. The fact that there are other people who believe differently than we do can all by itself cast doubt over our own convictions. The fragility and contingency of our knowledge, the way our minds are shaped by culture, upbringing, even biology, can undermine trust in our own beliefs.

One can find (at least I do) that sometimes the things you think you believe just don’t seem as plausible as they once did. You suddenly see the once-solid edifice of your beliefs as a rickety structure held together by duct tape and chewing gum. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that he never felt less certain about God’s existence than after he’d just finished defending it with some kind of argument because it made him feel like everything rested on his own puny reason. I’m certainly no C.S. Lewis, so the jury-rigged nature of my own belief-system is even more apparent. Not that there are no good arguments for the truth of Christianity, but those arguments, like the people who make them, are fallible and open to revision. And most of them are inconclusive to say the least.

After all, how much of what we believe is the result of hunches, educated guesses, intuition, or weighting some experiences or pieces of evidence over others, not to mention because that’s what mom and dad/my friends/my super cool professor/Bono believes? Being the incorrigibly social animals that we are, we seem to be highly susceptible to social influences and pressure in forming beliefs.

The trendy post-modern argument that all belief-systems (or “meta-narratives”) are all equally ungrounded is of little comfort here. It’s tantamount to saying “Oh yeah, so’s your old man!” when someone challenges your epistemic credentials. While it might be nice to think that we’re all in the same (leaky) boat, it’s hardly conducive to confidence in one’s own conclusions. We’re faced with what sociologist Peter Berger called “the heretical imperative” – since we no longer see any tradition as simply given and authoritative, we’re forced to choose, knowing that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to offer compelling objective grounds for out choice (this is akin to the existentialists’ notion that we’re “condemned to be free”). Incidentally, appealing to the tradition-boundedness of rationality, as MacIntyre and others do, doesn’t seem to me to help here both because traditions themselves are far from being monolithic and impermeable, especially in the modern world, and it still leaves the question of which tradition one should submit to.

The dilemma here was well put by Kierkegaard: how can faith, which calls for complete (subjective) commitment on our part, be founded on something that is (objectively) uncertain?