REASONS TO DOUBT

The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible expresses the skepticism of a life that has seen most things, and finds it hard to make sense of it all. The more we know about life, the more cynical we can become. We may have more, rather than less, unanswered questions as we age. We may find that religious faith, and personal trust in others, is harder rather than easier to come by. A friend who had experienced a great deal of betrayal and disappointment by people whom he expected more of, shared with me that his wife had taken it “all rather badly as it stings and hurts, and she doesn’t trust anyone just now.” There are plenty of reasons to doubt that there is a good and loving God if we look for them. Some of us may want to have a stronger faith but the advice people may give us may become reasons to doubt.

Lynn Anderson in If I Really Believe, Why Do I Have These Doubts? lists several reasons to doubt, several blind alleys seekers are encouraged to explore that lead them nowhere but to frustration.

First, is the advice that faith requires you to turn off your mind, and to just try harder to believe. “Don’t think about it – just believe!” Wanting to believe, or wishful thinking. does not make it so. Trying to ignore troublesome doubts, and attempting to sweep them under the rug, will not work. We fool ourselves if we try to believe by being intellectually dishonest. Closing our eyes to problems will not make them go away. God made our minds so that we can interpret what is happening in life. We are created to think through our understanding of life. That is why we have a book like Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is the journal of an intelligent seeker who is struggling with trying to make sense of the issues of life. His words ‘are like goads, his collected sayings like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd’(12:11). They are meant to goad us to action in our search for answers. When difficulties arise in life, we cannot dismiss them as though they do not matter. We must think through their implications and find a resolution of them in our beliefs. To be a Christian is not to commit intellectual suicide as some people contend, even if some Christians behave that way.

John Stott wrote a little book entitled, Your Mind Matters,ⁱ in which he criticized “the misery and menace of mindless Christianity.” He argues why it is important that we use our minds. “Faith is not credulity. H.L. Mencken…once said that ‘faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.’ But Mencken was wrong. Faith is not credulity. To be credulous is to be gullible, to be entirely uncritical, undiscerning and even unreasonable in one’s beliefs. But it is a great mistake to suppose that faith and reason are incompatible.”

The second reason to doubt is to assume that faith is like something you can catch. To this way of thinking all you have to do is to wait for faith to happen. It will be like waiting for lightning to strike, like it did Saul on the Damascus road. Parents who take this approach do not influence their children in any direction. They say that their children will make up their own minds when they grow up. Others say that the doubts their children experience will go away when they mature. I heard my aunt and uncle say that about their children. It was an excuse for them not going to church. As a result they deprived their children of the advantages of a childhood Christian education. They have had a hard time in adult life catching up.

More education or maturation does not necessarily bring faith. Faith is our response to revelation, and requires a choice on our part. Many people have reason to doubt because they believe that they have to do nothing and God has to do everything. God calls us to choose. “Choose you this day, whom you will serve.” Soren Kierkegaard calls the refusal to choose, to make a decision of faith, cowardice.

“Cowardice wants to prevent the step of making a decision. To accomplish this it takes to itself a host of glorious names. In the name of caution cowardice abhors any over-hastiness. It is against doing anything before the time is ripe…. In the end, failure to decide prevents one from doing what is good.”

The third reason to doubt is the attitude that faith requires definitive proof. To this way of thinking, conclusive proof in the form of rational arguments is essential to faith. Since such proof is lacking, faith is, what Mark Twain defined as, “believing what any fool knows ain’t so.” But no person can be forced to believe by logic. Faith does not come to a person by being argued into it. If this were so, the smarter people would be the first to believe, and the duller people the last. But the opposite may be true. Paul, who, despite doing a lot of arguing himself, quoted Isaiah 29:14

“ ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’ Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world.”

Intelligence levels have little to do with faith. You cannot reach a conclusion about faith in Christ based upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Faith requires a risk, a leap, or it would not be faith. It is a decision without complete proof and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Faith is a leap based not on proof but trust in the evidence that is available. There is no life without this kind of trust. We decide what is worthy of our trust without requiring absolute proof. We trust ourselves to all sorts of people, machinery and organizations because we have enough evidence that they are worthy of our trust. We do not completely understand many things we trust every day, e.g. banks, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers. But because we have evidence that they work, we use them, act on them, put our trust in them. We are called to examine, not proofs for the existence of God, but evidence of a loving relationship with the personal God. Frederick Buechner writes,

“We all want to be certain, we all want proof, but the kind of proof that we tend to want – scientifically or philosophically demonstrable proof that would silence all doubts once and for all – would not, in the long run, I think, answer the fearful depths of our need at all. For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind to keep the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-to-day lives who might not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after.” (The Magnificent Defeat)

The fourth reason to doubt is the belief that faith comes through miracles. If only we could see a miracle happening! Would we believe? Witnessing miracles does not automatically generate faith. Take the Pharisees for example. “Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence they still would not believe in him…..For this reason they could not believe.” Lynn Anderson comments on St. John’s conclusion:

“What an ominous statement. Notice that the unbelief of the people John was describing was a choice. Faith in Jesus would have threatened their vested interests. Consciously or unconsciously, they had chosen to set their hearts against Christ and had continued choosing not to believe in spite of miraculous proof over a long period of time. Finally, their hearts so hardened that even the miraculous signs of Jesus himself would not touch them! It is possible to reject faith so often that we can wind up actually dismantling our believing machinery. The mightiest signs and wonders cannot change our hearts! Only the Spirit of God can do that! Through the gospel, the Spirit of God can move us to choose faith. But even then, he will not force us – only touch us, convict us, call us on. How we respond is entirely up to us.”

If you ask people who do not believe in Christ, what it would take for them to believe they usually mention one of these reasons to doubt. They want a miracle, or conclusive proof, or they want to wait for divine intervention, or they or their peer group think that faith is anti-intellectual. These reasons, I believe, are ill-founded.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt. We can always find a reason to avoid believing in God and serving him. The choice is ours. But God sent his Son so that we might believe. We have to decide whether we are going to worship him or not. Examine the evidence, by all means. Faith can be commitment based on the evidence. Our mind is engaged. But at the end of the day you still have to take a leap of faith if you want to experience God’s presence. Invite the Spirit of God into your life so that you will know the reality of Christ.