Doubt is part of our Faith. But, raising doubt to a virtue is nothing more than moral preening. For sixty years our society has celebrated the “doubter”. He is a more authentic human type. His depth of soul, his inner despair gives him a dignity that the simple “believer” does not hold. To doubt is to suffer. It’s become chic to doubt. The doubter wears his exitensial despair with pride.

If one reads the Gospels carefully, he will realize that even those who were with Christ for years doubted who He really was. Even after His Ressurection, those who witnessed His works, continued to doubt. Judas himself went as far as to betray Him. We all assume that if Christ would just show us physcially His wonders than all doubts would melt away. If it was only so. Both the New and Old Testaments are filled with people who saw but still failed to believe. Seen in this light, “doubt” takes on a different meaning. We can only assume that we also would fail to act in “Faith” even if Christ appeared before our eyes and performed miracles. There would be the exceptions. But those exceptions are made possible through Christ’s Grace. And those given such graces usually had great trials (almost all of the Apostles and early Popes were martyred).

Mother Teresea spent her entire apostolate in spiritual darkness. Her Faith wasn’t predicated upon doubt, or proofs of the physical or mystical manisfestations of Christ’s existence. Yet, for 5 decades she hid her spiritual suffering while she performed incrediable works of mercy. It wasn’t that she didn’t doubt or even despiar; but, she didn’t make such things the focus of her religious faith.

But, speaking as a “Millenial,” and someone who does have a belief in God, I think there is a value to listening in a culture that still prides enlightenment rationalism in harmful ways. I haven’t doubted God’s existence in my life, but I by no means am certain of who he is in his entirety. I align more with the Eastern church on this one, as I see mystery an essential value to Christianity. One of the harms of the Great Schism was the split in philosophies in East and West; the West adopted systematic, Aristotelian logic driven by certitude, as evidenced by thinkers like Aquinas. The Eastern church, however, kept mystery as a focal point of theology. The great Eastern thinker Bonaventure held that the truths of the faith are found in the “concidence of opposites,” or the paradoxes of belief. I don’t buy that wholesale (it fails the same test that the Golden Mean of the ancient Greeks does), but I think it speaks a valuable truth about the faith. Anyone who thinks the Triune God is “clear” or “entirely understandable” would have to be absolutely mad.

So I think, then, your discussion of “listening” helps us to put the term in a better light. Listening doesn’t mean throwing out all presuppositions and surrendering oneself to the speaker; listening means a willingness to engage in ideas, and not seeing the speaker as an enemy. When I hear someone like Sam Harris speak against Christianity, I don’t think, “Well, I’m not going to listen to him, because he’s on the other side.” Nor do I think, “Well, in order to really listen, I need to forget about God.” Both are wrongheaded ways of going about intellectual interaction. It’s often the case that people we disagree with actually share a whole lot with us than we think. It’s definitely the case with New Atheism and a lot of Christian thought; the modes of philosophy are near identical at times.

So I think you’re right, Sarah, that doubt shouldn’t be a state of existence. We may doubt a lot of things at a given time, but there are always those beliefs we have that we can never escape.

However, I think an equal danger here could be the opposite of doubt: absolute certitude. The C.S. Lewis scholar Gary Tandy put it well here:

So here’s my modest proposal. When discussing… controversial issues as Christians, can we exercise enough humility to temper our statements? Can we resist the temptations of certitude, realizing that it draws lines in the sand and reinforces stereotypes that non-Christians already carry about those of our ilk? Can we learn the use of conditional phrases like “Based on my understanding of scripture” or even “I might be wrong about this” or, God forbid, “my views on this are evolving”? Can we remember [author] Anne Lamott’s friend, Father Tom, who suggests that the opposite of faith is certainty?



Doubt is not a four-letter word — even for Christians. 


I don’t know if I’d say the opposite of faith is certainty, but the idea the quotation is getting at is key. To think we could ever have all the answers to Christianity is to err, and to overestimate our knowledge and God’s mystery.

Satan knows how to manipulate doubt into a weapon for use against God.

That being said, I appreciate conservative young evangelicals fighting the good fight against liberal young “evangelicals.”