We live in an era of doubt. If we Christians are honest, we’ve had to deal with a series of doubts in our own minds during the course of our lives. Unfortunately, many do not know how to deal with doubt. For instance, some consider doubting to be a duty. We’ll hear slogans like, “Doubt everything!” or “Question Authority.” Of course, if we follow their advice, we’ll have to doubt and question these self-proclaimed authorities.
Even so, how do we navigate the challenges of doubt in an age of uncertainty, suspicion, and skepticism? Perhaps the following points will give some insight.
The Inescapability of Doubt
Christians can readily identify with what theologian Avery Dulles has observed: there is a “secret infidel” in every believer’s heart, a kind of internal dialogue that takes place between one’s “believing self” and “unbelieving self,” as it were.1
No wonder the book of Jude exhorts God’s people to “have mercy on some, who are doubting” (Jude 22). In light of this, the Christian tradition has emphasized seven spiritual works of mercy. Alongside instructing the ignorant and comforting the sorrowful, there is the practice of counseling the doubtful. Even John the Baptist had his doubts about the nature of Jesus’ messiahship (Lk 7:17-23).
Some Christians will insist that James denounces all doubting as sin; the one who doubts is “double-minded” and “unstable in all his ways” (Jas. 1:5-8). But this doubting calls into question that God is enough; so various God-substitutes are added to the list of objects of ultimate allegiance. What James condemns is a mindset of divided loyalty between God and the world—a spiritual adultery: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?… Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded” (Jas 4:4, 8; cp. Mt 6:24). The “James-doubt” is far different from the “Jude-doubt.”
We read in the psalms and elsewhere that many saints have grappled with doubt and have experienced dark nights of the soul. Living in doubt can be corrosive to the spirit—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Some misguided advocates of a duty to doubt are confusing doubt with critical thinking. Doubting isn’t a duty to be observed or a task to be celebrated; rather, it is a concern to be addressed. Rightly used, doubting can be a stepping stone to a deepened, robust faith and intellectual life. Our faith can be strengthened as we come through valleys of doubt. Keep in mind too that atheists and skeptics will—whether they admit it or not—will have their own share of doubts. We need to learn what the poet John Donne advised: “Doubt wisely.”
Doubt-Suppression
How should churches deal with doubters and with teenagers who ask direct and challenging questions about God, Jesus, and the Bible? The incorrect response would be to maintain a kind of “Christian bubble” in order to shield them from hard questions—or simply to dismiss their questions and exhort them to “pray harder,” “read the Bible” or “just believe.” Christian leaders and believing parents should give the young people entrusted to them ample room to grapple with doubts and to ask honest questions in open forums and conversations around the supper table or over a cup of coffee. The next generation should receive direction about how to work through their questions constructively and with humility. This will sharpen their minds and strengthen their faith so they can embrace it as their own—not because “this is what my parents (or pastor) told me.”
Consider the very relevant example of Augustine. As a young man in North Africa, he was critical of anti-intellectual church leaders with their pat “answers” to fair-minded questions. When asked about what God was doing before he made heaven and earth, these leaders would answer mockingly: “Preparing hell… for those prying into such deep subjects.” Augustine adopted a more honest attitude: “I would rather respond, ‘I do not know,’ concerning what I do not know rather than say something for which a man inquiring about such profound matters is laughed at while the one giving a false answer is praised.”2
Doubt-Mismanagement
Today a good number of people don’t know how to properly manage their doubts; instead, they follow mistaken methods for handling them. Let’s have a look at how some mismanage their doubts.
Mismanagement Example #1: Knowledge as 100 percent certainty: If you want to feed your doubts, accept the falsehood that genuine knowledge requires 100 percent or absolute certainty. We should note that virtually no philosopher today assumes this criterion—even though many doubters wrongly do. The idea that knowledge requires 100 percent certainty comes from the confused stance taken by the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650).
This isn’t the biblical view. The apostle Paul wrote in Eph. 5:5: “For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.” The implication of Paul’s wording is this: you can know things without certainty. Furthermore, certainty is just a subjective state that doesn’t even remotely guarantee that one has genuine knowledge. We can all think of particular persons—and perhaps we ourselves—who have spoken with such an air of certainty, only to eventually realize that they were utterly wrong!
This absolute-certainty demand for knowledge, which no one truly follows, is itself questionable: How do we know with 100 percent certainty that knowledge requires 100 percent certainty? This is a phony criterion that can’t sustain itself. Indeed, there are very few items of knowledge that reach the level of 100 percent certainty—perhaps certainty of one’s own existence or that 2+2=4. But surely we truly know that the universe is expanding, that the Earth is round, that other minds exist, that Paris is in France—even if this doesn’t rise to absolute certainty.
While plenty of good and defensible reasons for following Christ are available, a good number of Christians blindly accept the following notion: “If it’s logically possible that something (including the Christian faith) isn’t true, then it follows we can’t really know that it is true.” The Christian faith is a knowledge tradition, and the evidence it presents for, say, Jesus’ bodily resurrection is objective and checkable (see 1 Corinthians 15:3-9). In the Christian tradition, faith isn’t a blind leap, but it is a personal trust or commitment for justifiable reasons.
Mismanagement Example #2: Scientific Verification Alone: Christians are often being challenged to “prove that God exists.” By “prove,” many critics have scientific proof in mind. Of course, the term “proof” itself suggests something like 100 percent certainty, which, we’ve noted, can be readily dismissed.
Furthermore, while knowledge through science certainly has its place, why think science is the only source of knowledge? This is just arbitrary. This isn’t science, but scientism, which insists that knowledge comes through science alone. Such a criterion isn’t only arbitrary, but self-contradictory as well: how can one scientifically prove that all knowledge must be scientifically provable? Scientism is a self-contradictory philosophical assumption rather than the conclusion of scientific research.
Mismanagement Example #3: Double-standards: At least four double-standards typically emerge in this discussion of doubt. The first two have to do with our own internal processing of doubts. The remaining involve the engagement of other voices or viewpoints. Let’s look at the internal for starters.
The first double-standard has to do with assuming our doubts are more authoritative than our beliefs and thus cannot be doubted. Why do we give more weight to doubts than we do to many of our beliefs and even our deepest convictions? While in some cases we ought to doubt our beliefs and revise them in accordance with reality, we should also engage in the exercise of doubting our doubts. After all, why think that doubting is somehow “smarter” than belief? Why trust the authority of our doubts over our present beliefs?
The second double-standard has to do with taking the dark valley of doubting more seriously than the mountaintop experiences of clarity. When we have times of deep doubt, we should ask: Have we forgotten very clear, supernatural evidences of God’s work in healing or other very obvious answers to prayer? Are we negating solid intellectual answers to, say, the problem of evil when we are suddenly feeling the emotional weight of certain evils—a friend’s suicide, the loss of a child in a drowning accident, the onset of cancer in our own bodies? The English artist and missionary Lilias Trotter once said: “Believe in the darkness what you have seen in the light.”3 During times of stability we should further anchor our faith by exploring the solid supports of the Christian faith; we should pay proper attention to the previous clear evidences of God’s presence and working.
Let’s stay focused on the problem of evil a bit longer. Various people will react emotionally to the problem of evil and give up on God—when in fact the Christian faith offers us the most robust answers to the problem of evil. Without God, we have no standard by which to judge something as evil. And what is evil but a departure from the way things ought to be. Now if God doesn’t exist, why think that anything ought to be a certain way? Things just are what they are. In addition, without God, we have no salvation or rescue from evil. In the Christian faith, the Son of God entered the world and experienced suffering and injustice himself. Besides identifying with us in our human frailty and the battle against temptation. He came to die in order to overthrow the powers of evil, which would establish a renewed physical creation which has no tears, no suffering, no evil. Furthermore, without God, there is no solution to injustices in the world. The Hitlers and Stalins of the world get away with murder while many unnoticed sacrifices and righteous endeavours—like those of Mother Teresa—are not rewarded in the end. Everyone ends up in the same place. However, the existence of God guarantees that cosmic justice will be done and that the moral and spiritual ledgers will finally be set in order. G.K. Chesterton was on to something when he wrote: “When belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him; but in heaven’s name, to what?”
The third and fourth double-standards are the “external” ones. A third double-standard is assuming we believers have a special burden of proof that the skeptic or critic doesn’t. Many believers take for granted that the burden is on them to make the case for God and to answer all the objections. Meanwhile, the atheist can just sit back and evaluate the Christian’s reasons for belief in God. The problem here is that every person—including the atheist, skeptic, or agnostic—has a worldview with its various assumptions about the nature of reality, ethics, knowledge, and life’s meaning. Everyone takes a stance both in theory and in practice, and everyone makes claims that need to be justified. To assert one’s belief is not to justify it.
What’s more, we will regularly meet critics who borrow heavily from the resources of a biblical worldview in order to hold together a belief-system that would otherwise be stark and unlivable. They assume the reality of human dignity and rights, moral responsibility, right and wrong, purpose and meaning which somehow emerged from purposeless, mindless, valueless, impersonal, material origins! Every adherent to a worldview makes truth-claims or takes a stance on things—not just the Christian. So all of them stand in need of justification and cannot escape intellectual scrutiny.
A fourth double-standard is when atheists or skeptics let themselves off the intellectual hook far more readily while holding the believer to a much higher standard. On the one hand, the critic of belief in God might demand “proofs” with stringent requirements with no room for error. On the other hand, they’ll allow themselves much more latitude when it comes to accounting for beauty, consciousness, rationality, free will, moral values, human dignity—as well as the beginning and fine-tuning of the universe. They’ll say, “These things could have come about from non-rational, nonconscious, purposeless, valueless processes.” But do the critics apply the same lofty standard to anything they themselves believe? Or are they operating by a double standard? They typically won’t allow that God could have been responsible for these phenomena. So the believer will be accused of something like a “God of the gaps” idea (i.e., God plugs the holes of our ignorance, which science will eventually explain). Very often, we have a “naturalism/atheism of the gaps” explanation: a God-like being couldn’t be behind these phenomena.
Naming the Doubts
“Doubting” can be a vague thing. So we should consider the species of doubt we’re facing. Is its source intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, or even physical? Sorting out what kind of doubt we’re dealing with is very important. Let us briefly address them.
First, there’s what we could call physical doubt. This has to do with doubting that arises from not being at our physical best. One Yale grad wrote about his university experience that when he would have doubts about God’s existence, he would get some rest to regain an inner equilibrium, and the doubts tended to dissipate. When we’re not at our physical best, we may be more susceptible to doubts.
When doubting is intellectual, the doubter should explore rational or evidential reasons for that doubt as well as the array of resources to address it. Rather than advocating a blind leap, the biblical faith presents itself as a knowledge tradition. That means, it takes truth and evidence seriously: public “signs and wonders” (Acts 2:22), eyewitnesses (1 Jn. 1:1), rational discussion (Acts 17:2), giving a “defence” (1 Peter 3:15). Personal trust (faith) in a God who reveals himself is not opposed to having strong reasons for his existence, the Scriptures’ historical reliability, the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, and for the plausibility—and the actual occurrence of—miracles. Today more than ever, ample supports and defences of the Christian faith are available.4 We could also add that the gospel offers existential or practical resources to address our deepest longings as human beings: dealing with guilt or shame and the need for forgiveness and freedom from them; overcoming the fear of death; having a longing for security and significance; seeking true purpose and meaning in our lives.
Some doubt may be emotional. Some people perpetually respond to plausible, well-articulated intellectual answers about the Christian faith with “Yes, but what if…. ?” If so, they will likely never be satisfied with any solid answers. Why not? Perhaps experiences with a negative or absent father-figure incline them to doubt a heavenly Father’s existence and care. These anxieties and insecurities may require counselling and a loving community to address them wisely and lovingly.
Moral doubt about God or objective moral values (right and wrong) may spring from immoral actions. Perhaps the doubter has started sleeping with his girlfriend and suddenly begins to doubt God’s existence or even becomes a moral relativist. Author Aldous Huxley frankly admitted his desire for sexual freedom and easily constructed a philosophy to support it, thus trying to keep the Cosmic Authority at a safe distance.
Spiritual doubt can be the result of struggles and discouragements with sin and failure—perhaps feeling accused by Satan and his hosts (Rev 12:10). Here we—sinners all—must recognize that our own efforts could never bring acceptance before God; this can only come through Christ’s work on the cross (Rom 15:7). The greatest and godliest of saints are those who, like Paul, see themselves as “the chief of sinners.”
While more can be said about dealing with doubts, perhaps these reflections will help bring issues of doubt into clearer focus and help us deal with doubts wisely and constructively.
Paul Copan (Ph.D. Philosophy, Marquette University) is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach, Florida. For six years, he served as president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. He is author and editor of over thirty books, including works such as An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, When God Goes to Starbucks, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Creation out of Nothing, and Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues, The Zondervan Dictionary of Christianity and Science, A Little Book for New Philosophers, and The Kalām Cosmological Argument (a two-volume anthology). He has also contributed essays to over thirty books, both scholarly and popular, and he has authored a number of articles in professional journals. In 2017, he was a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University.
Paul and his wife, Jacqueline, have six children, and they reside in West Palm Beach, Florida. His website is www.paulcopan.com.
Endnotes:
- Avery Dulles, A History of Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (Ignatius Press, 2005), Note: Some material in this article is adapted from Paul Copan, “Learn How (Not) To Doubt,” The Gospel Coalition (April 17, 2017): https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/learn-how-not-to-doubt/.
- Confessions, 11.12.14.
- Lilias Trotter, A Way of Seeing: The Inward and Outward Vision of Lilias Trotter, ed. Miriam Huffman Rockness (Naples, FL: Oxvision, 2016), n.p.
- In addition to popular-level and scholarly books defending the Christian faith that can be located at my website (www.paulcopan.com), see philosopher William Lane Craig’s comprehensive apologetics and philosophy website www.reasonablefaith.org. For those starting out, see B&H Academic’s Apologetics Study Bible, 2nd edition (2017).