Faith and Doubt

The pastor at the church I attended yesterday spoke during her sermon about Mother Teresa. There has been much discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the revelation that Teresa underwent long periods of questioning and doubt. Citing Saint John of the Cross's description of "the dark night of the soul", the pastor suggested that it is likely that most people of faith will undergo similar feelings of spiritual emptiness or an isolation from God at some point in their life. I agree.

It seems perfectly natural to doubt the existence of God. I would argue that God is not a being in the sense that you and I are, but rather a kind of meta-reality, a way of describing that which encompasses, defines, or frames the everyday reality that we experience. You can't talk about God in the same way that you talk about objects or beings in the everyday world that we experience; God is therefore an inherently untestable hypothesis. God is a way of thinking about the world. And ways of thinking about the world are unprovable; they are inevitably fraught with uncertainty.

I think we need to talk about the different kinds of religious doubt. There is doubt--and then there is doubt. Questioning the existence of God is one thing; questioning certain kinds of tenets of a particular faith is another. Many religions incorporate belief in miracles as an essential tenet of the faith, and in the modern world, that is a surefire way to inspire a certain kind of doubt. It is one thing to doubt the existence of a philosophical meta-reality that serves as the ground of being, because that is a kind of poetry that guides our existence rather than something empirically verifiable. It is another thing altogether to doubt the historical validity of purported events that defy our understanding of how the world in the here and now actually works. Miracle stories are legitimately subject to not just doubt, but outright rejection, because they contradict the reality of the world we experience.

All of which is to say that while I think that doubting the existence of God is perfectly reasonable for people of faith, I also think that believing in God is itself also a perfectly reasonable thing to do. On the other hand, I think that it just defies human reason to believe that, for example, Jesus walked on water or was resurrected from the dead. We are all children of the enlightenment. When Christian apologists insist on the literal resurrection as an "essential" of faith, it is no wonder that so many people, assuming that to be religious you also have to be credulous, just throw up their hands and leave organized religion behind them.

The Catholic Church, which is likely to confer the official status of sainthood on Mother Teresa, requires miracles to be attributed to a candidate before they can be considered a saint. It isn't good enough to have fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless; no, in order to be a saint, you also have to be a magician. In practice, this means that some miraculous cure has to have been attributed to the saint candidate; this is because miracle cures are the kind that take place at the microscopic level within biological processes that lie beyond the watching eyes of skeptics. Nobody believes that modern people ever walk on water, because that would be too obvious and easy to disprove, but there is nothing obvious about a miracle cure of a disease. In any case, I'll take take someone who feeds the hungry over performing magic tricks any day of the week; and by that criterion, many people would consider Mother Teresa a saint, regardless of what the Catholic Church's criteria are.

I recently ran across the transcript of an interview with John Shelby Spong. Spong was nice enough to grant this interview to Scott Stephens, but the generally friendly tone of the dialogue stands in contrast to the blistering attack against Spong that interviewer Stephens issued in his own blog. A lot of people have criticized Spong for various reasons, and while I have my own disagreements with him, I think that the real problem that a lot of people have with him boils down to his views on the miraculous. In the interview, Spong says:

...there has been another revolution that changed the whole way that we see the world, and Christianity has got to redefine itself in terms of this new world. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo destroyed the dwelling place of God above the sky, and in effect the theistic definition of God with it. After the destruction of this God, we’ve got to find a new way of talking about God beyond theism. The only alternative to theism that our world seems to know is atheism. We’ve got to find a way of getting beyond that opposition. We’ve got to find a new way of talking about God.

Spong goes on to talk about the people who shaped his thinking, including Tillich, as well as "Isaac Newton, who showed us that the world operates according to very precise natural laws." Spong then says, "There’s not much room in the world for miracles and magic."

I think he is right on that point. I can criticize Spong for being vague on what alternative he proposes for what he calls "theism". I can criticize him for being caught up in obscure, revisionist theories (such as those of Michael Goulder) and then defending them with dogmatic certainty. I can criticize him for sometimes coming across as arrogant. But as much as I may disagree with Spong from time to time, I give him credit for trying to liberate Christianity from the miraculous. To me, that is the most important part of what he has to say. And I think that this is what sets people off the most, because he is quite blunt about this element of his message. While Marcus Borg also leans heavily against the miraculous, he expresses his views in a softer tone. Spong, on the other hand, takes no prisoners.

And yet, on this one point, I sympathize with Spong's approach. As a child, I was always interested in science. I was also taught to believe such things as that the Bible was inerrant, and that Genesis was a literal depiction of the creation of the earth. At some point, something had to give between believing in the rationality of science and believing in the miracle stories of the Bible. It took me a long time to realize that one can believe in science and reason, and also be a person of faith. Rational thinking has always been important to me, and I've never gotten over my resentment that the Christian faith is presented as one that requires one to suspend their disbelief over things that no reasonable person in other contexts would ever believe. For that reason, despite my disagreements with Spong, I still think he has something important to say.

And for me, it is also important not confuse disbelief in the miraculous with doubt about God. The two are not the same thing.