MysteriousFaith

Is Doubt Healthy?

To simply throw out that “doubt is healthy” is as unhelpful as it is not insightful. Doubt’s value takes on additional meaning when we acknowledge and compensate for those experiences and emotions that have brought us to a willingness to acknowledge our doubt. As just one example, the individual doubting “the church” has to differentiate in their mind whether their frustration has, at its roots, anger over some particular mistreatment, an interpersonal confrontation within the church, a troubling sense of the church’s indifference to those issues you feel it should care about, or most critically, a real sense of detachment from what it is the church teaches and requires for membership. These are all different forms of doubt and need to be viewed differently by those experiencing doubt as well as those counseling others through their own doubts. To leave the church as a whole simply because of a bad experience or a bad relationship is not wisdom; most importantly, it sacrifices critical thinking for a false sense of emotional security. While fair to recognize the failure of the church in the moment you were wounded, this is not license to throw out the idea of church altogether. Such emotions, while fully understandable and ones yours’ truly has experienced, give root to adolescent rebellion and not contemplative reflection on your ideas, what beliefs you hold dear, and why.

It is in learning to discriminate between the natural but reactive responses from a wounded heart contrasted to the deeper probative questions about faith in general, where real wisdom can be found. This real wisdom explores meaning by desiring truth before anything else. What is most important in the process of doubting is that you doubt for the right reason (seeking truth above all else – creedal statements be damned) and that you feed your doubt as objectively as possible recognizing that a bad experience with a particular institution, idea or person is insufficient to disembowel the truth of their statements. They may or may not be right; but if you come into an evaluation of their position angry, all you guarantee is your own lack of objectivity, not your more elevated desire to know truth for its own sake. If man is to take ownership of this world seriously, it is absolutely essential that we cultivate those ideas and philosophies that actually make a positive contribution to the world. No ideology can be exported to a world composed of cultures at various levels of development and states of disrepair without primacy given to critical thinking.

In such a global argument it may not seem obvious why doubt is important. Doubt, rightly handled, is one of the essential tools by which critical thinking can be nurtured and reinforced. Without learning to think calmly, clearly and rationally we will destroy ourselves. The next evolution of human consciousness as reflected in post-revolutionary society will incorporate new advancements in the fields of law, government and politics that will seek to discriminate between ideas that are knowable and those that are not. The next phase of education (again, only in a post-revolutionary society), will elevate critical thinking and certain philosophical training in the interests of allowing the majority of people to participate in an educated and meaningful way in an increasingly complex world. The world looks very dangerous until these things happen and, unfortunately, it may only be possible for these developments to take place after a particularly difficult revolution in our way of thinking and acting.

If we accept that doubt is healthy only when it is not an act of social or parental rebellion, or an act of intentional distancing from the norm in an effort to lower expectations others have in you, or doubting just to doubt, then we must begin to wrestle with whether or not doubt is healthy and if so, how it is healthy. Doubt is healthy for four primary reasons: first, it understands the capacity of human self-delusion, second it illustrates a comprehension of social cascading, third it believes comparisons and contrasts between competing truth claims is essential for genuine knowledge, and last it is a means of getting away from culturally captive truths. Each of these is interwoven with the other and functions best when taken collectively.

Among post-modernity’s few contributions that will last is its appreciation for what constitutes our own subjectivity and its requirement that we acknowledge this subjectivity when arguing for specific objectivity. As simple of an idea as this is, it is of immeasurable help to recognize that our experiences, bound by culture, tradition and time, get in the way of understanding anything as simply as we would like to think. Post-modernity, as a philosophy, is to be thanked for its simple refusal to accept that which is accepted within a particular culture just because it has been accepted before. Taken to an extreme, post-modernity denies that any knowledge of deep truth is possible minus its own truth that no truth is knowable. The lasting contribution of post-modernity as a philosophy is that it has forced us to acknowledge the singular lens of culture and history most of us peer through when evaluating our beliefs. Within the church, the implications to post-modernity are not fully understood even by those who write about it: post-modernity questions the very crutch of the church’s beliefs – tradition. The post-modernity in evidence in the church is skin deep and not particularly helpful; it is deep enough to recognize the equally surface level resistance to the singular truths of Christianity on the part of the secular world whose introduction to the religions of the world has caused them to question the exclusive truth claims of the Judeo-Christian culture they were raised in. What practitioners of post-modernity in the church do not grasp is that what they use to ultimately defend the basis of their faith is that which advocates of post-modernity suggest should be least trusted – truths bound within our particular culture, history, and collective story.

This analysis of post-modernity is helpful because it draws us closer to the first part of healthy doubt, its grasp of the capacity of human self-delusion. No book more profoundly elucidates this topic than Cass Sunstein’s Why Societies Need Dissent. Within this book the political and legal theories for why a free democracy requires a society that protects dissent are married to sociological analysis taking into account the impressive insights sociologists have learned about how belief takes shape and why it lasts as it does. Take the time to read this professor’s review of Sunstein’s book as it touches on the first and second reasons why doubt is healthy:

“If only those complainers would just get in line, then we could get on with the task and be more effective.” Have you ever heard this sort of comment? The underlying assumption is that agreement, cooperation, consensus, conformity - whatever term you want to use - is beneficial for the group. Consequently, those who challenge orthodoxy are deemed to be selfish. Actually, the reality is exactly opposite, according to a readable book by Cass R. Sunstein titled Why Societies Need Dissent (Harvard University Press, 2003). Sunstein says that “Much of the time, dissenters benefit others, while conformists benefit themselves.” (p. 6) … In making the argument that dissent benefits society, Sunstein describes fascinating research on group dynamics. Many findings show how readily people will conform, even going so far as to deny evidence staring them in the face. This propensity to conform leads to social cascades. In one type of social cascade, an informational cascade, people base their beliefs not on what they know themselves but on what other people do or say. For example, most scientists will make their judgments about fluoridation or global warming based on what a few experts say, not on their own independent assessment of the evidence. The same can apply in politics, business and other areas. The result can be an appearance of unanimity when actually the information base is limited. A single dissenter or, even better, a group of dissenters can puncture this cascade and lead to better decisions. Another sort of cascade occurs when people know that a belief is wrong but nonetheless goes along with the majority in order to keep in their good books. … Sunstein says “Freedom of speech provides the key safeguard against senseless cascades. It opens up space for dissent by forbidding government from mandating conformity or from insulating itself, and citizens generally, from disagreeable, unwanted, and even offensive opinions” (p. 96). To this should be added that freedom of speech is also needed inside organizations. It is not just governments that mandate conformity: corporations, schools, police forces and other organizations can be just as intolerant and, therefore, just as prone to poor decision making as a result. Another phenomenon that Sunstein analyses is group polarization. When people in a group deliberate about a matter, they often arrive at a more extreme view than any of the individuals started out with. For example, if some people who dislike the prime minister get together, after discussion they will dislike the prime minister more intensely than before. This can be a dangerous process when juries, executives or politicians are making decisions about vulnerable people. Extremism in religion and politics is fostered by group polarization.” Source: Brian Martin, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/.

For those who have read my review of N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God you will know my primary suspicion as to the historicity of the events of the Resurrection is my belief that Wright does not adequately address and may in fact intentionally downplay the sociological cascading and group polarization that can be empirically evidenced in other systems of belief development. The sociological explanations of religious belief function very well when we apply them to a competing truth claim (as an example, when a Christian explains the origins of the Mormon Church in sociological logic) but are not allowed to function equally well when commenting on our particular belief statements. Seen rightly, an appreciation for social cascades or group polarization do not in and of themselves fully disavow the various truth claims of religion; however, they do provide a reasonable and quantitative tool to use when pursuing truth in the form of healthy doubt. Please hear my emphasis on “quantitative” in the word’s truest sense here – unlike miracles such as the virgin birth or the Resurrection, social cascades – getting people to say they believe what they know to be wrong – can be empirically put into evidence; the mythological claims of religion can not be. For people such as myself when asked to say whether I believe “dead men stay dead” above believing some social effect may explain the early church’s belief in the Resurrection, I have to honestly say the latter makes more sense than the former. Why? Because to believe in the Resurrection I have to believe a social cascade applies to the historical claims of the other world religions but not to my own. It either applies to all equally well, or it applies to none and is a broken tool for investigating truth.

I distinctly remember the moment in my life when I encountered the harsh truth of the third component to healthy doubt: to say “I believe” anything, I would have to do the work of comparing and contrasting it to competing truth claims, specifically those who denied that which I said “I believe” concerning. I was in my car at a four-way stop near my home, and felt the crushing weight of having to acknowledge that my confession that Jesus was God, and was physically resurrected was blind belief because I had never once trained my mind on the possibility that he might not have been either. Again, it is important to reinforce in this dialogue my own searching is a pursuit of truth and I freely acknowledge I may have missed something in my logic or wrestling with this specific question. What I care about most about in this essay is not the question being asked, but the spirit with which it was asked and the reason asking the question itself is important. I fought this idea off heavily and to date have immersed myself in orthodox theologians who function as very effective apologists for these truths. Interestingly enough, what has impacted me most significantly has not been John Dominic Crossan (of whose work I have not yet read one book) or Marcus Borg (of whose work I have read two small books, one being a collaboration with N.T. Wright); what has impacted me most have been my reading and reflection on sociology, philosophy and the underlying lessons they have taught me about critical thinking. Rather than go back to my previous beliefs with new creedal statements (as if I am a sufficient scholar to dispute Wright’s history and advocate Crossan’s), I went back to my beliefs with a new way of thinking. It was this newly found critical thinking skill filtered through reasonable doubt that led me to where I now stand.

Lastly, healthy doubt is a means of getting away from ethno-, socio- and cultural-centric perspectives and ideologies. This idea touches heavily on the implications of post-modernity but adds a deeper appreciation for what happens when we never question what about our worldview is better versus what is simply unique. A good example of this is the difference in the balance between collective political thinking and individual free market ideology as held in tension in China. Such a position would be untenable in America where it is assumed that free market ideology is the greatest ideal and that any form of socialism is bad. In China, healthy socialism is necessary to feed and modernize 1.3 billion Chinese citizens whose leaders have learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union that an overnight embracing of the free market can center wealth in the hands of an oligarchy that quickly becomes as powerful as the government but with much darker motives. The point? That what America values – a free market above all else – is unique, but not necessarily better for everyone everywhere. When contrasting political ideologies it becomes possible to appreciate what the Chinese understand about the greater good, an idea Americans are becoming increasingly distanced from in our pursuit of crass consumerism.

Never easy, doubt is hard because finding objective means of comparing various truth claims is hard. Many times doubt is deemed an act of rebellion when it should be seen as something deeper, a healthy expression of an individual’s desire to own their beliefs and not simply parrot those of the family or culture they were raised in. It is the personal, familiar and cultural costs that explain why this work is sufficiently daunting to be pursued by very few.

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next post: Book Review: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

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• August 8, 2005

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