I am currently reading an interesting book, entitled Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2003. In a brief comment I found from the author, she said she was writing a history of atheism, but her publisher decided that such a title would limit the book to religious doubts only, and they had something broader in mind. Nevertheless, what Hecht has produced in fact is a history of atheism, beginning with ancient Greece, moving to the Bible, to various eastern religious experiences and texts, up through the very beginning of the 21st century. It is an interesting book, written well, and filled with fascinating material.

For the purposes of my essay today, I am taken by the struggle Hechts publisher had to title her work for their particular purposes. They chose doubt over atheism, assuming that doubt is the broader, thus more widely engaging, title. My concern has less to do with the publishers decision than with the connections between the word doubt and atheism, that the publisher apparently found inevitable. May I respectfully disagree. Far from doubt leading inevitably to atheism, may I suggest that serious doubt may in fact lead directly to a robust faith. I do not limit my definition of faith to Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Jain, but rather wish to suggest that without doubt, no genuine and lasting faith of any sort is finally possible. Ironically, Hecht has, for me, not written a history of atheism, however much she intended to do so, but has written an introduction to the need for faithful persons of whatever stripe to look deeply and continuously at whatever faith they have chosen to embrace. All faiths must address the reality of doubt, lest that faith become dangerously convinced of its certainties, along with its absolute convictions of its own eternal rightness.

There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds, wrote Tennyson in his poem In Memoriam. I belong to the United Methodist Church, am an ordained member of that church, and we periodically recite one Christian creed or another during our worship services. I have long thought of formal creeds, whether the ancient Nicene Creed or any of the more modern affirmations, as freeze-dried faith statements. They enshrine in their words battles over theological niceties that embroiled churches and their leaders over now nearly two millennia. I believe in God the father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, we say in one famous expression, and immediately my doubts are triggered. Since I had an earthly father who was essentially distant from my upbringing, whose memory for me remains quite problematic, to imagine God as father is painful and not ultimately helpful to me. Besides, there are more than a few biblical references to God as something more than father (see Hosea 11; Isaiah 43; Genesis 1, among other examples). And then there is the word almighty. My own theological struggles have led me to the conviction that I do not perceive God as almighty, but rather as in process, evolving and changing along with all creatures and the universe as a whole. And precisely how my God is maker of heaven and earth causes me to wonder just how that may be understood in the context of the vast and increasing scientific evidence of the origins and formation of the universe.

See the article here:

The Peripatetic Preacher and the Necessity of Doubt - Patheos