As Christopher Lane argued in The Age of Doubt, the explosion of questioning among thinkers in the Victorian era transformed the idea of doubt from a sin or lapse to necessary exploration. Many influential Christian writers, like Calvin and C.S. Lewis, have acknowledged times of uncertainty. The Southern US writer Flannery O’Connor said there was ‘no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe’, but for her, these torments were ‘the process by which faith is deepened’.
Mother Teresa, too, startled the world when her posthumous diaries revealed that she was tormented by a continual gloom and aching to see, or sense, God. In 1953 she wrote, ‘Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started “the work”.’ Yet, through this work, she helped many thousands of people.
Some live quite contentedly with a patchwork of doubt: it is not always torment. Who can possibly hope to understand everything, and to have exhaustively researched all areas of uncertainty? How can we jam the infinite and contain it in our tiny brains? This is why there can be so much comfort in mystery.
Just over a month before he died, Benjamin Franklin wrote that he thought the ‘System of morals’ and the religion of Jesus of Nazareth were the ‘best the World ever saw’. Yet Franklin said he had, along ‘with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity: tho’ it is a Question I do not dogmatise upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.’ A logical pragmatism.
If we don’t accept both the commonality and importance of doubt, we don’t allow for the possibility of mistakes or misjudgments. While certainty frequently calcifies into rigidity, intolerance and self-righteousness, doubt can deepen, clarify and explain. This is a subject far broader than belief in God. The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it best. The whole problem with the world, he wrote, is that ‘the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt’.
Of course, doubt goes far beyond the existence of God to the existence of anything and everything. Intellectual rebellion, air for unorthodoxy and robust questioning should all be part of any open society; and in an era of eroded trust and untrammelled and unapologetic lie-telling, the need for vigorous scepticism becomes even more crucial. This is especially the case for science. My friend Dr Darren Saunders — cancer biologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of New South Wales — said the biggest lesson he got from finishing his PhD was to ‘embrace doubt, and see shades of grey instead of black and white’. Scientists have often been wrong in the past, as have politicians, teachers, priests, principals, CEOs and all sorts of other authority figures, let alone pundits and bloviators whose work in recent years has been marked by a series of poor election predictions. Think of all the stupid things you have been told over time, by a host of misguided fools and well-meaning people. (Although, seriously, if you can’t accept what the vast majority of scientists have to say about climate change, it’s not doubt that is your problem.)
We should also regularly doubt ourselves, and question what has shaped our own thinking, what unconscious biases we might harbour, and whether we might be wrong. All of us have limited understanding of most things, most especially of the lived experiences of other people. It seems so obvious to state that men won’t understand sexism the way women do, straight people won’t fathom homophobia the way the LGBTQI people can, and white people are extremely poor judges of what racism is. Much as we might like to fancy ourselves freethinkers, all of us carry our pasts in our opinions: the parents, suburbs and schools that spawned us; the lessons we were taught that confirmed our conventionality or sparked rebellion. We need to know how much we do not know.
Many of the great thinkers of the Western canon have touted the importance of questioning. If you begin with doubts, you will end with certainties, said Francis Bacon. Or you might at least. When René Descartes discovered some of his own beliefs were false, he decided to rid himself of all the opinions he had adopted and begin again ‘the work of building from the foundation’. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, the Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, who was known as ‘The Great Dissenter’, believed certainty was ‘illusion’. ‘To have doubted one’s own first principles,’ he said, ‘is the mark of a civilized man.’
The mark of a civilised woman, too, is to doubt the wisdom received from men for so long — it’s remarkable how ancient and modern texts alike read differently when women have the chance to interpret them. The mark of a civilised person is to recognise that for a long time what we understood to be history — and theology — was history of the few written by the few, and that the voices and experiences of women, the disabled, the poor, the discriminated against, the queer, the black, the colonised and the ‘other’ have been seen through eyes that never understood what it was like to walk in their shoes, or dance in their bodies, or fight to be free from prejudice. Myths and ideologies have permeated every inch of our written histories, and there is a need for constant rethinking, revisiting and revision to shed stereotypes of the past and allow a full, bustling, diverse experience of history to be heard. We need to constantly doubt what we are taught and what we read.
And the guiding principle remains the same: when in doubt, reach for experts, as well as those with lived experience, and those who have not been heard; ask whose story and truth is being told; probe the gaps in the evidence; go to original sources; burrow into footnotes; coax the shadows into the light; and perhaps even ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought’, as Alfred Tennyson tried to.
‘LET YOUR LIFE BE YOUR WITNESS.’ This is the only place of faith I am really comfortable in now, with those who wish to be a quiet witness of love. The egregious sins and stag fights of an institutional church have sullied its public face and caused harm to countless numbers of people; we can too easily forget that the true church is based on love, and lived out in thousands of little parishes, where people care for each other.
Many of us are more comforted by what is unsaid than said. At the heart of the Christmas story is a baby — God as a naked, poor, newborn refugee; God as utter absence of power. Not a bearded patriarch obsessed with doctrine and church law, but a kid who grew up to teach in parables, then a young revolutionary who was killed for sedition. Who told people to love, to train their hearts to be kind, to let their life be their witness.
Many who don’t attend church or adhere to any particular religion congregate on beaches, in forests and on mountaintops — to experience awe and wonder, to sense a ‘peace that goes beyond understanding’, the ‘sighs that have no words’, and seek ways to bring living light into their lives. Such sites are nature’s cathedrals of awe, places where we can sit alongside strangers in silence and understand what we share; where we exclaim at the firefly or the sea sparkles or the cephalopods because they are signs of the miraculous and they usher in a kind of quiet respect for the fantastic, the improbable and the marvellous, the things we can’t quite believe are real, alongside us, here on Earth, where land meets the sea.