Summary: Doubt is often seen as a threat to faith, but it can actually deepen our understanding of God. True faith is open to mystery, wonder, and the idea that our beliefs should be re-examined. Embracing doubt allows us to remain receptive to the divine rather than reducing God to rigid dogma.
Many people believe that doubt is a deal breaker when it comes to religious faith. As they see it, persons of genuine faith are rock-solidly certain in their beliefs about God and God’s ways, no matter how unlikely, irrational, or even harmful those beliefs may strike others. For them, doubt is a crack in the tower of faith that, unattended, brings everything crashing down. (View Highlight)
At its deepest level, faith isn’t an uncritical swallowing of this or that religious claim. Instead, it’s an attitude of radical openness, wonder, awe, trust, and gratitude, grounded in the intuition that there exists an ultimate reality we can call “God,” and that this reality is benevolent rather than indifferent or hostile. (View Highlight)
Thomas Aquinas, surely one of the most orthodox thinkers of all time, cautioned that anything we say about God is necessarily analogous, not descriptive. When it comes to God, he said, our language simply doesn’t stretch far enough. God is unwordable Mystery. (View Highlight)
The trouble is that many of us resist uncertainty when it comes to religious beliefs, even if that means repudiating the ultimately indescribable experiences that awakened us to God in the first place. We substitute dogma for wonder, ritual for gratitude, and placation for trust. (View Highlight)
Doubt is the daughter of humility, of the chastened awareness that no finite human mind is capable of fully knowing God or of making definitive, once-for-all pronouncements about the Divine. Doubt is receptivity to the always surprising adventure of God. (View Highlight)
more inflexible we are in our religious beliefs, the less we’re able to open ourselves to the ever elusive yet ever beckoning God. (View Highlight)