As a Christian, is it wrong to have doubts?
Jamie Dew: Hey, everybody. I'm Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie: Welcome back to our podcast again, The Towel & The Basin.
Joe: That's right. And so, today, we're taking a look at this question of doubt, and a lot of people doubt. Doubt shows up in the New Testament. I believe, helped me with my unbelief. This kind of thing, we see this all the time, Jesus even talks directly about doubt and so forth. I think where I have a question on this is, doubt is such a common thing, but is it wrong to doubt? Is that a sin exactly, or is that just simply a learning? How should I look at that?
Jamie: Yeah, that's a good question. And that's probably the right way to start with it because doubt seems to me to be an inevitable reality for a lot of people. I mean, and we talk about the various causes of it and everything. But, man, it does seem to be that at some point or another, most people are going to have these kinds of questions. And what ends up happening, unfortunately, I think, is that we tend to moralize these kinds of anxieties. So, for example, imagine little Timmy in the youth group, grew up a faithful Christian, faithful Christian home, has believed these things all of his life. Hits a point in either high school or college where all of a sudden has a whole new cluster of questions. And will come to maybe his parents with these questions, his siblings with these questions, his church with these questions, or any other group of people that, generally speaking, he shared these beliefs with. He begins to explain the fact that he's having these questions.
The response that a lot of people have to these kinds of questions in our minds is to moralize it, and that is to say that it's bad or wrong to believe these things. And then there's guilting and there's shaming and all of those things. And I don't think that's helpful, and we can maybe talk a little bit later about how should we then respond to these things. But there is a sense we just start with this reality. And I think this is part of what makes doubt such a scary issue for us is that when we have doubts, we're often very afraid to admit these types of things to people, especially the more strong a person or group of persons would be in their religious beliefs. We're afraid to admit those things because there is a tendency for some to vilify you for having these questions. So, that seems to be what happens.
You've asked the question, should we do that or is that the right way to do it? And of course, I'd want to say to that, no, that is not a helpful response at all. Look, there's this general sense in which you could say, people just believe what they believe. I mean, for example, I do believe in Christ and I am a Christian. And because I think for me as it just turns out, I just do believe this stuff. Now, there's lots that's gone into that. There's thought development and critical thinking and lots of research and education that's gone into me holding the beliefs that I have, sure. But at the end of the day, I still stand where I stand and say what I say, because I find this perspective to be right and accurate.
Some people don't. They've come through various life experiences that are very different and they have come to feel and come to think very different things. Now, some people will immediately vilify that and say, "Well, yes, that's right, they're letting their feelings get the best of them." Maybe so, but I suspect that's just what human beings do. Our feelings have vastly more control over what it is we end up believing than we would be inclined to admit. At the end of the day, I just don't know that it helps people that struggle with certain types of intellectual questions about their faith to guilt them, shame them, or make this a matter of moral issue. That's probably not what we need to do.
Joe: Yeah, that makes sense. So, given that and the way we feel about doubt and the fact that doubt exists and all that, where does this come from? I mean, even when you really start to look at it rationally, God has given us abundant proof and examples and providence, and he has given us all this comfort like, "I am here with you," and he's given us the spirit to just guide us and direct us and give us that comfort, yet we still doubt. So, where does something like doubt come from?
Jamie: Yeah. Good question. I mean, the real answer to that question is it probably comes from a slightly different place for everybody. Nobody's experience is the exact same experience. So, the things that may cause you to believe, may be different than things that cause me to believe. Or the things that might cause you to have certain questions, may not be the exact same things that have caused me to have questions over my career. So, every one of us being very different, have a wide variety of different experiences and perspectives that shape these things. There are some common denominators.
One thing is just experience and background. And we don't particularly like to admit the role that experience and background plays in belief formation, but it does indeed play a very substantial role in belief formation. Lewis, C.S. Lewis was very well aware of this, and there's a sense in which a lot of his less formally apologetic works and more of his literary works were designed to get at this. And so, you think about any bit of the fantasy types of writings that Lewis writes, they're inherently Christian. You take the Chronicles os Narnia, for example, these are inherently Christian writings that come at these stories from a very Christian perspective and it almost smuggles it in the back door.
And Lewis would talk about what we call plausibility structures, that he recognized that for some people they come from backgrounds and those backgrounds are so intertwined in their experience, that it's much easier for this person to find themselves believing things. And for somebody else who grew up in a very different background, it may be very difficult for them to actually believe some of these things. And so, for those people, he wrote these stories. And these stories were designed to take them into the world of fantasy, where in these worlds there was a different structure. And that structure and frame of reference would give a greater or lesser plausibility to certain beliefs.
And ultimately, it was by getting caught up in these stories that one could be introduced to these ideas and these concepts, that within their own life experience, they might find themselves very closed off to. But within this structure and this framework, they might find it far more plausible. And so, Louis talked about that. I think that all that to say, some of it's just experience and backgrounds that we've had. So, take, for example, a real life circumstance. Imagine the guy that's grown up in the south and in a Baptist church, and let's just talk about a guy that's had a very positive upbringing with maybe his father who was a pastor or his grandfather that was a pastor. And it's been a very positive, not a perfect life, but it's been a very positive life and a very good life.
That person, when they hear the claims of Christianity, might be far more inclined to think that that's true than say some young female that's grown up in a sexually abusive home and is constantly either neglected or abused in various ways. And then for that person to hear some of these claims, it might be harder. Even if it's just pure emotional that's causing that stuff to seem less plausible to them, that's still very real. Those experiences gives shape too, the way that they might be inclined to receive certain types of information or messages. So, I think some of it is that.
I would also point to other variables, obviously, new discoveries challenge previously held beliefs. So, anytime we begin to expand our knowledge in say, science or philosophy or theology or biblical stuff, historical stuff, you name it. Anytime we take on board new data and new information by its very nature, we're broadening our perspective and our knowledge base. And that can, and often does for many people begin to cause new questions to arise that they've never occurred to them before. That's just part of intellectual growth and grasping the whole.
I point to two other things very quickly. One of them would be our finitude. So, look, whether we like it or not, we're finite creatures. We have little brains in comparison to God and we are finite creatures. I've talked about this since my other the podcast, we are finite creatures trying our best to wrap our head around an infinite God. And the question we have to wonder about is, well, just how successful then are we going to be in fully and completely comprehending that being? We won't be. And therefore, always and forever, we will have to grapple with the partial nature of our grasp.
And so, our finitude, we're finite minds, we're fallen minds, meaning, look, our minds are not just limited in their size, they're also broken and twisted in various ways. We don't think the way we ought to think because of as a result of the fall. And then I would also point to a couple other things like you and I, we talked about our experiences and some stuff like that. And so, the finitude of our experience is also a factor in this. And then lastly, I'd point to fatigue. I mean, I've noticed this about myself, and I'll note one other thing in a minute, fatigue and hurt, those kinds of experiences in particular tend to have major effects on the way a person will believe.
And when we don't take good note of that and we tend to those types of things, we may very well be brewing up a recipe for doubt and existential struggle. The last thing I'd mentioned, I said only one more, but I do need to add this one as well is sin. I mean, look, I'll just put it this way. I think in all of our lives, when we are allowing sinful patterns in our lives to persist, always remember, sin always destroys. It's just what it does. And if I'm honest with you, in some of the bigger seasons of doubt and struggle in my life, it's been seasons where I've allowed some sins to creep into my life. I mean, I'm not talking about anything heinous or terrible or anything, but I'm just talking about patterns of thinking that I shouldn't have embraced or something like that, laziness or dispositions.
Anytime you let sin encroach into your life, it's going to have an effect on the way you look at the world. And so, I think these are some of the variables and factors, it's probably for most people, a combination of some of these things. There isn't a one size fits all on exactly what's causing this for every individual person, but these are the kinds of things that generally speaking have an effect on people.
Joe: Yeah. Something you said really stood out to me or a thought from something you said. And I think a lot of times, and we had kind of made a similar point on a different topic in the past, but a lot of times doubt is this singular feeling, so we have doubt. But you can doubt many different aspects. And what you where talking about a minute ago, where how much our backgrounds, or even sin, or all these different levers that we can pull that do this, they all kind of result in this one thing of doubt. And I think a lot of times we can conflate and feel like, "Oh, there's a lot of doubt," when in reality, maybe there's just a little in this area for this person over here. And then that person over there has doubt, but it's a very different kind of doubt. And to me, taken together, I feel like that puts a lot more helpful context around the concept of doubt.
Jamie: Yeah. There's a lot of variables that come into this and cause us and detach us in our confidence from God. So, we have to be honest about all of those variables. Again, I'd want to underscore, we're not the only ones that ever felt this way. I mean, so, circling back, bringing all of those things we just talked about, bring all those things back now to that original question you asked. I mean, how should we think about this? Are we bad people for doubting? And I'd want to encourage no, that's not helpful pastorally, just to help people that are struggling with doubt, but also think about that biblically for a second.
You mentioned in the opening to this when you were framing the question to me, all the different examples of doubt and struggle that we see in the Bible. I mean, the psalmists are regularly asking the question of, "Lord, how long? How long are you going to hold off on redeeming me?" They're asking questions like, "Why do the ungodly people prosper and we struggle like this?" There's a general question there about God's justice. There's a question there about God's involvement or lack thereof, and they're struggling with that.
In the Gospels, there are people that would just own it and say, "Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief." And so, what we find in those places is that, look, when approached with the right posture of heart, God never rebukes us for that. There were some people that came to Jesus, testing him and he would rebuke them. But for the believer that really is trying to hang on, he doesn't rebuke them for that. And I'm struck by the John 11 passage where Jesus has delayed deliberately in coming to Lazarus to redeem him.
And by the time he gets there, not only is Lazarus already dead, but the status of those people's faith is in jeopardy in those moments. They've experienced a hardship. Their emotions are raw. There's a fatigue there. There's a wound there. And in those moments, I mean, they're just stone-cold honest with the Lord. They say things to him that, man, I shutter to think of us ever saying such things to God, like, "Lord, where were you?" I mean, who says that to the Lord? But they did.
And what I'm moved by there in that passage is that Jesus does not rebuke them for asking that question. In other words, he doesn't rebuke them for not getting it. He doesn't rebuke them for have the inability to see the whole terrain and to see everything that he can see. He gets that we don't see what he sees. He gets the fact that we don't know what he knows. He gets the fact that we don't have mastery over nature or any of those other things. And therefore, when those kinds of questions were asked, instead of rebuking him, the Bible says things like he was moved with compassion for them and he wept.
And I don't know. I take comfort in knowing from that, that the Lord gets it. He understands that we don't understand everything, that we don't see everything, and that I am free to be honest with him about how frail I am, even how frail I am about my faith sometimes. So, I think we're in good company for having these moments. Obviously, we want to tend to them the right way. We want to be good stewards of them and honor the Lord with them. But I would say this is just part of what it means to be a human being in the circumstances we're in. It's a very unfortunate but normal experience that we have.
Joe: Yeah. As you said that, I was thinking about, I have two little kids, five and seven. Well, they're almost six and eight now, but still, they're little. And there are plenty of times when they have to trust me. And what I know and see is so much greater than what they know and see, obviously, as an adult and they're not. And the very last thing I would want them to do is hide that from me. I want them to have confidence and get to that level, but until they do, and I really will want them to be able to just lean in on me. And I mean, Jesus makes this point. He says, "You love, how much more so does the father in heaven love?" You know what I mean? You're imperfect. Of course he's going to be so much better than that. And so-
Jamie: That's right.
Joe: ...to me, what you just said brings it all together. He's a good father.
Jamie: That's right, yeah.
Joe: And even though we doubt, it's okay, because he wants our best and we can bring that to him.
Jamie: Yeah, that's right. And the metaphor of a parent and a child is a good clue for us on where to look and what to do when we face these struggles. So, maybe in the next podcast, we can circle back and talk about, all right, what do we do with it?
Joe: Sounds good. Yeah. Well, this has been great.
Jamie: Yeah, thanks man.
Joe: All right, thanks Jamie.
Jamie: Hey, everybody, this is Jamie and Joe again.
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