Origin of Doubt

Jay: To get us started, here are some random quotes about doubt from the Internet:

• Doubt is too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
• Seeking to know is, only too often, learning to doubt.
• Faith that does not doubt is dead faith.
• Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

We’ve been looking at “good” doubt, that enhances faith, and “bad” doubt, that destroys it, through the eyes and example of Job. When we reach a crisis of faith, how do we transition to good doubt and not bad doubt? Does it have anything to do with the origin of our doubt? If so, understanding the origins might help our doubt advance along beneficial as opposed to destructive lines.

What might those origins be? Could they hark all the way back before the Fall from the Garden of Eden? Genesis 2:9,16-17; Genesis 3:6-8,10; and Genesis 3:22-24 tell us:

Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.… The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened [key phrase], and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.… He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid [I began to doubt?] because I was naked; so I hid myself.”

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” [so god has a problem with others having immortality]—therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.

I draw three questions on the basis of these passages:

1. Were faith and doubt necessarily present in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, or only necessary on Earth after the Fall and as a result of the Fall?
2. If they were not present pre-Fall, how can we retrieve that state? Can we get back and if so, how?
3. Do these passages tell us anything about good vs. bad doubt?

Harry: At face value—the value of the words of Genesis alone, shorn of the spin we have learnt or been taught to put on them—the Garden is replete with doubt. To be “crafty” and to challenge the word of god as it did, the serpent must have had less than complete faith in god. It then contaminated Adam and Eve with the same doubts about, and challenge to, the authority and power of god’s word.

But (and again, these are essentially the words of scripture, not an inference) they were not thrown out of heaven because of their doubts about god: They were thrown out because, once their eyes were opened to good and evil, god did not want them to become immortal. Those are what the words of the scripture tell us, plainly and simply. Now, we may infer that perhaps god knew they would do evil once they knew about evil, but but it is hardly an inference to say that there certainly was doubt in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.

And, by the way, the doubt seems to have been bad doubt insofar as it destroyed at least some of Adam and Eve’s faith.

Chris: God planted the tree of knowledge and then put it off limits in order to allow doubt to exist. It was the only way he could put Adam and Eve’s free will to the test. Their choices were: Do god’s will by obeying his command not to eat of the tree, or do their own will. Doubt was part of the plan.

Pastor Ariel: We still need to define what it is that we doubt, what is our doubt about, before we can determine whether it is good or bad doubt.

Jay: Doubt arises when something that once made sense no longer does so, or when a personal, family, or community crisis strikes. What we are doubting is whatever it is we once thought was certain and true. Whether that can be distilled to a single essence of doubt is a discussion I hope we will have.

Robin: Adam and Eve had no scripture to doubt. They were doubting god’s word in the light of what the serpent told them. They chose to believe that god was trying to keep something of theirs from them. God was not afraid of Adam and Eve becoming immortal, he was afraid of them learning evil when they had known only good.

Kiran: Faith existed before the Fall. Adam and Eve had to have faith in god in order to accept his strictures about the Tree.

David: Bible stories like Genesis are riddled with inconsistencies. For example: Adam and Eve must have been mortal to begin with, since they never apparently ate of the Tree of Life, even though it was not forbidden them before the Fall. To the extent one believes scripture to be the literal word of god, then such inconsistencies can and do cause people eventually to doubt the entire religion on which the scripture relies, and to doubt the god described in that scripture. Rather than do what Harry does—take the words of scripture at their face value, at great risk of developing doubt—religion tries to analyze the stories and put various spins on them to make them conform to that religion’s scripturally bound views.

Daoist philosophy posits the existence of a Way—The Way, a force of nature that just is, that cannot be denied, and that cannot be changed. The wise, the kind, and the just do not seek to understand The Way or try to make it go their way. Rather, they strive simply to follow The Way, to go where it takes them. This is the same message as “Thy Will Be Done.” But in my (admittedly limited) reading of Daoism, there is no discussion of doubt, of whether The Way exists or not. The Daoist is expected not to have faith in The Way but to know that it exists. Scripture, on the other hand, encourages us to become obsessed with the concepts of doubt and faith.

The god I believe in does not speak to people. It is a force, a power. We cannot possibly understand or communicate with it. But we can observe it, and we can choose to let it carry us along or choose to fight it. In the end, its will will be done. The key is the un-doubtable observation that Goodness not only exists but on the whole is more powerful than Evil.

So our discussion of doubt has been intensely interesting, but the more we discuss it, the more I am tending to think that “Doubt” is a spiritual red herring.

Pastor Ariel: The more I read and engage in the bible, the more my dissonance diminishes and harmony grows—in particular, the dissonance of a good god allowing bad things to happen to good people. I have studied and found more dissonance—and, frankly, emptiness—in Eastern philosophies because they ignore evil. We do experience doubt, so a philosophy that says there is no doubt runs contrary to human experience. Eastern philosophy and religions did not answer my spiritual questions, my questions about faith. I find those answers in the bible.

Jay: The story of the Fall is a story of two different realities: A pre-Fall reality and a post-Fall reality. The latter seems to me to be full of doubt, acquired as we traverse and experience life. Could it be that the pre-Fall reality did not have doubt? We are taught that when we reach the kingdom of heaven, there will be no more pain and suffering—so no more doubt. We cannot enter the pre-Fall reality—heaven—as long as we are living this earthly life, but can we at least get closer to it, so that when doubt arises, we grow stronger and more secure rather than weaker and more afraid?

A related issue is whether free-will is a pre-Fall or a post-Fall condition. Before the Fall, man’s will was perfectly aligned with god’s, therefore there was no need for faith or doubt and no need for free will, but that was not so after the Fall.

Harry: To me, doubt is a positive. People can and do have different perspectives on the bible and the writings of other religions and philosophies, but at the end of the day, if god exists, then one has to feel god tugging at one’s heart. There has to be a sense of an inner god. The core principle in people of all religions and no religion is love, respect, and caring for people in need. That’s the proof of god’s existence, not scripture. My doubts are not about god, but are about the inconsistencies of the bible. But that’s just me. We all find a path that we are comfortable with.

Don: Are we born with faith, and if so, what kind and stage of faith?

Chris: If we were born with faith, there would be no reason for babies to cry over hunger or a dirty diaper—they would have faith that they would be taken care of. By being born with doubt, we have the opportunity to experience faith growth.

Pastor Ariel: The bible says that the capacity to believe is in everyone’s heart, that god gave everyone a measure of faith. But if you don’t believe in that scripture, then I don’t see how one can answer Don’s question, or other important questions.

David: I agree. The bible gives us concepts that do not exist in Daoism, so there is no Daoist answer to Don’s question. The question is unintelligible. If doubt is a meaningless concept, then so is faith. To me, god is Goodness, and I believe we are all born with a measure of Goodness inside us. We’ve been calling it the inner light. This, to me, is the only meaningful concept—not faith. You can see it clearly in children, who are born with innocence and a near-certainty of love and protection but soon, alas, start to lose it. To doubt god is to doubt Goodness, and its inevitable corollary is to have faith in evil.

This is not to say that the bible does not contain great truths that resonate across all major religions and mystical philosophies including Daoism, such as “God’s ways are not our ways.” To accept that god’s will be done is to follow The Way. There is no difference. The problem and the difference arises when we use scripture to try to define the will of a god whose will, we all here seem to agree, is essentially unknowable. We try to map The Way so we can follow it, but The Way cannot be mapped.

That’s what causes the dissonance, and it brings us back to Jay’s original question: What causes doubt? It is the very concepts of doubt and faith that lead us to question them, to try to explain and understand them. The concepts of faith and doubt are the cause of doubt. If one does not recognize them as valid concepts, then there is no problem. We are left with just god. With Goodness.

Robin: People must have faith in something. If they cannot have faith in a god, then they will have faith in a philosophy, or a charismatic leader, or themselves. We will always look for something in which to have faith. Philosophy tends to depersonalize god, reducing him to the status of a disinterested force. The bible gives us a god who is personally interested in each one of us, whether or not we return his love, whether or not we recognize the sacrifice of his son Jesus.

God is defined by love, not by his anger and his wrath and his vengeful nature.

Michael: I don’t think we are born with faith. We are certainly not born with religion—that is indoctrinated in us later. We seek the easy certainty of faith because doubt makes us vulnerable, fearful. When children start to ask difficult questions about life, the easy answer is “Because god made it so.” It satisfies their need for some certainty, and might last for a long while.

Chris: To clarify my earlier answer: Faith and doubt go hand in hand. I think everyone has the potential for faith when they are born. Doubt arising from life experiences can then cause that potential to blossom—or to wither. There is a difference between having the potential for faith, and having faith itself.

Jay: In scripture, Jesus calls us back time after time to a child-like state. I agree that we are not born with faith itself, because we don’t need it at that point. We are in good hands. The problem of faith is linked to the intellect, which depends on knowledge, which is the cause of the Fall. Knowledge gives us the capacity to understand good and evil, and this results in cognitive dissonance.

The essence of faith is belief in things unseen—belief that the dissonance is not real, it existss only in our limited minds. It is belief in the statement that god’s ways are not our ways. Knowledge is what makes us need faith. The younger we are, the less knowledge we have and the less cognitive dissonance we have. The older one gets, the more one needs faith to counter the growing cognitive dissonance. A father can punish a child without in the least destroying the child’s faith and trust in him and love for him.

David: Faith is an intellectual construct. One needs to develop some level of intellect to have some level of faith. Our pre-Fall state, our natural state, the state we aspire to return to, is simply to be one with god. The development of faith—and doubt—is a function of our creation and intellectualization of concepts that don’t exist in that perfect state of oneness with god.

I think most of us are in agreement that the answer to Don’s question is that faith does not exist in the newborn child because faith is not needed in the newborn child. It is a meaningless concept to the child.

Don: The story of the  Fall with which Jason began this discussion gives us great insight into today’s topic. Before the Fall, the operation of the Garden was all in god’s hands. Adam and Eve had little to do, except to obey god’s will. They did not doubt, they did not need to doubt.

Jay: Clearly we shall be returning to this topic!

* * *