How Doubt Prevents Smugness

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My friend, Terry Bruce, recently reminded me of a sort of tongue-in-cheek creed of journalists: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

Those words, in fact, were on a sign a reporter had fixed to the side of his desk in the newsroom where I worked. It was a daily reminder that in writing and reporting – and in life – nothing should be taken for granted.

A mother’s pledge of love, of course, can’t be “checked out” like the words of a politician or the unfulfilled promise of a corporation. And it’s not subject to the scrutiny you might expect of a scientist.

Few people doubt their mother’s love, however. A mother “proves” her love through her affection, her actions on our behalf and her steadfastness, sort of like the way our relationship to God is described by traditional religion. And sort of like the way we can’t “prove” the beauty and value of art, music, philosophy and nature.

Goes Beyond

Faith provides a way of looking at the world and of our place in it that, though not contradictory to science, goes beyond the need for “systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses,” the classic definition of the scientific method.

That’s not to say there’s no evidence for the existence of God. It is, in fact, gathered in a way similar to how scientific evidence is often gathered: by observing effects rather than direct observation.

An example in science are the methods used to determine the existence of black holes in space. According to Wikipedia, a black hole is “a region of space-time where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light — can escape from it.”

Surprisingly, the existence of black holes was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. His hypothesis was observationally confirmed afterwards by Edwin Hubble and others.

The late Giles Fowler
Journalism Prof
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In other words, Lemaitre proposed the existence of black holes by seeing their effects and speculating that black holes must exist. Only later did direct observation prove him correct. And from the little I know, that’s not unusual in astronomy and other sciences. Inferences are made from observations, which are confirmed, or not, through direct evidence.

With the eyes of faith, people can see the effects of God’s existence all around us, in nature, in the goodness of others, and if we’re lucky, in occasional direct encounters with God through prayer. And we have the evidence of the testimony of millions of believers through the ages. Faith is like the microscope or telescope that allows us to “see” below and above the surface of life.

Whether to accept God’s invitation to faith is a choice, however. Many people appear to ignore the invitation - like discourteous people who don’t respond to wedding invitations - or put off making a choice. And many prefer a view of the universe as a cold, impersonal entity in which humans are like evaporating clouds, or dust in the wind.

Chemical Scum?

Stephen Hawking, the famous British theoretical physicist and cosmologist - whom you have to admire for his dogged fight against the cruel disease that eventually killed him - described humans as “chemical scum on an average-sized planet, orbiting around a very average-sized star, in the outer suburb of one of a million galaxies.”

With all due respect to Hawking’s brilliance, people of faith can’t accept that description. Despite widespread skepticism and cynicism, we know that we’re a family caressed daily by a loving father/mother.

But what about doubt? Can believers really be believers and doubt his/her faith?

How can they not, just as people who are indifferent or hostile to faith have doubts about their views? Doubt is part of the human condition. It’s also part of what keeps believers from being smug or lacking empathy for people who don’t believe.