Sometimes I doubt...

This week, while sitting on a hot, crowded and delayed train, I read a book which asked why God would create a world in which suffering was possible. Cue an average Tuesday punctuated by a series of minor existential crises. Yet later that night, as I lay in bed, thought occurred to me: I still believed in God. And what’s more, it took no more effort to believe in Him than it had the day before. I believed, and that was that.

While many Christians, at some time in their lives, will go through periods of prolonged and serious doubts, I suspect that day-to-day doubts like mine are a more consistent part of the lives of most Christians.  Like an Agatha Christie in the middle of an alphabetically-arranged bookshelves, these doubts stand out not because they are commonplace, but because they are exceptional. We doubt, but then, our questions resolved or unresolved, we find ourselves returning to belief. We doubt but still find ourselves convinced.

Not that I have find myself absolutely certain that all of it is true.  Do I know whether God exists? Of course, I don’t. And neither does the Pope. Nor Richard Dawkins, for that matter. No, I find myself in a place of relative certainty. As certain I can be in the absence of definitive proof either way.

And I don’t think we do need definitive proof either way. It’s true that Christians sometimes talk about proof or evidence perhaps in response to people like Dawkins, who once described faith as the ‘belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.’ But while it’s right to emphasise that there are rational reasons for belief in God, the beliefs at the heart of our faith are fundamentally unproveable. While we can prove that Jesus lived and died, the question of whether he died and lived is not something that history can answer easily. Though we can use the unexpected and inexplicable emergence of the belief in the resurrection as a reason to believe in it, we can hardly pass it off as proof. It’s a reason to believe. I happen to think it’s a strong one. But there will always be the possibility of some unknown unknown that could explain the whole thing away. In the end, although reason can guide us part of the way to a belief in the resurrection, it will always come down to a leap of faith. Not a leap into the dark. But a leap, perhaps, into the half-lit shadows of belief.

Despite this, reason can help us deal with my doubts. While I didn’t come to my belief in God through a process of reasoning, I find myself convinced again and again by the arguments for His existence.  And so, whenever my belief in God seems less credible, or I am overly conscious of its weirdness, I remind myself of those arguments. They help me to realise that my doubts are often not usually caused by any resurgence of reason, but by my ever-changing emotions.  

Yes, while we often think of doubts as what happens when we cling on to what we feel to be true in spite of reason, just as often it is our emotions that shape what we find credible. Bizarrely, on a sunny day when I’ve had enough sleep and it feels like everything is right in the world, the existence of God feels more likely. Similarly, when I’m downing my third coffee of the morning, half-asleep at my desk yet unusually aware of all my flaws and the inadequacies of my life, my belief in God feels so much less rational.  But the arguments for believing in God haven’t in fact become more or less credible. They haven’t changed; I have. And so when I remind myself of those arguments, I’m not trying to make them seem more credible. I’m not trying to brainwash myself so that I can, in spite of reason, carry on believing what I want to be true. I’m telling myself to carry on believing, in spite of my changing emotions, what I have already reasoned to be true.

That’s not to say that I don’t have any unresolved issues. I have so many unanswered questions.  It’s been a whole three days since my mini-crisis of faith and I still haven’t sorted out the problem of evil. Just thinking about it for a few seconds is starting to make me feel a little bit stressed. Sometimes, I find even the good bits about Christianity overwhelming. I struggle to understand, let alone feel excited about, the prospect of heaven. While I can get behind the popular conception of heaven as a sort of celestial safety net that is preferable to oblivion, I just don’t connect with the idea that it could be a state of eternal fulfilment. To be honest, I find the concept of eternity vaguely terrifying. I believe, even though part of my doesn’t want it to be true.  

I still try to deal with my unanswered questions. But I know that any other worldview I adopted would come with its own unresolved issues. Take the problem of evil, for example. I find it hard to comprehend why God would allow a world in which evil was possible. Yet I also struggle to see how an atheistic worldview could explain why I find that evil repulsive. Perhaps a basic conscience could emerge as humans who cooperated with each other managed to survive for longer. But how could that explain why we think rape is wrong? In a morality governed by the survival of the fittest, why on earth would sexual consent matter? Rape would be a good, perhaps even praiseworthy thing. And if we could explain every aspect of our conscience using natural selection, why would that evolved morality have any intrinsic value?

There are unresolved issues in any worldview. It just so happens that I find Christianity both leaves fewer questions unanswered and gives better answers to the rest. In the end, I find I still believe in spite of my changing emotions because, while there are moments when I’m not convinced by Christianity, I’ve certainly never been convinced by anything else.