For thousands of years we thought Earth was the center of the universe. We thought the sun and moon and stars revolved around Earth. And we thought Earth was stable and unmoving—a firm island of objectivity amid the swirling sea of the cosmos. It certainly looks and feels that way. But now we know none of this is true.
Now we know that we are tiny ants who live in a tiny corner of a massive planet; a massive planet spinning on its axis at a thousand miles per hour, while orbiting the sun at the center of our solar system at 66,000 miles per hour; a solar system flying around our galaxy at 450,000 miles per hour; a galaxy whirling through the universe at a couple million miles per hour.
Do you ever trip and not know why?
In the deep ocean of space, there is a giant. Visible to the naked eye on a clear night in the southern hemisphere, Eta Carinae might be the biggest star in the galaxy—one hundred times bigger and five million times brighter than the Sun. Fortunately, it is located about 7,500 light years away. But if it were to die in a hypernova explosion, it could release a gamma-ray burst so powerful that a direct hit might trigger a major extinction event, the end of our little ant colony—sobering, isn’t it? The death of a giant star—impossibly far away, farther than the mind can possibly imagine—might be the death of humanity. And we cannot do a thing about it.
We thought we were the kings of the cosmos, but now we know we’re ants on a rollercoaster. Now we know the universe is a whole lot bigger—and we’re a whole lot smaller—than we could have imagined. As astronomer Carl Sagan has said, “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” A universe in which there are far more galaxies than people—who would have known?
So we’re tiny and we’re not in control. That does not mean we’re insignificant or doomed to the fixed winds of fate, but as fallen kings of the cosmos living in rapidly changing times, it is likely to make us feel insignificant. The times are always changing, but it certainly seems the times are currently changing at a rate never before seen in the history of the world, with no deceleration in sight. David Kinnaman suggests that a “reasonable argument can be made that no generation of Christians has lived through a set of cultural changes so profound and lightning fast.” In particular, technology has created, for all intents and purposes, a new world. Click a few buttons and in a few minutes you can learn more about the world than previous generations could have hoped to learn in a lifetime. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt claims we now create as much new information every two days as all of humanity collectively created from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.
Our ancient ancestors interacted with a small handful of people each day—their family and perhaps the family who lived in the cave down the street. As technology advanced, social circles widened, and now most of us daily interact with hundreds if not thousands of people. Cars, planes, television, radio, phone, internet—because of them we bump into all sorts of different people all the time, and as we’ve bumped into all these people we’ve discovered that we disagree about many things, some of which are awfully important.
Think of something you would stake your life on, something you believe so deeply you would die for it. No matter what that something is, someone else is willing to die for her belief that you’re wrong about your belief. I suppose this has always been the case, but we’re more aware of it now, and it weighs more heavily on us. We know we’re ants, and there’s no turning back, no putting the genie of hyperpluralism back in the bottle:
Human life in the western world today . . . is characterized by an enormously wide range of incompatible truth claims pertaining to human values, aspirations, norms, morality, and meaning. . . . A hyperpluralism of religious and secular commitments, not any shared or even convergent view about what “we” think is true or right or good, marks the early twenty-first century.
The endless proliferation of truth claims, coupled with our increasing awareness of them, makes the world feel bigger, all the while making us feel smaller. Many people believing many different things does not mean nothing is true (that is, pluralism does not necessitate relativism), but as the beliefs pile up into the heavens, we can’t help but wonder if anyone (God or gods or whatever) is actually at home up there. Maybe we are just making it up as we go.
I once listened to a podcast where a Christian and Christian turned agnostic talked about faith and doubt. The Christian was a brilliant professional theologian whereas the agnostic was an amateur. Predictably, the Christian won the exchanges—all except one.
The theologian had skillfully laid out his case for God and faith, and the agnostic fellow conceded as much and even intimated he would very much like to be a good prodigal and return to faith. But he also knew there were countless Christians (not atheists or Hindus or Muslims) who would not only disagree with the theologian but go so far as to say the Christian theologian wasn’t even really a Christian but a heretic. So how was he to worship God when there was so much disagreement about who God really is and what God is really like, even among those who agree God is Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Spirit? The theologian lacked a decisive response, and I did too. Some questions haunt us, and their ghosts are not easily exorcised.
Like so many, I was in college when I realized I was an ant. The bigness and diversity of the world accosted me. The claims of science and other religions rang in my ears, contrasting voices ricocheted inside my head, the load on my shoulders grew, and my little ant legs buckled. The universe is a heavy thing for an ant to bear.
My son loves our family dog. Her name was one of his first words: Piper. So far as he is concerned, there are no dogs—there are just “Pipers.” We haven’t bothered trying to explain that while Piper is our dog’s name, not all dogs are named Piper. She recently nipped him for the first time, and for a few seconds he didn’t even think to cry. He was too shocked. He had run up and hugged her hundreds of times. He had pulled on her tail and ears. He had crawled all over her. She was his best friend, and his best friend had just hurt him. His watery eyes told the familiar story of innocence lost.
Life is a journey from innocence to doubt. It can travel in various directions after doubt, but it will always venture from innocence to doubt. We embrace the world with the wide-eyed gusto of a child, the world pummels us, and we hobble away bewildered, wounded, and confused.
From the time I had faith, faith was my friend, though I came to it kicking and screaming. I vividly remember walking down the aisle with my little brother at First Baptist Church in Lufkin, Texas. He was going forward to ask Jesus into his heart and be baptized, and while I had no clue what that meant and no desire to let a homeless carpenter live in my heart, big brothers don’t let little brothers finish first in anything, so if baptism was what it took, I was willing to take the plunge. (The commitment runs deep.) But years later, things changed.
I realized I wanted to follow Jesus because Jesus was good and not because my life was bad. “Come follow Jesus because you live a sad, miserable life and will continue to do so; but heaven will be great” was the gospel I heard. It left me moderately intrigued but mostly bored. Fortunately, Jesus didn’t preach this gospel, and in time I discovered that, and I found that faith beckoned me into a life of merciful adventure. Faith was my friend, and then one day it nipped me.
I arrived at college with the brazen gait of someone who just doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know. Ignorance was bliss, and I deflected any and all challenges to my faith with five magic words: “Because the Bible says so.” Yes, there are other religions, but the Bible says Christianity is the truth. Yes, we’ve never seen a dead person walk out of a tomb, walk through walls, and ascend up into the heavens, but the Bible says it happened. Yes, science indicates the earth is very old, but the Bible says it is fairly young.
Those five words worked miraculously, and so long as you don’t think about it too much, they’re all you need. But I thought about it too much and finally made myself ask the question all my “because the Bible says so” answers had been begging all along: Why do we think we can trust the Bible?
For some this question is easy to answer. Point to fulfilled prophecies and corroborating archaeological finds. Assert the Bible is inerrant and infallible and self-authenticating. Believe Solomon affirmed the First Law of Thermodynamics in Ecclesiastes 1:10 thousands of years before Rudolf Clausius and William Rankine stumbled on it. And to some the logic of all this is, more or less, airtight. I certainly used to agree.
But I’ve come to believe it’s all a good bit more complicated than that. For one thing, some of these answers are highly contestable and, worse, deceptively circular. For example, reasoning that we can trust the Bible because the Bible says we can trust the Bible is not really very reasonable. It’s an assertion pretending to be an argument. And this happens a lot when we defend the Bible. We often struggle to answer questions about the Bible because the Bible is what we use to answer most of our questions. It’s like taking off your glasses and trying to inspect them but being unable to do so properly because you can’t see without your glasses. Speaking along parallel lines about worldviews, N. T. Wright says, “When you are questioned about some or all of your worldview, and you have . . . to take [your worldview] off and look at it in order to see what’s going on, you may not be able to examine it very closely because it is itself the thing through which you normally examine everything else.”
On top of that, too much is at stake—we can’t afford to play fair. Better yet, all is fair in the defense of faith.
Sometimes a mild case of doubt pops up and a good night’s sleep will do, but what I was experiencing was far from benign. A potentially terminal skepticism crept through my bones. My doubt was not going anywhere anytime soon.
It is strange that your eternal well-being would be determined by your ability (or lack thereof) to convince yourself that something is true, but in much popular theology, this is, allegedly, the case. Faith is the absence of doubt, and some biblical passages appear to nod in this direction: “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord” (James 1:6-7 NIV). Your faith is measured by the degree of certainty with which you hold your beliefs. Certainty equals strong faith. Doubt equals weak faith.
When we think about faith this way, there is only one acceptable response to having doubt: stuff it down, pretend it’s not there, push it out of our mind and heart so we can feel certain again because that’s what faith is and what God wants from us. It’s certainty or bust. There are a number of problems with this response, and the first is that we are humans, and humans cannot be certain about much of anything.
A little lower than God—Psalm 8 says that’s what God made us. Whatever that is, that’s what we are, but apparently being even just a little lower than God makes a big difference. We are painfully finite creatures who know far less of reality than we could ever comprehend. We peep out into an infinite universe through a pinhole, during a brief space in time, and no matter how long we live and how much we learn, what we don’t know will always greatly outweigh what we do know. These are the facts. So whether we stretch our certainty-lusting hands into the heavens or bury our heads in the sand, certainty will always lie beyond our reach.
As a personal anecdote, I’ve always found that unbelievers are much less offended by the hypocrisy of our morality than they are the hypocrisy of our certainty. Every human, believer or unbeliever, knows what it’s like to fail to live up to one’s beliefs, to fail to embody one’s moral ideals. Moral hypocrisy is a universal experience, so unbelievers can be remarkably understanding of our moral fragility, because they know it too. What unbelievers fail to understand is how we can pretend to be certain of things we obviously cannot be certain of.
In his short but wonderful book How to Think, Alan Jacobs reminds us “there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity.” Put more simply, we should seek to find a balance between being open-minded and closed-minded. Be too open-minded and it’s impossible to live with any settled conviction. Be too closed-minded and it’s impossible to live with any integrity because you are dishonest about the narrow horizons of your own knowledge.
I once spoke with an atheist who told me he would love to hear me explain the coherence of Christian faith, but not until I admitted that, while a believer, I was also uncertain about my beliefs. I asked why and he curtly responded, “Because I haven’t any time to waste talking about something this important with someone who lacks the decency to own his humanity and admit we are two uncertain human beings trying to make sense of mysteries. I know that I am an uncertain human. Do you?” Sadly, at the time I did not, so our conversation floundered on the shoals of my unacknowledged uncertainty (or humanity).
So while we often think admitting our doubt and uncertainty would damage our witness to the world, I am now convinced it would mostly do the opposite. Owning our uncertainty does not make our faith less credible but more credible since it makes our faith more human and thus more honest. We need not overcome our humanity to have faith. So if we want to better fulfill the Great Commission, we shouldn’t pretend we’re certain!
The second problem with the notion that faith is somehow tied to certainty is that it makes us do some very strange things, perhaps the strangest being the virtue it makes us make out of the peculiar psychological ruse that is convincing yourself something is true.
In a college class about deviant social behavior, I met a man who had convinced himself that Bigfoot was real and one lived among the loblolly pines outside College Station, Texas. I do not think I could convince myself of something quite like this, but I do know what it’s like to try to convince myself something is true, and most important, I know there’s nothing particularly virtuous about doing so. We criticize people of other faiths when they pronounce the verdict before really sorting through the evidence, failing to have an “open mind.” When we exhibit the same psychological behavior, tipping the scales disingenuously in our favor so we can convince ourselves we are right, we call it faith. But the ability to convince ourselves is not a fruit of the Spirit, nor will the Bigfoot hunters be greatest in the kingdom of God.
There is nothing wrong with being simple or gullible, but making an absolute virtue out of crass fideism is unwise. As Voltaire allegedly stated, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” Trying to convince yourself that you’re certain of something you know good and well you cannot possibly be certain of is torturous beyond measure, and any God who would leverage anything of consequence on it is, frankly, not a God worth believing in, much less worshiping. And yet many people go through life thinking the healing of loved ones, the answering of prayers, and eternal destinies hang in the balance as they courageously try to “just believe.” It is certainty seeking faith. We convince ourselves because we don’t trust God to convince us.
Once at my church, I preached on the absurdity of certainty seeking faith, and afterwards a sage elderly lady asked me about Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The verse is just vague enough to be interpreted in a number of ways, so context is key.
Hebrews 11:1 provides us with a nonexhaustive description of what faith is and does before the rest of the chapter puts flesh and bone on it. We discover that faith is not the absence of doubt. For example, Abraham and Sarah did remarkable things by faith (Hebrews 11:8-12). Abraham also nudged his wife into the arms of another man because he didn’t trust God to do right by him—twice (Genesis 12; 20)! Then we have Sarah, the woman with the chutzpah to laugh at God for outlandish promises (Genesis 18:9-15). And let’s spare ourselves the comedy routine of Jacob’s faith.
If Hebrews 11 teaches us anything, it is that faith has little to do with certainty and more to do with a willingness to act faithfully despite uncertainty—an idea we shall return to later.
The technical term for what I was experiencing as I sorted through all of this is an “epistemological crisis.” Crises of faith come in all shapes and sizes, but an epistemological crisis occurs when you realize that what you think about the world (your conclusions) isn’t half as big an issue as how you think about the world (your methods). You realize you don’t just have the wrong answer, but you are using the wrong equation. You realize you didn’t just misidentify a specimen on the petri dish, but you need to trade in your microscope for a telescope.
We are hardwired to choose the path of least resistance and seek the least dramatic explanation, so when we get things wrong, we might acknowledge it but remain confident that the way we make sense of the world is basically sound. Our conclusions can be wrong, but our methods are sure. Our microscope is all we need. Oh, we might misinterpret the Bible from time to time, but we can (and should) be certain that appealing to the Bible and nothing but the Bible is the sure and proper way to find the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Sola scriptura! (Scripture alone!)—as our Reformation fathers would say. (To be sure, the best and brightest Reformers knew sola scriptura was a hyperbolic way to say prima scriptura—the primacy of Scripture over tradition—but much folk Protestant theology has taken the hyperbolic slogan hyperliterally and believes the Bible, by itself, can deliver a sure and certain faith.)
And I, for one, really wish things were that simple. I wish all the pieces of a perfect faith effortlessly fell into place as I read the Bible with an open mind and generous heart. But things are not that simple, primarily because the Bible is not and was never meant to be anyone’s ticket to certainty, nor is it “self-authenticating” in the way many would like to think. History has born this out. For example, we Protestants tend to fancy ourselves a particularly biblical kind of Christian, and yet from the very beginning we have not been able to agree how to interpret what the Bible says, even on matters as fundamental as the Eucharist! It’s no small wonder that at last count there are somewhere around forty thousand Protestant Christian denominations. The results are in—the Bible alone has proven every bit as incapable as reason alone in producing the truth, the whole truth, sure and certain.
When the epistemological rug is pulled out from under us and we are confronted with our basic fallibility (or humanity) and the inadequacy of Scripture alone or reason alone or anything alone, we have a decision to make. Some double down on their own certainty and spit into the wind of uncertainty in an attempt to restore the “innocence” that has been lost. We don’t need telescopes! Sola microscopio! This is the basic pathology of fundamentalism.
Years ago, I had lunch with someone trying to double down on his own certainty, though I did not perceive it at the time. He was a smart and kind young man who asked a string of questions about Genesis and the age of the earth and the logistics of fitting all those animals on the ark. I asked him where the questions were coming from and why he found them so concerning, and while he claimed he was searching for ways to convince hostile coworkers, I think, with hindsight, he was trying to convince himself. So I offered him a telescope—some thoughts on how a proper reading of any literature must respect its genre, and how the genre of Genesis’s primeval history is not history in the modern sense. But none of this satisfied him, because he was looking for something else: his lost certainty and innocence. He was looking for a return to a simpler world where he didn’t know he was an ant. I recognized it because I too had lived it. Innocence lost recognizes innocence lost.
What followed is a scenario many of us have seen and some of us have experienced. He rejected the telescope and gripped his microscope so tightly it broke. His desire for a long-lost certainty led him into a season of obsessive apologetics and hyperfundamentalism. Apologetics has its place (indeed this book is an apologetic of sorts), but when it gets manic it is often the death throes of a doomed faith. People accidentally strangle their own faith because they cannot bring themselves to let it go and see if it can really stand on its own—accidental faith suicide. I was not surprised to learn he walked away from faith (because he felt he had to walk away from his hyperliteralized Bible) shortly thereafter. Studying stars through microscopes is a sure-fire way to become resentful of both stars and microscopes.
The other way to respond when we realize the epistemological emperor isn’t wearing any clothes is to accept our basic fallibility and kiss certainty goodbye. This is easy to say yet very hard to do. It requires that both what and how we think about the world will now be more flexible and porous. We do not trash our microscopes, but we learn when to use our telescopes instead. We will pick up other tools along the way, each helping us see reality from a different angle. Learning the art of focusing them all is a dizzying choreography to master. We will be tempted to return to the faux simplicity of sola microscopio.
I know it can be excruciating. When I realized the Bible alone could not provide me with invincible, indestructible, certain faith, I feared I was losing my soul. I pined for a return to innocence. I tried to convince myself that I believed all the same things in the exact same way I always had. But once the doubt really hits, there is no going back. We cannot unsee what we have seen. We are different now, and our faith, if we are to keep it, will be different too. And that’s okay. Don’t be afraid. Don’t turn on the fluorescent lights. Sit in the dark for a while. Pray. Get back to basics. Accept the journey your doubt wants to take you on. Accept the journey Jesus wants to take you on using your doubts: “Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults” (1 Corinthians 14:20 NIV).
I am trying. I am trying to stop convincing myself. I am trying to stop tipping the scales. I am trying to stop using faith to seek certainty. I am an ant on a rollercoaster, and when I accept that and throw my hands up in equal portions terror, bliss, and surrender, the real magic of faith begins.