After Certainty

Recently I gave a series of lectures on the relationship between faith and reason. After the last lecture, a university student came up to me, wanting to talk. We found a quiet place to sit down, and chatted for the better part of an hour. Though he didn’t come from a religious background, it was clear he had been wrestling with faith. After all, just as sincere believers often have to deal with doubt, sincere skeptics are confronted with belief. But something was holding him back: “I want to believe, but what if it isn’t true?”

In the lectures I had presented numerous arguments in favor of Christianity and responded to common objections against biblical faith. I asked the young man what he had thought of the arguments, and he indicated that he had found them compelling enough to consider faith in God both plausible and desirable. But he had one last question for me: “Are you certain?”

I told him that I was confident that God exists, that God is good, and that God has provided a reliable revelation of Himself in His Word. I explained why I had found the evidence compelling and that I was confident enough to base my life on it. Yet when pressed, I explained that if by “certain” he meant irrefutable proof that no one could object to, then no, I couldn’t offer that. As Ellen White wrote: “Our faith must rest upon evidence, not demonstration.”[1]

What Do I Know?

I sympathize with the young man’s desire for certainty. After all, I am a mathematician, and mathematics prides itself on being a deductive science that can produce irrefutable proofs. It is tempting to seek that same level of certainty in the rest of life. This was the goal of the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes. In mathematics he made major contributions to geometry, and just as classical geometry is built upon a small number of self-evident axioms, Descartes sought a truth upon which he could construct an unshakable philosophy. He attempted to arrive at this certainty through extreme skepticism, questioning everything he knew, including what his senses told him—might what we perceive just be an illusion or the deception of a powerful demon? After systematically doubting everything he thought he knew, he was left with one truth he believed could withstand all doubt: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum).

But it turns out that neither geometry nor Descartes’ philosophy was unshakable. Later mathematicians showed that one of its key axioms of Euclid’s geometry—the parallel postulate—could be rejected, giving rise to non-Euclidean geometries in which the results of classical geometry, such as the Pythagorean theorem, no longer hold. Similarly, Descartes’ cogito was challenged.

When I study a geometric argument, I may be convinced, but I am not convicted. Yet when I place my faith in God, even with unanswered questions, I am transformed.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche questioned the assumption behind Descartes’ claim that there is a unified, stable “I” that does the thinking; arguing instead that the self is a construct shaped by competing inner drives. Thus he undermined confidence in human reason, suggesting that what presents itself as careful, unbiased reasoning is often shaped by unconscious desires and the “will to power.” This paved the way for more radical skepticism, further developed by such twentieth-century postmodern thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who questioned the very nature of truth and authority. The turn to doubt as a path to truth ultimately led secular philosophers to doubt whether truth could be known at all.

How should Christians navigate doubt in our postmodern culture? First, we should acknowledge that questioning can play a healthy role in the life of the believer when the questions are seeking to arrive at truth rather than deconstruct it. In the book of Acts the Bereans are celebrated because they tested what they heard the apostles teaching to see if it aligned with Scripture (Acts 17:11). And Paul instructs believers to “test all things; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21).

A healthy level of skepticism that leads one to critically examine claims using our God-given reasoning ability, and to compare them against Scripture, can protect against error and deception. But if one embraces a radical skepticism that questions everything, it undermines all truth claims and makes it impossible to “hold fast” to what is true. Such critique subjects even our most basic experiences to a level of scrutiny that no belief can realistically satisfy. How do you know you can trust what you are seeing, touching, and feeling? Perhaps you are just dreaming, or in an artificial simulation? Yet such radical skepticism fails to apply its own standard to itself. What evidence is there to suggest that this is a dream or a simulation? Is engaging in such critique helpful? There are plenty of reasons to question skeptical questioning.

Doubting Your Doubts

To escape the truth-eroding spiral of doubt, learn to doubt your doubts. When you find yourself experiencing doubt, ask yourself: What presuppositions lie behind the doubt? Are those presuppositions necessarily true? After all, while doubts often pose as innocent questions or hypotheticals, they carry with them a host of hidden assumptions. The serpent introduced doubt into Eve’s mind by asking what appeared to be an innocuous question: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1, ESV). But by entertaining the question, Eve implicitly accepted the insidious presuppositions behind it: that God is restrictive, withholding something good, and not seeking the best for humanity. In her response to the serpent she recites God’s command: “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden,” but then adds a further restriction: “neither shall you touch it” verse 3, ESV), revealing that she had already started accepting the serpent’s hidden premise that God is restrictive.

Rather than embrace every question that doubt presents, we should learn to interrogate them. Consider, for example, a common doubt: With so many world religions, how could Christianity possibly be true? Behind that question is the assumption that the variety of religious expressions undermines the truth of any one religion. But does that assumption hold in other contexts? Imagine you are taking a mathematics test and discover that your classmates have given a variety of answers to one of the questions. Does that mean there is no correct answer and thus you should erase your own? Of course not. It might cause you to double-check your work, but the mere existence of other attempts does not invalidate your own. Likewise, encountering other religious faiths may prompt us to reexamine why we believe what we do, but the fact that others believe differently should not undermine our confidence. In my experience, learning about the world’s religions has helped me discover what is distinctive about Christianity, growing my confidence in Christ as Lord while also finding shared values and concerns with those of other faiths.

Yet as we learn to doubt our doubts, we should not expect to have all our questions fully resolved this side of eternity. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Mathematical certainty is the wrong standard for belief in this world. Such immunity from doubt is not only unobtainable but also unlivable. If you demanded absolute certainty of your safety, you could never get into a car or board a plane. But neither could you stay home, for there is some small chance that a car will crash into your house or a tree will fall on your roof. Every day we make dozens of decisions without the assurance of absolute certainty. Reflecting on the uncertainty of life, French mathematician Blaise Pascal concluded: “If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles! I say then we must do nothing at all, for nothing is certain.”[2]

The book of Hebrews defines faith as “the confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (Heb. 11:1, NIV). The lives of the great heroes of faith—from Abraham and Sarah to Moses and Rahab—reveal that faith is not the absence of doubt, but the choice to trust God in light of the evidence of His faithfulness, even in the midst of uncertainty. Faith cannot be reduced to a deductive proof, because God desires more than intellectual assent; He seeks our hearts as well as our minds. When I study a geometric argument, I may be convinced, but I am not convicted. Yet when I place my faith in God, even with unanswered questions, I am transformed. Thus I concluded my conversation with the young man, not by attempting to settle all questions with an irresistible deductive proof, but by inviting him to put his trust in a Person.

[1] Ellen G. White, Steps to Christ (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1956), p. 105.

[2] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, p. 234.