Believing in doubt

By Ken Burrows

The title of this essay may, at first glance, sound oxymoronic. It is not. Because doubt, properly acted upon, is often a needed step to reach truth. Valerie Tarico, Ph.D., a former evangelical Christian, is one of many who have traveled this path. In her book Trusting Doubt, she describes not only the personal enlightenment that doubt helped lead her to but also the psychological dynamics at work in human beings when they choose to either embrace doubt or refuse it entry into their decision-making about what they believe.

Tarico abandoned an upbringing in “bibliolatry”—the unquestioning belief in the literal inerrancy of Scripture—due to the numerous internal contradictions she found there, the stark violations of proven knowledge, and particularly the inconsistencies of the main God character, who is at one time merciful and just and at other times cruel and capricious. She encountered too many textual pitfalls, too much fallibility in the human writers, too much that did not ring true. She found too much to doubt.

Which led her to explore the question: Why do people believe what they do? She cites research psychologists who have found that humans will take almost any evidence and distort it to support their point of view, especially when they care more about that point of view than about what is really true. Though we say we strive for truth, Tarico notes, our approach as humans is to look for information that confirms what we already believe. “The reason the scientific method is so powerful,” she says, “is that it pits itself against this universal human tendency.” It keeps alive what she calls “one of our greatest gifts: the ever present consciousness that we may be wrong.”

“Belief is powerful,” she says. “It not only changes how we behave, it changes what we perceive: what information gets through our mental filters, how we interpret it.” She cites childhood religion as forming a particularly powerful filter, not just because it’s instilled so early in life but also because there are so many heavenly promises and hellish threats in the Bible that it creates a strong bias to favor religious belief. But she knows from her own experience and that of others like her that “There are people who want badly to believe [in Scripture] but simply find it impossible.” She sees this kind of honest self-awareness as uniquely courageous because it must confront the strong and widespread biases—personal as well as societal—that pressure one to embrace religion.

“We generally agree that belief should strive to reflect truth,” she adds. She notes that even Huston Smith, known as a firm proponent of religion, says wisdom must involve the virtues of humility and veracity. Tarico insists these kinds of values wane when dogma replaces honest inquiry. She contends that righteous certainty, unchecked by self-examination, is dangerous because it eventually “nurtures belief and loyalty at the expense of empathy, mercy, truth, and life itself.”

Tarico describes newfound senses of integrity and liberation many people experience when doubt leads them away from unquestioning religious belief. Realizing that the positive essence of doubt lies in its commitment to an ongoing honest and humble self-appraisal, one “born again agnostic” in her book summed up his position thus: “I would rather live with unanswered questions than unquestioned answers.”

Published in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs Freethought Views column in the July 5-11 issue of the Colorado Springs Independent with the quotation below.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

--- Albert Einstein