Faith, Doubt, Knowledge and Truth 

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.

Hebrews 11:1

Recently I was talking with a pastor friend from Sacramento area. He told me how in his capacity as a swimming coach, he had gotten involved a conversation with one of the parents, and somehow the conversation gotten around to Bart Ehrman and his bestselling book Misquoting Jesus. This young father was in enamored by Ehrman's books and especially his approach to the study of the Bible and early Christianity apart from the presuppositions of faith. My friend challenged the unspoken assumption that such an approach was somehow more objective and scientific and to be trusted than proceeding from an acknowledgment some kind of precommitment. His challenge brought the young father up short. He pointed out that Ehrman is not proceeding from a neutral perspective of a truth seeker. He is proceeding from a heavy commitment to unbelief (in the sense of disbelief in the truth of historic Christianity). Rather than being open to the possibility that the ancient texts might be historically reliable Ehrman proceeds from a presupposition that they are not. Ehrman is a good scholar, but all scholars operate from a set of presuppositions that guide their research and affect to a greater or lesser extent their conclusions. These presuppositions show forth in his stating conclusions designed to shake the confidence of believers. Ehrman has been criticized loudly and at length by other non-Evangelical and even non-Christian scholars for this tendency, yet he continues to use these tactics with audiences who are vulnerable, while he backs off when talking to scholars.

This brings up the wider question of the nature of truth and knowledge. Since the Enlightenment (roughly A.D. 1650-1800) Western thought has been governed by the presupposition that there is objective knowledge that is available to all reasonable human beings. And that a presupposition of commitment to a faith of one kind or another endangers the objectivity of the individual. (This commitment to radical objectivism is normally accompanied by a materialism that insists that reality is only material—there is no transcendent spiritual reality).

The target of the postmodern revolt against is this Enlightenment/modern commitment to neutral and objective truth. The very concept of objectivity is an illusion. The postmodern critique is, I am convinced, on the mark. (Although the Postmodern answer of radical skepticism of any truth outside “me” is also fatally flawed.) For us as finite human beings there is no God’s-eye view, no cosmic spectator’s gallery, no “view from nowhere.” There is no neutral place where we can all gather and looked at raw objective data. The reason is that all of our knowledge is filtered through a lens, a way of looking at things that we have learned through our language or culture and through our experiences. No one is exempt from these influences. We human beings are, as evangelical theologian Alister McGrath has observed, “condemned to history.”

The idea of “objective facts” in the way that phrase is normally understood is according to Alistair McIntyre an illusion. He states: “Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.”

In the same vein, philosopher of science Michael Polanyi has shown that there is an equivalence between faith and doubt. When we hear this, we wonder how in the world this could be true. In our experience we see faith and doubt as the opposites. But Polanyi has demonstrated that t o doubt one thing is at the same time to believe something else!

The idea is that the person who employs the principle of doubt, allowing only the proven facts of public knowledge, will not be deceived by "mere belief." This position when rigorously applied leads to radical skepticism and engenders pride in holding no knowledge as opposed to naively trusting dubitable claims. This whole program is logically fallacious, for as Polanyi has shown, doubt and faith, contradiction and affirmation are, from the perspective of formal logic, logically equivalent.

The skeptical statement 'I doubt THAT' can be restated in a positive form: either ‘I believe not THAT'or ‘I believe THAT is not proven.’ But these statements provoke the question, ‘On what basis do you believe this?’ The answer to this question reveals a framework or support structure of belief that cannot be doubted while at the same time doubting THAT. This structure provides the conditions of doubt but the structure itself is not doubted. Were it doubted the ground for doubting THAT would be removed.

Thus every doubt has a fiduciary structure (i.e. relating to, or involving a confidence or trust ) and is rooted in a set of faith commitments which for so long as they support the doubt, cannot themselves be doubted.

The branch upon which every doubt sits is a belief. To insist on chopping this branch off in the misguided attempt to assume a wholly uncommitted position can only result in self-referential destruction, as the initial doubt itself falls to the floor.

To shift the focus of our doubt means to shift the focus of our faith commitments. The whole enterprise of doubt rests on an uncritical acceptance of and reliance upon a whole framework of meaning. So, doubt is not an objective process. Rather it is highly subjective and rooted in all sorts of commitments beyond the awareness of the doubter. So then, the act of doubting is not avoidance of unproven beliefs. The doubt itself rests upon unproven belief. If one is to commit oneself to the principle of doubt he must ultimately either be reduced to silence, since nothing at all can be proved, or he must be willing to move from one belief structure to another in order to associate himself with any unproven beliefs.

I know this may be a bit technical, but I do think that it is important. In our communities doubt is viewed as the enemy—the opposite of faith, yet faith by its very definition involves putting confidence in the unseen whether God (whom we have not physically seen), or in our friends, family or even spouse (whom we know by how they have acted, but into whose hearts and motivations we cannot directly gaze).

We could go any of several directions at this point. The contrast between absolute certainty and abject unbelief is a false dichotomy. The level of certainty demanded by the skeptics is impossible outside the field of mathematics. We live in a world of contingency, possibilities and probabilities. We cannot prove the existence of God. That is a commitment made on evidence which falls is short of absolute proof. We cannot prove the inspiration of the Scriptures. Again, we trust the evidence as pointing to their divine provenance, (and here there is an intangible—the witness of the Holy Spirit,) but this is not proof in the sense of scientific objectivity (which I believe is an illusion anyway in any case).

To come around to the starting point—the skeptic is not a neutral observer, not a white-coated scientist collecting objective facts and drawing conclusions. He is operating from a set of assumptions which he does not question. He is playing the same game as the believer, only he believes different things.

It is this of which we need to be aware: there is no neutral ground.