Doubt means that we are thinking about something. We are dealing with it. We are trying to process it and understand it. Doubting is not necessarily sinful. Unbelief is an act of the will, while doubt is born of a troubled mind and a broken heart. And even the great apostle Paul was discouraged. He wrote about this in 2 Corinthians 1:8: “For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our anguish that befell us in Asia: that we carried a burden beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life.” .” So if you’re struggling with doubt, you’re not alone.
Likewise, people sometimes describe a position of doubt as a scientific attitude. However, while most working scientists will not be ashamed of their skeptical attitude and, in fact, can boast of their questioning ways in many contexts, religious thinkers, especially as theologians, tend to downplay the questioning component. faith in their religion, arguing instead that there are logical and moral aspects. rational ways by which faith can be justified.
In fact, there is a respectable branch of theology, called apologetics, whose stated purpose is to defend the doctrines and dogmas of a religion on the basis of reason and rationality, either to combat those who oppose and dissent, or to persuade uncommitted souls to unite. a particular faith community.
We boarded a plane, trusting in the skill and sobriety of the pilot. This is essentially what we call trust. In many cases, we simply don’t have a choice. Nothing happens by itself, that is, every observed event has a cause. However, the scientific enterprise accepts them as true. These also fall under the category of faith.
People who take note of deaths from natural disasters and fervent unanswered prayers may have a hard time accepting this statement. However, we must understand here that in the scientific field, seeing refers to all the convincing data that one can obtain through the sensory faculties and reason; while in religion it means recognition through intuition and deep conviction.
Some have suspected that it is due to some genetic coding. On the contrary, ardent religious have analyzed the mentality of the unbelievers. Their explanations are often quite simple: The deluded unbelievers have succumbed, they say, to the temptation of the devil, or have fallen under the spell of some evil spirit; that the poor creatures have not yet received the Grace of God, or that the inability to sing the glories of God is a consequence of the bad actions perpetrated in past births.
Many positive things have arisen in human history from both belief and doubt, that there have been great scientists and thinkers who have been men and women of deep faith, and many horrible acts have been committed in the name of Faith.
In these cases, completely opposite effects have been produced. It does not seem to occur to either group that essentially they both share certain common characteristics: both are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that their own understanding of whatever may or may not lie beyond the world of perceived reality is the correct, that there is an implicit arrogance in their attempts to analyze and explain the innermost beliefs of the opposing group, that if one is obsessed with explaining everything, the other confuses experiences of hopes, ecstasies and transcendental visions with physical reality.
These are people who unsympathetically reject all religious narratives about the distant past or their prognoses about things to come in the very distant future, let alone about God and angels and so on.
In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it leads, regardless of any consideration. Do not pretend that they are certain conclusions that are not proven or demonstrable. Corporal punishment for wrongdoing, however unfortunate, is understandable. But burning others at the stake, cutting off their heads or mutilating their bodies because they had different notions of what constitutes God or the afterlife, without the executors having the slightest evidence of the incontrovertible correctness of their own arguments: this is incredible for those who have advanced somewhat from the medieval mentality.
One final thought, along with skeptical unbelievers who tend to think they are the only scientifically enlightened members of the human family, regard traditional believers as misguided, irrational, and worse, there really can’t be a healthy dialogue between humanity. science and religion.