But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
James 1:6
Be merciful to those who doubt
Jude 1:22
To deny, to believe, and to doubt absolutely -- this is for man what running is for a horse.
Blaise Pascal
What in the world is doubt? How is that we skid off the road from time to time and end up in a ditch? As it turns out, there are three major misconceptions about doubt that act as snares ready to trip us up.
Os Guiness devotes a chapter to each of the major trip wires concering doubt. First, that doubt is the opposite of faith and the same thing as unbelief. Second, that doubt is a problem for faith, but not for knowledge. Third, that doubt is something to be ashamed of because it is dishonest to believe if you have doubts.
The first trip wire is to consider doubt as the opposite of faith. It is not. A word study of "doubt" in scripture reveals five different root words. At the heart of doubt is two-ness ... double-ness ... being divided. Believing something is being of one mind; conversely, rejecting something is being of one mind. Doubt, however, wavers between the two -- it is believing and disbelieving at the same time ... to be of two minds. This is the essence of doubt.
Doubt is a state of mind in suspension between faith and unbelief so that it is neither of them wholly and it is each only partly. Unbelief is quite a different state. Unbelief is a willful refusal to believe or a deliberate decision to disobey. Can doubt lead to unbelief? Sure. But it does not have to. A good analogy is sickness. I like to think of creeping doubts as a sort of infection to your faith. Untreated, it can lead to death. It is serious, but not fatal. There are treatments.
The second trip wire is to confuse doubt as a "faith issue" instead of a knowledge issue. This simply misunderstands the relationship between faith and knowledge. Knowledge and faith are inseparable. Knowledge is built upon that which must be presupposed. Try proving the rules of logic without using them. Try practicing science without assuming uniformity or the reliability of our senses or our conscious thought. Rationality is part of our greatness, but it also serves to keep us humble because rationality itself must be assumed. Likewise, I would argue that faith is built on knowledge, assent and trust. It works both ways. There is a kind of mutual dependency.
This means that one basic source of human doubt is located within the very foundation structures of knowledge itself. In a profound sense we doubt not only because we are ignorant of something but because we are absolutely certain of nothing (except for maybe the fact that we are absolutely certain of nothing ;-) ). For human knowledge to be absolutely sure of itself is a contradiction in terms. Doubt is therefore inextricably bound up in both knowledge and faith. Martin Luther remarks, "The art of doubting is easy, for it is an ability that is born with us".
An interesting thing about doubt is that it can be of value to us. We live in a fallen world. All is not true, so everything should not be believed. Doubt can be used to prosecute error disguised as truth. The original meaning of the Greek word skeptikos is, in fact, "inquirer." The inescapable presence of doubt is a constant reminder of our responsibility to truth in a twilight world of truth and half-truth. Healthy skepticism is a sign of a knowing man's humility. We are, after all, encouraged to test everything (1 Thes 5:21) and to follow the example of the Bereans who double checked scripture to see if Paul's teaching was true (Acts 17).
The third trip wire deserves its own post.