Having doubts about God and the things of God can be good! Without ever struggling with doubts, we can have a shallow, surface faith in God. Doubts can cause us to dig deeper and end up with a deeper faith.
Doubts are the tablet upon which we write the pros and cons concerning belief in the things of God. The process involves thinking. Real faith is not mindless!
Os Guinness wrote, “If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger.”
When we talk about faith we’re talking about the reality of something we don’t see. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” we say when confronted with something that we doubt to be true. We’re not happy having blind faith, we want to “see” what we’re supposed to believe in.
This presents us with an interesting situation when it comes to belief in God, because the classic view of God, the one that’s presented in the Bible, is that God is non-material and is beyond space and time. He can’t be “seen” in the usual sense of the word. Is it possible to have faith in God’s existence without seeing Him with physical sight or experiencing Him with the other four senses?
Yes! Scientists observe the observable universe and yet a significant number of them embrace a faith in God. Francis Collins, a geneticist and Director of the Human Genome Project, said, “I find no conflict between being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us.”
Francis Collins is echoing what the Bible says of God. “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Roman 1:20).
We have faith in a great deal of things in our everyday life. We have faith the chair we sit in will hold us up. We have faith that the food we eat isn’t poisoned. We have faith the aerodynamic principles will come into play and let us take a flight on a plane to a distant location. If we always doubted, never having faith, we’d go nowhere and do nothing.
The danger with doubts is to use them as our comfort zone. Doubts can keep us from taking a step forward; they certainly can keep us from a step of faith.
Very smart, open-minded people, scientists and philosophers included, have come down on both sides of the faith question. This suggests that there may be another contributing factor, what could be called the heart issue. Is belief or non-belief in God to be resolved totally on the basis of observable facts? I doubt it!
Seeing is believing, but sometimes believing is seeing. Reasonable doubt can easily become unreasonable doubt. Doubts, rightly handled, can feed faith.
“And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). All Scripture references are ESV.
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