This service is dedicated to the UU Principle:
"A free and responsible search for truth and meaning."
"Doubt, Faith, and Discovery"
Message by Rev. Ron Knapp, Minister Emeritus
First Unitarian Church of Omaha
—September 8, 2002
"Doubt," said Galileo, "is the father of discovery." That is part of my theme for this morning. "Our doubts are traitors," said Shakespeare, "and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt." That is the other part of my theme for this morning.
I want to talk about doubt, and its value, but also to suggest that without faith, there is no discovery. Galileo is only partly right. Doubt is the father of discovery, but if we use that metaphor, we could say, as well, that faith is the mother of discovery.
Both Unitarianism and Universalism represent the truth of Galileo's assertion. Both of them were born out of the process of profound doubt, a process that led to the discovery of new ways in religion.
Historically, Unitarianism evolved out of a process where some historic Christian articles of faith were rejected. Our Unitarian forebears looked at the doctrine of the trinity, for example, and doubted its validity. That is where the very word Unitarian comes from—it is a word commentary on the error of the trinity. Our Unitarian forebears doubted the doctrine of the divinity of Christ and discovered, therein, a more human Jesus and a more humane Christianity.
Our forebears among the Universalists, on the other hand, doubted the validity of the doctrine of election, that is, the Calvinist idea that God, before the beginning of time, decided who would be saved and who would be damned. And they doubted the validity of the concept of hell, the idea that God would condemn sinful human beings to an eternity in terror and pain. And because they doubted those ideas, they discovered new ones. They discovered the doctrine of universal salvation. "In God's good time," they said, "all of God's children would be saved."
"Give them not hell," the Universalist preachers proclaimed, "but hope and courage."
With such a message from our forebears, it is easy to see why, among contemporary Unitarian Universalists, doubt has such a positive value. Indeed, it seems to me, we are almost alone among the religions of this land in encouraging the development of doubt as a positive religious force.
"Cherish your doubts", says our poet Robert Weston, "for doubt is the handmaiden of truth."
"Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge," he goes on, echoing Galileo, "it is the servant of knowledge." "Doubt", Weston says, is the "touchstone of truth, ...it is to the wise as a staff to the blind."
Doubt is to be accepted as a precious gift, to be praised as a valued companion. It is almost as if it is the mark of the liberal as faith is the mark of the orthodox. And if the orthodox see doubt as a dirty word, then we must see faith as a dirty word.
In an extreme form of this we may second the cynicism of Bertrand Russell: "Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm... . What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define faith as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of faith. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence... . We were told that faith could remove mountains, but no one believed; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove mountains and everyone believes it."
Doubt, we might say, is a more sure guide to truth, one that most usually leads us out of error. Or, if we do not want to be quite so iconoclastic, we might echo the thoughts of novelist E. M. Forester, in his essay, "What I Believe."
"I do not believe in belief. But this is an age of faith, where one is surrounded by so many militant creeds that, in self-defense, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy—well, they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse, they must come to the front before long. But for the moment, they don't seem enough, their action is no stronger than a flower, battered beneath a military jack boot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them. Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all."
All right! We live in a world where faith is seen as a virtue and so we have to accept it and deal with it even if we do not like it. I expect that for many Unitarian Universalists, if they are honest with themselves, there is a truth to be found here. We associate with this religion because our culture is so engrossed in religion that we cannot escape it. If we have to be something to exist in this culture, then, perhaps being a Unitarian Universalist is the best choice, or perhaps more correctly, the least objectionable one.
We may doubt our need to be religious, but we don't doubt our need to doubt. And here, at least, we can deify doubt, give it a transcendental value.
In the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, there is a great hymn to faith. By faith, Abraham set out to worship Jahweh; by faith, Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt; by faith, Joshua led the children of Israel into the promised land.
If the Christians can sing a hymn to faith, Unitarian Universalists can sing a hymn to doubt. By doubt, Copernicus was able to discover a more adequate construct of the universe. By doubt, Pasteur was able to more adequately understand the nature of disease. By doubt, Jefferson was able to conceive a government unlike other governments, that embraced the revolutionary idea that there were certain "inalienable rights and that among these were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." By doubt, Socrates was able to devise a better way of seeking the truth.
Doubt certainly has captured a central place in liberal religion. "One who never doubted," said the poet "never half believed."
"Question with boldness even the existence of God," added Thomas Jefferson, "because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear." Amen! says our liberal religious forebears.
Amen! say I. Amen! I suppose, say we all. And yet, in the process have we lost faith? Or at least lost faith in faith? Or have we transferred it to something else, as George Bernard Shaw suggested: "We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it to the medical profession."
Faith is certainly the central theme, or one of the central themes, of orthodox Christianity. "By grace are ye saved, through faith, and not of works least any one should boast." That was the conviction of the Calvinists out of which liberal religion arose. Faith is some form of ultimate virtue. Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, who once said that "reason is an ass" also said that "faith must trample under foot all reason, sense and understanding."
Faith becomes an ultimate. Doubt becomes a dirty word. And in the process, something is lost.
I would like to suggest this morning that doubt and faith are not enemies; they are partners. I would like to suggest that if we are to live affirmatively, constructively, joyously, then we must live in a world of tension with both faith and doubt as ultimate values. Gropingly and hesitantly, as it were, testing the waters, checking the terrain, exposing ourselves with a paradoxical confidence that we are going in the right direction, trusting in our inner sense of values, encouraged by our vision of the good, both for ourselves and for our fellows.
To do this, of course, will require an adequate definition of faith. And if the only definition possible is that suggested by Bertrand Russell in the passage I quoted earlier—faith is "a firm belief in something for which there is not evidence"—then I, for one, would have to reject it entirely. Faith from such a perspective becomes, as in Alice in Wonderland, "Believing a million impossible things before breakfast."
But is that the only valid use of the word faith? When I looked up the word faith in my dictionary, I didn't find anything so grandiose as the frequent Christian definition of faith.
What I did find was, as the first definition: "a confident belief in the truth, value or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing." It was only in the second definition where one comes up with the idea of "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."
Faith involves a "confident belief" and it is a distortion of its meaning to give it absolute overtones. Perhaps we can understand this more clearly by turning to the thought from Galileo, "Doubt is the father of Discovery." There certainly is an important truth to be found here. Galileo's more accurate understanding of the structure of the universe was born out of his doubt of older understandings. But that doubt does not preclude faith, at least faith in terms of the definition I have just presented.
To use doubt to lead to discovery, Galileo had to have faith: faith in his calculations; faith in his own reasonings. Doubt becomes the father of discovery only when it is matched by some sort of faith in the process by which doubt is resolved.
The psychologist Erich Fromm discusses faith in a similar matter: While irrational faith is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority says so, rational faith is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one's own productive observings and thinking. Galileo would have gotten nowhere with his doubt if he did not also possess what Fromm calls rational faith, a confidence in his own knowledge, in his own processes, in his own observations. He had to reject irrational faith, the kind of faith that expects belief without evidence, in order to find the path to discovery.
And, the same kind of thing can be said of doubt. Just as one can suggest that there is a rational faith that is set over against an irrational faith, one can talk about rational doubt and irrational doubt. It is rational doubt that is for Galileo the father of discovery. It is irrational doubt that is the note in the thought from Shakespeare: "Our doubts are traitors and make us loose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt." Irrational doubt is loss of faith in one's own judgement, loss of confidence in one's own ability.
"Doubt," says Galileo, "is the father of discovery." Using the same metaphor, a metaphor of sexuality and reproduction, we can also say that faith is the mother of discovery. It s only through intercourse—between faith and doubt—that discovery is born, that truth emerges. To continue with the metaphor: without doubt, faith is sterile; without faith, doubt is impotent.
It seems to me that there is a message in such a metaphor for human beings that helps us confront all of the conditions of life. There is a message in such a metaphor that can help us to cope with things as far ranging as crises in our own personal lives, on the one hand, to questions related to the meaning of life and of existence, on the other.
In their personal lives, people sometimes endure profound unhappiness because they do not have enough faith in themselves to make the changes that need to be made and others discover profound unhappiness because they let doubt demand changes that never should have been made.
They stay in relationships they should not have or get out of relationships they should have preserved, because they do not have healthy intercourse between doubt and faith. They stay in jobs or leave jobs for reasons they later regret. They deal with problems with their children in defective ways because they have neither the confidence in themselves, on the one hand, or refuse to honestly face reality, on the other hand.
There is a message here that says we must face life, and the choices and decisions we have to make in life, with both honest doubt and honest faith;, with both constructive questioning and constructive affirmation; with both a healthy hesitancy and a healthy confidence.
A healthy hesitancy and a healthy confidence. They need to be kept in balance. I believe that. Rational doubt and rational faith. They need to be kept in balance. I believe that. And yet...
And yet. I am not so sure. I am not so sure when it comes to "Religious faith" or what we are now, when we are politically correct, calling "faith communities." In such a context, "faith" becomes the dominate virtue. And doubt is relegated to the sidelines. If I have to choose a dominant virtue between the two, between "faith" and "doubt" I have to choose doubt. "Doubt," I would affirm with Robert Weston, "is the hand maiden of truth."
Perhaps we ought to see the wisdom in the thought I shared earlier from the eminent iconoclast, Betrand Russell. "Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm," he wrote. And then concluded: "What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm." That may be too harsh. Too raw. Too belligerent. But with any degree of intellectual honesty, we have to admit that there is an element of truth in what Russell wrote.
Christians killed millions of Moslems in the Crusades in an attempt to impose Christianity on the Holy Land. Catholics killed thousands of Protestants in an attempt to impose Catholicism on Europe. And Protestants killed thousands of peasants after the Reformation, in order to maintain their religious hold on their partition of Europe.
In the twentieth century, Catholics killed Protestants in Northern Ireland. And Protestants killed Catholics.
Jews continue to slaughter Moslems in the Holy Land. And Moslems continue to kill Jews.
In this beginning of the twenty-first century, Hindus are killing Moslems over Kashmir. And Moslems are killing Hindus.
In the war on terrorism, the West is seen by vast numbers of Moslems as "The great satan." And Islam, itself, is being seen more and more, by the West, as the great enemy.
We need to confront terrorism, but if we are not careful in how we handle this matter, we could set up decades, maybe centuries, of conflict between the vast Moslem world and the Western World.
History is replete with examples of the harm that "faith" can do. Perhaps the examples I have just suggested are enough to demonstrate that. Now, why do religious faiths do harm? Well, at least part of the answer is that religious faiths, as they developed, tended to believe that they had the way, the only way. They had the answer, the only answer. They had the true word of God. The only true word of God. The truth is revealed by special divine revelation.
"Christ is the answer," say Christians. "No one cometh unto the Father but by me," said Christ. "Unless you be born again," say the Christian Scriptures, "you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." "There is no God but Allah," answers Islam, "and Mohammed is his prophet."
You can face the death penalty if you defame the Prophet, as Salman Rushdie found out. "Are you a Moslem or an infidel?" a child in Afghanistan asked a western reporter. The phrase "We are God's chosen people" affirms Judaism. We have a God-given right to Judea—that is, to the West Bank in the Holy Land.
The major religions of the world were born out of tribal and regional arrangements in a world that consisted of known lands and unknown lands, in a world where people did not know what was happening in other parts of the world.
There was a time when it would take months to go around the world. There was a time when it would take months for knowledge of events in other parts of the world to reach our shores. But we live in a very different world. We live in a world where, thanks to modern transportation, we can go around the world in hours. We live in a world where information from one part of the world can be transmitted to every other part of the world instantaneously. And we live in a world of atomic energy and atomic bombs, in a world of potential biological weapons of mass destruction, in a world of chemical weapons of mass destruction.
A world which once was made up of small city states is in the process, as everyone must be aware, of evolving into a global community. Can that global community be a peaceful and benevolent one if faith systems continue to maintain the conviction that they have the only way? I think not.
It is here that I agree with E.M. Forster. "I do not believe in belief," he wrote, "Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy—well, they are what really matter and if they human race is not to collapse, they must come to the front before long."
"Tolerance, good temper, sympathy"—things like that—are what really matter. And they will only come to the front when the major religions of the world doubt their own major premises, when they begin to respect each other and are willing to listen to each other, when the faith systems doubt that they are the only way, when doubt overcomes faith, when the universal takes the place of the sectarian, when people no longer see themselves and others in terms of brothers and sisters in Christ, or brothers and sisters in Islam, or brothers and sisters of any other religious system and begin to see themselves as brothers and sisters in one universal human family.
Perhaps we, along with all of the religions of the world, could learn something from the insightful wisdom of Sophia Lyons Fahs, the influential UU religious educator.
"Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged. Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some beliefs are like shadows, darkening children's days with fears of unknown calamities. Other Beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.
Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies. Other beliefs are bonds in a universal kinship, sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction. Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some beliefs weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness. Other beliefs nurture self confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world. Other beliefs are pliable, like the young saplings, ever growing with the upward thrust of life."
All Souls Church — PO Box 400 — Sioux Falls, SD 57101
605-338-8652 — www.sfuu.org
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