The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

by Terryl L. Givens

Can any claim be more specious than to suggest that we want more objectivity, and less emotion, in guiding the course of our personal and collective lives? Emotion is not a defect in an otherwise perfect reasoning machine. Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader’s zeal.

In most of life’s greatest transactions, where the stakes are the highest, it is to the heart that we rightly turn, although not in utter isolation from the rational and reasonable.

Love does not blur the reality behind the appearance. Love reveals reality. So why would we privilege scientific rationality over our intuitive, emotion-laden ways of perceiving truth?

Science can tell us a great deal about the world. It can tell us what the stars are made of, explain how a lightning bug flashes in the night sky, and describe the process of cell division that leads a zygote to become a baby girl. But it does not tell us why we should care about the nature of stars, why the staccato flash of insects in the night delights us, or how the child should live. The error of believing that science represents the highest, or purest, or only reliable guide to truth is the error of scientism.

The problem is not that science cannot give us direction with life’s most urgent questions. It is because, in actual practice, logical reasoning does not give us much guidance. We don’t really live our lives, in any meaningful way, according to the dictates of logic. And we certainly don’t embrace our most cherished beliefs, values, or opinions on the basis of reason alone—however much we may protest we do.

In such a case as this, our failure to find support in science, or logic, or rationality, or whatever name we want to give it, should not cause us to doubt our intuitive moral faculty.

The point in all these examples is this: the human impulse toward the sublime and the artist’s revelation of the beautiful; love’s power to unlock the full splendor of the other, its blinding revelation of the infinite worth of the individual; and conscience, with its unwavering response to moral imperatives, its piercing protest against evil and gentle enticement to recognize the good—all these are living proofs that different ways of knowing exist. We employ them, we rely upon them, and we trust in them. As well we should.

Abandoning our faith because it doesn’t answer all the questions would be like closing the shutters because we can’t see the entire mountain.

The notion that modern-day prophets are infallible specimens of virtue and perfection is neither scriptural nor reasonable. They are simply ordinary women and men who have accepted the call and are striving to return Home, as we all are. Equally unreasonable is a view of published revelation as infallible, unerring transmission of the Divine voice. A simplistic notion of modern prophets as stenographers of Deity is not what the prophetic tradition, ancient or modern, suggests.