Doubt is Better than Certainty

Last Sunday, the 97^th Academy Awards presentations were made at Dolby Theater in Hollywood. I didn’t watch the award ceremony, but early Monday morning, I read the results with interest. I was especially eager to know the results for Conclave, the only one of the Best Picture nominees I had seen. 

Conclave did not win the Best Picture Oscar, and Ralph Fiennes (pictured above) was not awarded the Best Actor Oscar for which he was nominated.*¹ Still, please think with me about the striking words of Cardinal Lawrence, who was in charge of the conclave to elect a new pope.

Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals so admirably played by Fiennes, speaks these striking words near the beginning of the film:

… over the course of many years, in the service of our mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.

He goes on to say,

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a pope who doubts.

These were perplexing words to most of the Cardinals gathered for the conclave—and they are likely perplexing to many of you also, especially those of you who have grown up as (and still are) “traditional” Christians.

“The Appeal of Certainty” is a short subsection in my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020). In the first paragraph, I write that “the claim to certainty is one of fundamentalism’s primary attractions.” That same claim is true for many, if not most, conservative evangelicals today.

Nearly 100 years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent neo-orthodox theologian, declared, “Frantic orthodoxy [=fundamentalism] is a method for obscuring doubt.” The foundation of that method was an emphasis upon belief in the Bible, believed to be God’s infallible or inerrant Word.

In 1969, W.A. Criswell, the prominent pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, stressed that the Bible is the literal, infallible Word of God, and then averred, ”If the Bible is the Word of God we have an absolutely trustworthy guide for all the answers our souls desire to know.”

That position is appealing to so many who desire the comforting presence of certainty.

God After Deconstruction by Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller is a new (2024) book, and one that I highly recommend. The second of the twelve chapters is titled “Certainty Crumbles.” At the end of a sub-section called “The Benefit of Doubt,” the authors write,

Rather than being an enemy of belief, we think doubt is essential. Believers aren’t ‘certainers,’ to coin a word. To believe means to be uncertain. The wise ones among us learn to resist the impulse to seek certain foundations of knowledge (31).*²

Then, in “Bible Conundrums,” their fifth chapter, Oord and Fuller deal directly with how many people leave Christianity when they realize that there are many problems related to belief in an infallible Bible as a sure foundation. They give much good advice on how to take the Bible seriously but not literally.

Throughout their insightful book, the authors insist that doubt is more conducive to a life of faith than certainty.

This is similar to what Anne Lamott (whom I plan to highlight in a blog article next month) wrote in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005). One of her religious mentors is a Jesuit priest, whom she refers to as Father Tom. Near the end of her book, she writes,

I remembered something Father Tom had told me—that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. (p. 256).

Retired pastor Martin Thielen recently wrote about the benefit of doubt. He said, “Religious doubt can lead to a more authentic and mature faith, including the embrace of divine mystery ….”*³

Yes, when carefully considered, doubt is better than certainty.

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*¹ This was in contrast to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts presentation ceremony held on February 16. Conclave and Fiennes both won the BAFTA awards. 

*² While they didn’t cite him, perhaps the authors had read the eminent agnostic Bertrand Russell, who in 1935 wrote, “The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

*³ In April 2014, I posted a blog article (see here) in which I introduced Thielen, who at that time was a Methodist pastor in Tennessee. After making that post, I found out that he had graduated with an M.Div. degree from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1982 but left the Southern Baptists Convention in 1994. He now publishes articles regularly on his website that he calls “Doubter’s Parish.” The words cited above are from his March 1 post, “Faith, Doubt, and ‘Conclave’,” which I encourage you to read (here).