Time for a Great Cartoon! (nagging doubts)

Do you ever have “nagging doubts”? The skeptic Bertrand Russell said, “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Yann Martel in the Life of Pi said, “If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

May I suggest that doubt is like a fork in the road — One road of the fork leads to confident faith; the other fork leads to unbelief.  And unbelief is sin.

George Macdonald once said, “A man may be haunted with doubts and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood.” Os Guinness has a great article found here and entitled “I Believe in Doubt.”

How about you?  Do your doubts lead you to confident faith or immobile unbelief?

 

Spirituality, Hard Thinking, and Theology (time for a good quote)

“Our folk evangelicalism too often denigrates the life of the mind and especially critical thinking. Even to raise an honest question about a popularly believed evangelegend (religious urban legend) is enough to provoke prayers on your behalf for your spiritual renewal. We do God no favors by being gullible, credulous, irrational, or uncritical. No special spiritual aura accompanies stupidity or ignorance. All too often, however, contemporary popular Christianity leads people to think that spirituality and hard thinking stand in conflict with each other. God gave us minds and expects us to use them.” (Roger Olson, Questions to All Your Answers: The Journey from Folk Religion to Examined Faith)

Questions:

1.  How have you seen Evangelicalism denigrate the life of the mind?

2.  In his book In Two MInds (later republished under the title Doubt), Os Guinness says that doubt is not necessarily a bad thing.  Doubt can lead either to a deeper faith commitment or to ungodly unbelief.  Have we misunderstood doubt in our churches, do you think?  Why or why not?