The Benefit of a Doubt

There’s a story in the Christian tradition about a disciple named Thomas who gets remembered for one thing: doubt.

Everyone around him claims they’ve experienced something miraculous. Thomas basically responds, “I’m not saying you’re wrong… but I can’t force myself to believe something I haven’t experienced for myself.”

For centuries, Thomas has been treated as a cautionary tale — the one who doubted, as if doubt is a bad thing. Yet most of us don’t transform because someone argues us into certainty. Often change begins with questions. Discomfort. And the realization that maybe there’s more to the story than we understood before.

Whether or not these stories are part of your own spiritual language or tradition, I think they endure because they capture recognizable human experiences.

I gave this sermon several years ago, before I started the Spiritual Geography podcast, but listening to it again now, it still feels deeply relevant to this moment we’re living through together.

---

In the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams” Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice in his cornfield telling him, “If you build it, he will come.” Ray interprets this as an instruction to plow over some of his corn and build a baseball diamond. Then, long dead ball players start appearing, most notably Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other seven Chicago White Sox players banned from the game for throwing the 1919 World Series. Play ball! But not everyone can see the players. Ray’s brother-in-law thinks Ray has lost his mind. The brother-in-law walks through a game in progress as if he is walking across an empty baseball diamond. The brother-in-law doesn’t understand why Ray and his family are sitting on bleachers watching … nothing. Until … Ray’s daughter gets hurt and the baseball player who had become a doctor walks to the bleachers changing from a young ball player to an elderly physician as he crosses over the edge of the field. The brother-in-law can see the doctor who just materialized out of thin air. Then he looks out at the field and says, “Where’d all these ball players come from?”

There could have been no intellectual argument, no presentation of evidence that would have allowed the brother-in-law to see before he was ready. Witnessing the doctor emerge gave him enough doubt in his previous understanding that he could finally see.

Our scripture this morning is commonly known as the story of Doubting Thomas. Poor maligned Thomas. Christians have disparaged his name for millennia. Oh ye of little faith. He had to touch the wounds before he would believe. The assumption we often make from this scripture is that we shouldn’t have doubts. After all, Jesus said blessed are those who believe without seeing.

I’m not sure our assumptions about this passage are correct. I’m a little nervous about seeming to contradict Jesus, but doubts can be beautiful things. Doubts can help us see beyond our current understanding. Doubts can help us filter out what doesn’t make sense. We don’t have the privilege to learn about faith directly from Jesus. And when you’re learning about faith -or anything- from other fallible humans, doubt can be our very best friend.

How do we know what we would have done or thought in Thomas’ situation? We each have a framework through which new information gets filtered. This framework has been constructed by our life experiences, traumas, personality traits, education, family, and friends. We are very invested in our own worldview. Information that fits within our worldview gets welcomed in with a dopamine hit of pleasure. AAAAh, yeeesssss, this fits nicely. This new information reinforces that I understand life and therefore my world is secure.

Information that doesn’t fit within our existing framework… well … research shows that the reasoning center of our brain shuts down when we’re confronted with contradictory information. Our human response programmed within us is “that can’t be true.” Either the new belief is wrong or we were wrong, And, since we are each the hero of our own story, our first instinct is to question the new belief, rather than question ourselves. We engage in unconscious strategies to come back into alignment with our original worldview, looking for information that confirms and strengthens our original beliefs.

So for Thomas, walking into a room where everyone is telling him a story that sounds like fantasy or wishful thinking, just one small inconsistency between the disciples versions of events could reinforce his doubts. Jesus said, “Peace be with you.” No, he said “I am always with you in peace.” Thomas has understandable doubts and maybe was a little annoyed he missed out on the visit. Human doubts. Human emotions. He says he wants more data. However, he may have just needed a little more time, a little more space to process his thoughts and feelings, before his understanding evolved.

If you look back at your own life, your beliefs and your understanding of issues have changed. You didn’t come into this world with your current understanding of racial justice, human sexuality, or gender identity. As you gain information, live life, meet new people, hear personal stories, you grow. Often our views have to be softened before the tipping point comes and we can acknowledge we now see and understand in a different way.

For example, my dissertation research was with Christian counseling students who were struggling to work with LGBTQ clients. This was a place of being in-between, when their views about counseling and faith and LGBTQ people were in process. If their struggles were in any way public, they were sometimes called prejudiced, or bigoted, or just ignorant for struggling with the concept of counseling LGBTQ clients. And so they mostly struggled alone. In this in-between place, they had doubts. Doubts about their own understanding of what it means to be a counselor, doubts about their understanding of their religion, doubts about their ability to navigate between the two.

One middle-aged participant, I’ll call her Gail, described her journey to better understand the LGBTQ population. She had limited superficial experience with people who were gay – her hairdresser and some neighbors. So Gail attended several on-campus meetings of the LGBTQ association. At one meeting that was designed to foster allyship among graduate students and staff on the campus, Gail had a profound experience. The speaker, who was lesbian, was verbally attacked. Gail described her internal thoughts: “A woman in the audience about my age said, ‘You’re wrong and you’re going to hell’ and then painted a picture for her, ‘This is what the Bible says’ and quoted her scripture after scripture, probably a ten-minute sermon .... That woman (in the audience) personified … all of my biases, all of them.... It was like she held a mirror to me and I just said, ‘Wow. Who are you? Who do you think you are, Gail? Who do you really think you are that you have the right to think the things that she said? Who gave you the right to sit in judgment over anyone?’ There was a contract at the end of that meeting...and you had the opportunity to sign it or not, to be an ally. I signed it.”

Gail could not really see her own biases until she saw them from another perspective. Living within her own framework, she most likely did not view herself as prejudiced or biased, regardless of how many times other counseling students told her she was. Gail was just doing the best she could with the information and experiences she had. But once she opened the door to curiosity, she veered just enough from her old point of view that she could see from an entirely new perspective. Then there was no going back.

Her various forays into new knowledge each chipped away at her original understanding. None was enough to immediately catapult her into something new. She needed processing time and more information to make the leap into an entirely different perspective.

This leap begins with doubt. It may not be conscious doubt. It may just be an uneasy feeling. But something is telling you there is more to the story. More that you need to know. When we push down doubt, we sometimes push down our intuition telling us something is wrong. Or we push down our capacity to learn and grow.

Theologian Paul Knitter talks about how our spiritual understanding is like looking into the night sky through a telescope. What we see depends on the power of the telescope, where it is pointed, and where we are located. He says (quote)“the truth that we see through our own cultural-religious telescope is not only limited but dangerous. In not realizing that the truth we have is limited, we see it as the only truth, or the whole truth, or the superior truth – not only for ourselves but for all people.” (end quote)

So why not doubt our own truth? I wonder more about people who never doubt. Each time I get what might be construed as an answer, I also get at least a half dozen more questions.

I can have both faith and doubt simultaneously. I have faith there is a source of infinite love far beyond my own understanding. When I attach myself to more specifics, then doubts may come. The key for me is to keep a loose grip on my understanding of the specifics, and encourage both my curiosity and humility.

We are all in-process in our understanding of … everything. We will never know all there is to know about the oceans, other people, ourselves, and the infinite source that many call God. Our human perspectives are always limited and often fallible. But by sharing your perspectives with others and listening respectfully while they share theirs, we each may learn and grow. And then one day maybe we will understand something in an entirely new way. That shift in perspective can be just as miraculous as if we were watching a baseball game played by long dead ball players in the middle of a corn field in Iowa.

Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net

Related Content: