Belief and Doubt

For some time I had been wondering about the ways in which these states of mind both counteract and compliment one another but had not put my inconclusive meanderings into print as they were neither original nor conclusive.

But then a recent re-reading of Graham Green's wonderful novel Monsignor Quixote provided the perfect answer. Late in the story, the Monsignor and his 'Sancho,' the communist ex-mayor of the town in which the two men live, discuss the matter .

Enrique Zancas, otherwise Sancho:
"Do you know what drew me to you in El Toboso father? It wasn't that you were the only educated man in the place. I'm not so fond of educated men as all that. Don't talk to me of the intelligentsia or culture. You drew me to you because because I thought you were the opposite of myself. A man gets tired of himself, of that face he sees every day when he shaves, and all my friends were in just the same mould as myself. I would go to Party meetings in Ciudad Real when it became safe after Franco was gone, and we would call ourselves 'comrade' and we were a little afraid of each other because we knew each other as well as each one knew himself. We quoted Marx and Lenin to one another like passwords to prove we could be trusted, and we never spoke about the doubts which came to us on sleepless nights. I was drawn to you because I thought you were a man without doubts. I was drawn to you, I suppose, in a way by envy."

Monsignor Quixote:
"How wrong you were, Sancho. I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even the existence of God, but doubt is not treachery as you communists seem to think. Doubt is human. Oh, I want to believe that it is all true - and that want is the only certain thing I feel. I want others to believe too - perhaps some of their belief might rub off on me. I think the baker believes."

"That was the belief I thought you had."

"Oh no, Sancho, perhaps then I could have burnt my books and lived really alone, knowing that all was true. 'Knowing', how terrible that might have been. "

Extract taken from
Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene - Vintage Classics Paperback Edition

Science and Belief

I have just read, in the July 2009 edition of Scientific American, an article by Dr. Michael Shermer PhD.

In the article, entitled, I Want To Believe, Dr. Shermer describes the importance of the null hypothesis to scientific exploration; the notion that, in general, scientific claims are regarded as untrue until and unless they can be verified by means of controlled experiments validated by statistical analysis. However, he goes on to describe a class of such claims which, by their nature, cannot be tested in that way but instead rely for verification on "nuanced analyses of data and a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry that point to an unmistakable conclusion" Cosmology and archeology are given as examples of this type of study.

Later on in the article, Dr. Shermer refers to a question, the answer to which can probably not be ascertained by either approach, the question of what came before the Big Bang. In other words, what brought the universe into existence? He mentions the idea that the universe which we inhabit might have been proceeded by a multiverse which spawned daughter universes one of which was the one we inhabit but that there is no positive evidence for this conjecture. He then adds an intriguing comment to the effect that nor is there any positive evidence for the traditional answer to the question of the origin of the universe; that it was created by God.

I refer to this as intriguing because that remark would seem to compare the possibility of there having been a physical precursor to our universe with the possibility of there having been a metaphysical one, a case, to my mind, of comparing apples with elephants. The implied comparison is invalid.

I raise this matter because Dr. Shermer, who elsewhere describes himself as a skeptic, says that he has concluded that he is a skeptic "not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know." That seems to me to be both an honest and an honorable position. However, to speak about knowledge in respect to God is surely a misuse of the word. Theoretically at least, everything about the physical laws governing the universe is discoverable. However, we should not delude ourselves that any comparable process could uncover any knowledge about God.

I neither know that God exists nor do I know that God does not exist but I am sure that knowledge is not the issue in this context.

Dr. Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) and the author of Why We Believe.