Beyond the Edge

Last time I noted that doubt is not a positive statement. Doubting is not a different way of saying you have faith in something else. From this it follows that doubting God's existence is not the same as believing God does not exist.

What I missed in my thought is that doubt requires faith. Doubt is a negation, a privation, a lack of faith. Without faith, there would be no such lack, therefore faith is a pre-requisite for doubt. Also, the world is not divided between those with faith and those with doubt. Rather, everyone has faith and everyone has doubt.

If I believe that God does not exist, that is my faith. I can't prove that my view is right. I have to trust it. Now, I can try to justify my belief by pointing out the doubts I have about belief in God. In the end, however, I believe this to be bad atheism. If my atheism is driven by doubt about God, my doubt is evidence that I still have faith in God.

Now I'm not saying that no one can be an atheist. I'm rather saying that to be an atheist I need to provide positive rationale for my belief in atheism. I can argue that the physical universe does not require a God, etc., but I think that is a bid different from arguing that God doesn't exist. If God's existence is not one of the conclusions of my understanding of the world, so be it. But I cannot believe in my doubt, and therefore neither can I believe that God does not exist. I can, however, believe in a world without God.

This subtle reasoning is designed to point out the foundational nature of faith in all of our lives. Atheism is thus not necessarily more rational than Christianity, as if atheism necessarily required less faith because it is more scientific. That claim could be true, but atheism requires faith just as Christianity does. Maybe it requires less faith, but that's a different argument. Science itself is based on faith at some level. The chair I'm looking at has no reason to persist from one second to the next. My belief that it will and that I can thus study it is faith.

In this sense, all of us live our lives beyond the edge of logic and rationality. Secularism is a myth; we cannot live without faith. We all may not live with the same degree of faith or the same exact kind of faith, but faith is central to all of our lives. We do not have so much control or understanding of our world. Because of that, we are faithful creatures.