faith vs doubt vs reverence

finding a better dichotomy

I spent ten years deconstructing my Christianity.

The eight years since? Reconstructing?

Nah, nothing so industrious.

Those I've spent playing.

Which, honestly. Was that the point all along?

I had that real real real faith.
That real real zeal.
I went all the way.
Name a standard Evangelical doctrine,
I believed it.

Heaven? Check.
Hell? Check.
Rapture & Armageddon? Check.
Six-day creation? A 6000-year-old Earth? Check and mate.

That's how I was gonna convince them, I was taught.
Creation, the foundation of my worldview.
Evolution, the foundation of my culture's.
Aim for the foundation.
Shake people's belief in their descent from apes,
the rest of the Christian worldview follows neatly.
If Genesis; if creation and the flood,
    then the prophets.
    If the prophets,
        then Jesus.

This was the play.
I was taught it explicitly,
and I tried it,
and made a fool of myself,
and made friends feel attacked.

It's not surprising to you,
dear reader:

this was a brittle worldview.

I spent years missing it.
Trying to get it back.
That certainty.
That blessed assurance.

You don't understand.
Every star in the sky!
Every world event.
All under control;
predicted; foretold;
hand-picked by the Creator
for my specific
    and our collective
edification.
To draw our eyes upward.
To focus us on Himself.

And no,
I don't miss it anymore.
But I spent the first...
three? five? of those ten years,
trying to re-achieve 
that same zealous worldview.
A version of God
that could support all the weight
of my intellectual rigor.

And God receded.

God receded.

"God becomes, and God unbecomes," said Eckhart, by way of On Being [I wish I could find the episode for you].

"God is that which cannot be known, God can only be loved," said Richard Rohr, by way of The Liturgists.

But I found all this
    receding and
        unbecoming and
            unknowability a bit,
you know.
Unbecoming.
Unsatisfying.

A spiritual counselor
gave me chapter of a book:
Eco-Theism.
God as Vivifier; Animator;
Enlivener of all things.

And that's fine!
Poetic. A nice metaphor,
but it didn't give me a necessary God.

It always just felt like
in any of these explanations,
God is always dancing,
just out of sight,
right on the other side
of Occam's Razor.

You don't need God,
God's just a nice-to-have.
Not something to lean on 
with all my intellectual weight.

I know someone still on this quest,
still reasoning toward a necessary god.
He places God in the gaps
in scientific understanding;
all we've yet to explain.
    The origin of life.
    The fine-tuning of fundamental constants.
He knows this is called a fallacy;
he does it anyway.

I have many problems with this.

Why one God?
Why not a god for every gap?
    The Origin of Life god.
    The Fine-Tuning god.
Or heck, a god for every finely-tuned constant!
    The Planck Constant god.
    The Gravitational Constant god.

Why not something altogether stranger
than "us but bigger,"
than something approximating human
     form,
     mind,
     agency?

And for the sake of argument,
let's go with monotheism.
One god, to fill all the gaps.
Isn't it a far cry?
Generic theism
to Christian doctrine?
Draw that line for me.
On the merits of reason alone,
how you gonna get from
"some anthropomorphic Agent, idk?"
to Heaven,
    a personal God,
    saved by grace,
    Jesus?

Friend gave me his answer.
He drew his line.

But anymore
I find this whole pursuit,
this whole "reasoning our way into God"
neither intellectually
nor spiritually
satisfying.

All deconstructed, bricks and boards and nails in neat rows on the ground where the house of my faith once stood

I think it's kind of a silly word, "deconstruction."

It's very popular, in the exvangelical space. Everyone's deconstructing.

Maybe we should use some other metaphor. Maybe we're wandering the woods, the desert, the wastelands, the valleys of the shadow of death, circumnavigating the border of Christianity, until we perhaps find the rumored playground.

But also, deconstruction is a metaphor that works. Pull apart every wall, shake every pole, figure out what's load-bearing. Remove the unnecessary, but carefully. No wrecking balls; no pyrotechnics. Just meticulous, exhausting inspection.

To the outsider, it seems like such a waste of time, effort, intellect. "I never had one of these houses! You can just knock it down!"

But it's necessary. Don't wanna end up an atheist with secret fundamentalist misgivings; don't wanna just join a different clique given to similar-but-differently-flavored magical thinking; don't wanna just ping-pong to the other end of the same tired dichotomies. Any good deconstruction ought to demolish the dichotomies, too.

And what more culturally potent dichotomy than the one between faith and doubt?

My deconstruction ended with a book. Finding God in the Waves. Maybe it will help you with your deconstruction, or maybe it will hit you like Eco-Theism hit me. I talked about this book in my last essay:

This did it for me. I found peace.

No more trying to reason my way to God. Let my left brain be my left brain. Let my right brain be my right. Left brain delights in reason; in intellectual pursuit; in data and facts and rigor. Turn that spotlight on God, and God recedes.

So don't turn that spotlight on God. Don't think, essentially, about God. At least not the conscious, prefrontal-cortex sort of "thinking" that we've come to associate with the word.

The less I think about God, I concluded, the more at ease I'll be.

I stopped trying, essentially, to even have faith.

And doubt became irrelevant

A friend explained his thoughts on doubt. "If God made me, and I'm a doubter, then maybe doubt is my gift."

I agree with this friend on many things. But this seemed off to me. I couldn't put my finger on why.

But this is it.

Faith is no longer aspirational,

and

Doubt is irrelevant.

I have exited the continuum.

Demolished, in my own self, the dichotomy.

I am not impressed by anyone's faith or troubled by their doubt. Nor the opposite. Neither concept feels virtuous, villainous, or even salient.

I feel like the person outside the house, watching the deconstruction. Only this house keeps getting new additions by the faithful as well as the doubters. Exasperated, I throw up my hands. "You don't need to spend time on this!"

On a scale of 1 to 7, how much do you believe in God?

Have you heard of this scale? It's sometimes called The Dawkins Scale, after famed a(nti)theist Richard Dawkins (who also gave us the word & concept of "memes"!)

1 being full belief in God,
7 being full belief in no god,
4 being perfect uncertainty.

Feel free to answer this for yourself before you read on.

A “grid of various artistic depictions of God, showcasing diverse cultural and spiritual interpretations” from Mr. GPT (sorry)

My answer? I'm a total ignostic: the question is meaningless. “God” is not a well-defined concept.

There are some definitions of god for which almost everyone would answer “1, full belief.” “God is a metaphor for the possibility of a better way,” “God is at least the fundamental forces that started the universe and guide its evolution.”

There are some definitions that only small children would entertain. My five year old seems content to think of God as a large man in the sky. (She told me she thinks of God as a “he”; I said I think of God as an “it.” She thought about that, then said: “God is it. [pause] It is God. [pause] That doesn't make any sense.”)

Probably the more broadly-palatable you make the definition, the less satisfying and personal that construction of god becomes.

And yet, despite the meaninglessness of the question, people at both ends of the spectrum croon endlessly about their position on it.

Blame the Reformation

I wonder how much of this cultural obsession with doubt we can pin on the Protestant Reformation. Is that when "faith" took on the bundle of associations it has for us now? Is that when it turned into the intellectual pursuit we think of today?

A friend wrote a dissertation on various poets of the Reformation, and they all struggled with this same “paradox of seeking certain faith in salvation by uncertain means.” Prior to that, for 1,000 years of Christianity's history (half its lifespan!), your experience of the divine was mediated by a priest. Confession, prescribed Hail Marys, attending mass, singing the songs—these things were considered equivalent with “faith.”

Then along comes Luther, hot on the heels of the printing press, in the late stages of the Renaissance; in parallel with the emerging Scientific Revolution. “This book needs translation!” And now faith is in your individual hands, dear Protestant. You read and interpret and apply the Bible yourself. You pray directly to God. People would talk about getting “divine illumination” during reading; during prayer. Which would “spark faith,” if it fell on you. But if it never did? How would you know that you were doing it right? How would you know that you believed enough?

It's interesting to consider that all the anti-theist posturing around doubt—"look at me! I'm a 7 on that spectrum! 💪🏼💪🏼"—might not have happened if Christianity had been less obsessed with a scientifically-inflected version of “faith.”

Zealous people at both ends of the spectrum make me think of that Le Guin line from The Left Hand of Darkness:

To oppose something is to maintain it.

To be an atheist is to maintain God.

If you want to oppose the people at either end of the spectrum, don't jump to the other side of it.

Demolish the whole dichotomy.

Finding an alternative

Is it possible to live without any dichotomies? To rid yourself of all spectra by which to measure the world?

Maybe. I won't say there's not some enlightened (?) meditator out there who somehow goes around never having any judgement about any phenomena at all.

But it's unclear to me if this is even desirable! Like, this whole post is measuring concepts like “the faith↔doubt dichotomy” by where it falls on other dichotomies, like helpful vs harmful and meaningful vs meaningless. And surely some dichotomies are universally lauded. Safe vs dangerous. Wise vs foolish. Intentional vs reactive.

The goal isn’t to get rid of all dichotomies, but to avoid becoming trapped by the unhelpful ones.

(A therapist friend points out that even mostly-helpful dichotomies can have their pitfalls. Like kindness vs cruelty—don’t get trapped, in the name of kindness, into being a people-pleaser and an enabler! Don’t avoid honesty and the deeper connections it can bring for fear of being cruel!)

I argue that the faith/doubt spectrum is meaningless. Is there a better one we can come up with?

In her book The Land Is Not Empty, Sarah Augustine had a section called "Faith vs Reverence":

My experience of spirituality in the dominant culture is to value faith. Faith, from my point of view, is believing in something that I cannot see or prove with my senses. Despite overwhelming doubt, I believe anyway.

Reverence is deep respect. The Creator is evident in creation, which surrounds me. I can see it and experience it with my senses. I am part of it. Humility is acknowledging that I am not separate from creation; I am part of a web of life. I have been taught that this mutual dependence is a gift. Life is a gift.

"Faith," or belief in something I can't see, is meaningless in my experience of Indigenous cosmology.

I love this.

And what's on the other end of the spectrum? If reverence is the virtue at one end, what's at the other? What's the vice to avoid? The opposite of deep respect is…

Disregard?
Carelessness?
Taking-for-granted?
Entitlement?

I'll happily judge people based on where they fall on the entitlement/reverence spectrum. I already do! If you're careless and entitled, you should be judged; you should feel shamed. Way more CEOs and presidents should feel shame!

I'll happily form in-groups around this, and compete for status in my group by how well I exhibit reverence. This seems like a useful dichotomy. Isn't the world dying from our species' entitlement problem?

Let's not be people of faith. Let's be people of reverence.

Not the faithful, but the reverent.

Let's not be believers. Let's be witnesses.

Witnesses to this great mystery; this co-arising; this exultant, unfolding chaos.

The world—and all its building blocks, and the universe entire—is alive, and we are its witnesses.

Don't tell me about your faith in things unseen.

Show me your attention to reality as it is.

Let us mourn and marvel this dying, transforming world together.

Show me your grief.

Show me your awe.