Daddy, Papa and Me

I find it somewhat instructive that the two categories of people who would doubt those credentials are the two that have no doubt in the in incorrectness of each other: fundamentalist religionists and fundamentalist atheist scientists.

There are many a fundamentalist religionist who doubt I am a man of faith because I do not hold to their black and white world of literal dogma. Yet, the conversation in our society today lead by some such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and others suggests that my faith as antithetical to what Science is.

Yet I find both, my science and my faith, founded on doubt and questioning without which neither would thrive. They are two sides of my coin of questioning.

I was lead to science because of my questions about how the world is and came to be, because of my doubts about the answers I was given. Doubting my understanding of the world lead me to find out more about it. Questioning the "truth" before me, lead me to closer to truth. Hypothesis and experimentation It is the foundation of scientific inquiry: doubt. If I let go of doubt, then the quest of science would die.

Once I know the truth, I've lost it.

There is a Daoist saying, once told to me by a Korean friend but that I have never found since, that truth is like water. If you hold it tight in your fist, if you "know" truth, you lose it through your fingers. You no longer hold truth. Yet, if you cup truth gently in your hands, with the care and caution that doubt gives, you will retain in.

This is the essence of faith.

A past Mormon bishop of mine, when I questioned the truth of prophets did not chastise me for doubting, but rather told me that it is in doubt that I find true faith, that without doubt, without questioning and testing faith, it would die.

He spoke no truer words.

I have spent a lifetime in doubt and questioning faith. I have gone from knowledge of "truth" to belief in doctrine to a doubting faith. Where once I "knew" some humans literally talked to God, I now have faith that we are inspired by something beyond us. Where once I "knew" all the particulars of that which awaiting me after I die, I know have faith there is meaning in life. In my youthful past I "knew" all the particulars of God but God was nothing. Now I do not "know" God, but God resides in me deeper than ever, I experience God.

I once "knew" of the details of salvation. I now have a questioning faith in the redeeming power of selfless love, a faith that lives in me rather than the words on a page.

Some religionists call this the loss of faith, yet it has proved to be a greater faith. Whereas before I held "truth" tight in my fist and it forever eluded me. Now I hold it ever so lightly and it is deeper in my soul. It has brought greater joy and understanding, questioning the "truths" I once held and holding them in cupped hands of doubt.

It is difficult to express in words, but the truths we learn through science are similar. They come only through doubt. If we "know" them, we hold onto something dead, if we hold them in doubt, we know them. I am an evolutionary biologist and I accept evolutionary science as the closest to the truth we've come to how life came to be and changes. In fact, the truths of evolutionary science are inspiringly sublime.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

But I hold those truths lightly in my hands. It doesn't make them less true, on the contrary it allows me to be open to further and greater truths.

Doubt informs by science and faith, and through it makes both majestic.

The vapor of doubt, as a reader of Andrew Sullivan quotes from Moby Dick, is what allows the rainbow:

"And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor - as you will sometimes see it - glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."

(You might want to read the debate between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris on this topic)