Doubting Thomas? or Honest Thomas?

I think that this is nice question and I thank Maggi Dawn for posing it along with the personal story about doubt. It is true that some of us can develop a big fear of doubt because we see it as a kind of unbelief. In my experience doubt is much more like an inner reocnition of plausibility, it has to do with being honest about how we 'feel' about something. And I use the word 'feel' advisedly. Real doubts are not just intellectual questions, though they are that as well often. No they are a gut-recation demanding honesty. Now the thing is that the plausibility of something may be socially-constructed. We may find things easy to believe or disbelieve because we are culturally in touch with what's going on around us. We are constitutionally disposed to be social creatures who take a sense of reality from those around us and to have a our sense of what is real reinforced by regular routines and particular events or rituals [understood broadly]. Take us away from regular personal support structures or routines and rituals and we often experience doubts as we are exposed afresh to the impact of different ways of understanding our world and experience. Doubt is built, in part, on our ability to empathise with another person, it is part of the risk of love; of reaching out to others with compassion and the attempt to understand.



So doubt can be a sign that we are making a connection with someone else or a different culture of understanding, it can be a call to re-work our faith to speak to or to translate into and out of that culture. It can be a recognition that we have begun to take seriously something that now sits ill with a former understanding and now it is time to review where we are at.



Doubt is also not final. Because it is linked so often with a sense of plausibility, it is actually a cognitive issue at least in part. The grounds for doubt may turn out to be illusory and mainly about the company we keep or what we have been filling our minds with. This recognition lies behind the whol thing of 'positive affirmation' and 'positive confession', however I may feel that those things are gimmicky and somewhat dishonest or ill-founded, they build on the human reality that our beleifs are malleable and we can reinforce some and undermine others as a deliberate strategy. Heck some of life coaching and NLP aims to be part of that kind of process.



Th eopposite of doubt is not faith so much as plausibility. Doubt can ask us to examine why it is we find some things plausible and others not.



'Doubting' Thomas? I reckon that he realised that if this was true then a lot of things hae had found im/plausible previously were open to question. I think he wasn't so much doubting Christ as struggling with a potential shift in his plausibility structures, and that's never easy. The stakes were high, it is fair for him to hold out for as much confirmation as possible. I salute him for recognising that firends' say-so doesn't necessarily make a compelling case.

maggi dawn: Doubting Thomas? or Honest Thomas?