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Why do bad doubts happen to good people?

I've been thinking lately about deconversion stories. If one hangs around on the Internet long enough, one certainly runs across them. A theme that sometimes crops up is that the person did not want to deconvert. Looking over the deconvert's shoulder at the flimsiness of the arguments that led him away from Christianity, one is permitted to wonder about that, but it is what a deconvert will sometimes say, and presumably he believes it when he says it: "I didn't want to deconvert. I struggled. I asked God to help me keep my faith, to speak to me, to reach out to me. God didn't help, or didn't help enough, and now here I am--I'm not a Christian anymore."

That's rather convenient, because it blames God for the deconversion. It's an insurance policy. You can see the wheels turning: "If I turn out to be wrong, and God exists after all, or Christianity is true after all, I will be able to say to God's face, in the immortal words of Bertrand Russell, 'Not enough evidence, God.'"

So you're covered. You asked God to help you not to deconvert, you tried hard not to, and after that it was up to God to come through. He had his chance.

All snark aside, I have to admit, as a person who tends to feel responsible for others who are struggling with doubts or on the cusp of deconverting, I find this sort of thing bothersome. I feel like tugging on God's sleeve to get his attention: "Uh, Lord, if you could spare a minute, there's someone over here who is doubting your existence or doubting that you sent Jesus to die for us, but it's not too late, because right now he still believes in you and loves you and is crying out to you, so, could you please do something about this? Just send him a sign or nudge him in the right direction or something. I would if I were you. Right about now would be a good time, Lord."

And sometimes, or so it seems to the person going through the crisis, God doesn't. The potential deconvert doesn't feel anything and doesn't even have any moment of great, shining, intellectual enlightenment. The things that bothered him about Christianity continue to bother him. Perhaps he finds answers that should be intellectually satisfying, but he doesn't find them emotionally satisfying, and those two things are very easy to conflate.

Why does God let this happen? It's one thing to acknowledge that God lets people who are indifferent to him go to hell, people who don't care, don't try, don't seek. But we're talking about someone who at least seems to himself to be seeking. This person is, at least to begin with, one of the good guys.

Well, I don't have all the answers. I believe that the evidence shows that God exists and is all-loving and all-just, but the precise how of the divine justice is something I don't claim to be able to follow through its infinite windings.

But I do have a thought to offer, and it is this: All of us who have been Christians for a while have major gaps in our understanding of God. That's inevitable, even for the most advanced saint, since God is beyond our comprehension. But it is especially true, I think, of two classes: First, those who have grown up Christians, and second, recent converts. For differing reasons, members of both of these groups are in danger of having a radically simplistic and insufficient view of the nature and character of God. This may take many forms. Perhaps the person thinks of God as harsh and vindictive, and it just takes a while for that to start to bother him. Or perhaps he demands that God must do things exactly as he would do them. One of the most common over-simplifications that I have run into is a misguided view of heaven. Heaven is seen as a kind of Happy Hunting Ground to which God (more or less arbitrarily) lets some people go while (more or less arbitrarily) blocking other people from going there, plopping them down in hell instead. Heaven is not intimately connected with the presence of God and with our own highest good through union with God. While they may mouth the idea that hell is separation from God, too many Christians don't really believe the corollary that heaven is union with God. Thus they will say things like, "I don't want to be in heaven with a God who would send my best friend to hell." As if they can have any good without God. As if they can casually pick and choose, shrugging off heaven and God while still holding onto truth, beauty, friendship, and human love. Or, "Why would we have a sense of perfect union with God in heaven, when we don't need it, rather than in the trials on earth, when we need it more?" Because "needing it" is entirely beside the point. Heaven is perfect union with God. You can't "be in heaven" without that perfect union with God.

Again and again, the angry things that deconverts say show just how shallow their concepts of God's character, of eternal life, and of Christianity really were and still are, because they never grew past them.

It's all very well to start out with sketchy ideas. But when you become a man, it is time to put away childish things. If you started out thinking that God owes you something, including a special revelation of himself in your time of doubt, you need to get over that. If you started out thinking that you can have any good thing without God, you need to learn what the beatific vision is.

God lets bad doubts happen to good people to give them a chance to move up, to deepen their understanding. C.S. Lewis portrays Tor and Tinidril, the characters in Perelandra who are like Adam and Eve, in much the same way. God allows a representative of Satan to come to their planet and tempt them in order for them to mature. One of the angelic characters says as much. "Today for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of [God] that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be."

In Perelandra, when the lady is being tempted, Maleldil (God) is silent. Previously she has always sensed him guiding her, but now she does not. If you know the book you may protest that God sends Ransom to (eventually) fight the un-Man after Tinidril has resisted temptation for a long time. That is true. But if I may say so, I never knew a former Christian deconvert yet who had no resources. Those resources may have been web sites, wise friends, or other people to whom he could take his questions. The resources might even have included very good answers, answers that were rejected. These "sendings," however, are rather mundane. We would prefer to have God zap people out of their doubts, not just send along some friend, perhaps some awkward or tactless friend, and then to leave the doubter to accept or reject the response given.

This all may sound rather harsh, but I think it is true nonetheless. God's intolerable love wants to make saints out of us while we would much prefer to be left alone to be happy, ordinary people. Happy, ordinary people tend to have happy, ordinary ideas about God. Which is all very well and good for starters but isn't where God wants us to be in the long run. Any lover of detective fiction knows that the very fact that doesn't seem to fit in, the fact that gives you the most trouble, is a clue to the whole mystery. So it is in theology, and so it is inevitable that anyone given the opportunity to know God better will start to notice inconvenient facts that do not fit with his preconceived ideas.

So if you are that doubter, consider the possibility that God is deliberately not making this easy for you because there is something he wants you to understand, and you will learn it only by passing through this time without visible sign from him. Then ask what that something might be.

I would be remiss if I did not mention evidence again in closing out this post. I am not recommending fideism or even mysticism. On the contrary, I am always asking the doubter to examine the positive evidence for Christianity and take his stand on it. Indeed, one of the most curious things I find about recent deconverts is how difficult it is to get them to come back to the subject of the evidence for Christianity. A recent deconvert is like a man whose mind is always wandering from the point.

So my point is not to recommend that anyone believe against evidence or without evidence. Rather my point here is just this: If you are watching someone struggling, or you are struggling yourself, with questions and doubts about Christianity, and if you wonder why God lets this go on, take a hard look at the doubter's theological concepts (especially if the doubter is you) and ask where they need to be deepened and how such a deepening might serve to allay the doubts. If Christianity is true, then it is entirely possible that there is a step up that God wants you to take. You cannot stay comfortably where you were before. Whether or not you take that step is a matter of more than passing interest to us all.

Cross-posted

Comments (13)

Lydia,

I'm afraid what strikes me, at least concerning your example (and perhaps other examples of this phenomenon you've encountered) is the raging ego at the center of it all:

"I don't want to be in heaven with a God who would send my best friend to hell."

Perhaps it is generational, but this statement rings with selfish pride to me -- how dare God not cater to my will and desires (and how quickly your "fictional" doubter has forgotten the most basic Christian prayer -- "thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.") Of course, this doesn't solve the problem -- we still have a former Christian on our hands filled with doubt -- but I do think that the solution has to be, as you suggest, a process of helping them grow up and more importantly, confronting their self-centered ideas.

Thanks for the thoughtful post, Lydia. Would you include under "deconversion" people who come to understand what Christianity is and then reject it? For instance, someone who recognises that Christianity means some form of self-sacrifice and simply says "no"?

Jeff, I would _guess_ that the argument is something like, "I have had an opportunity to know this person well, because he's my best friend, and therefore I know that he could not possibly deserve to go to hell."

That's still rather prideful but perhaps not quite as self-centered.

Joshua, I don't know. Does the person you are envisaging claim to believe that Christianity is _true_ and then just ally himself with the devil? I've seldom run into anyone who does that so frankly. Generally the claim at least is that he's decided that Christianity is false. I suppose this reveals an ambiguity on the term "reject" when one speaks of rejecting Christianity.

This was edifying and interesting to read Lydia.

I immediately thought of Jude's admonition to be merciful to those who doubt and to save others "by snatching from the fire". This is at the end of his short epistle after strongly denouncing and slamming false teachers. Given the prevalence of crazy ideas and worldviews out there today, and assuming that Jude is talking about doubting Christians here, I can see his point.

So if you are that doubter, consider the possibility that God is deliberately not making this easy for you because there is something he wants you to understand, and you will learn it only by passing through this time without visible sign from him. Then ask what that something might be.

Interesting point, and it makes me think of James chapter 1 where he says that if anybody lacks wisdom (I presume that he again is talking about any Christian, not just any old Joe), let him ask God who gives generously and without reproach. However, there is a condition --- the one asking must not doubt, and James states that those doubt are unstable or double-minded, and such people should not expect any wisdom in response. (Side note: this seems to contradict my own personal experience where I wasn't sure decades ago but God gave me strengthening in the faith anyway.)

Again, this was very nice to read and thanks for posting it.

Joe, you lead me to suggest a distinction between *questions and puzzles* and "doubt" properly so called. I don't know how Protestants propose to speak of these, but in Catholic theology, there is all the difference in the world. A real doubt is a willed act of standing back, away from the movement of assent that the gift of faith provides. It is contrary to the living faith that St. James speaks of, and so implies the death of that grace in the soul. A person who has consented to an actual doubt (as defined) is already corrupted by that act, which is a sin (and therefore originates in the will, not in the intellect). His doubt is, even before any eventual conclusion that "Christianity is bunk", an affront to Christian faith.

Questions and puzzles and such are not the same. Questions are matters that you do not profess to have a solution for, even though you remain confident there is a solution. In the second and third century, during the time of clarification of doctrines of the Trinity and Christ's 2 natures, a Christian could readily say "Christ is God" and "Christ has human nature" confidently, even though he might be much less than confident how both those don't imply contradictions.

When someone approaches a believing Christian with a "problem" in the Bible or theology, something that looks like a paradox or a contradiction, the Christian should never respond (even interiorly) with anything like "well, that makes me uncertain of my faith, or of God, etc." No puzzle, conundrum, or paradox should produce such a result. The tried and true response is "I don't know how to solve that apparent contradiction, but I remain confident there is a solution." It is accepting the puzzle as the basis for a loss of that confidence that is the moral mis-step of doubt.

As have many (perhaps most) long-standing adult Christians, I have had issues that caused me years of discomfort because they looked like problems. But years, even a whole life, of acknowledging that a question is unsolved is perfectly OK. We ought to expect not to have answers for everything, we would have to be God to have all answers. People who get actively impatient with God for not supplying the answer "when I need it" are deciding for God when the right time is - they are dictating to God what His providence ought to say about the organization of the world. Humility means accepting it when you can't make sense out of a puzzle, and letting God have his way in whether (and when) to help you out of it.

I suspect this is (part of) the reason that Lydia, in the OP, identifies in the person who professes "doubts", that there is often a kind of defect in their willingness to believe, not just a gap in their knowledge. A true doubt about the validity of Christianity (in a Christian) IS a defect in the will.

Well, I have to admit, Tony, I'm more of a die-hard probabilist than would (I gather) be consistent with Catholic doctrine on this point. I wouldn't want to identify my position with "the Protestant" position, though. There are certainly Protestants who would strongly disagree with me. Anyway, I would treat the difference between a puzzle and a doubt as one of degree rather than of kind. I would use the word "doubt" in relation to probability--one's probability of the truth of Christianity has dropped down to x.

However, it often is not _actually reasonable_ to do that. That is to say, there are objective facts about how much some puzzle or problem _actually_ "hits" the probability of the truth of Christianity, and a rational person will have his probabilities in line with these objective facts.

The reason I insinuate in the main post that many (most?) deconverts have a defect of the will is that in my experience their subjective probabilities are not in line with objective probabilistic relations. They exaggerate the rational impact of the problems they raise. They misevaluate answers as insufficient even when they are sufficient. (I think in many cases this misevaluation arises from a failure to distinguish emotional satisfaction with intellectual satisfaction.) Or, worst of all, they make little attempt to talk to people who could help them with their initial concerns, sometimes even people they _know_ would be likely to be able to help them.

I'll give a concrete example: Joe is brought up to believe that God loves him. One day, Joe's wife and son die in a tragic accident. Joe voices his doubts about God's love, to which his wise pastor replies: "Joe, perhaps God's love is bigger and more mysterious than what you thought it was. Being loving doesn't mean not letting you suffer."

Joe has two predictable responses:
1. "I see. I guess I don't really understand what love is, but I'll continue trusting that God is loving."
2. "God doesn't love me! To hell with God."

But there's a third:
3. "I see. So that's what God's love is. In that case, I don't want God's love. I'd rather be in hell than be loved by God."

I'm thinking the ambiguity may lie more along the line of using adjectives with positive affect e.g. "love" to describe God. Learning more about God's love may simply lead someone to conclude that this isn't what he's attracted to.

Well, I get that you are a probabilist, Lydia. Not sure in what manner you tie that in with such passages as

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

The "confidence" and "conviction" we have arise not from the usual sorts of evidence, but from God's moving the will to command assent to these things: assent that God chose to save us, that God wants us to be with Him. (The evidence that it is God doing this is a separate set of questions and evidences than those as to WHAT he is revealing.) Since our assent rests on Divine testimony, it is (as I see it) a stronger basis for assurance and conviction than

If we apply a Bayesian analysis to the combined set of statements consisting of (a) God is the source of this, (b) God does not lie, and and (c) God is a Trinity, the net probability for the third cannot get higher than the probability of the first.

But I don't think that we really ought to apply it that way. In my marriage I don't (and I don't think anybody does in a healthy marriage) rest my probability for something my wife says about some important matter on a prior probability that she intends to be truthful to me. When you trust someone wholeheartedly, this is not intellectually equivalent to saying "I believe that she tell me with X% confidence", where X is some high value like 98 or 99. Wholehearted trust is whole, and doesn't admit of partial confidence like a probability.

Nor would I attempt to cash it out by saying in faith, I _accept_ the probability of (a) as 100%, and with that, the probability of (b) is 100%, and with those as the prior probabilities, the probability of (c) is then equal to just the "stand alone" probability that the statements in the Bible about 'the Father', 'the Son' and 'the Spirit' are what we call "the Trinity", running around 98.7%. Give or take 0.3%

I think that wholehearted belief in someone is sort of like accepting the probability of their being truthful to you is 100%, but not entirely. When we say "I believe in you", we seem to be saying something of a different order than "I have 98% confidence in you." But adding that 2%, as a matter of probability ONLY, does not get us to a different order of adherence. So I tend to think that wholehearted belief is a different category of intellectual adherence than a probable measure at the top end of the scale.

Joshua, you raise a very interesting question which is related to this question: Does the Devil really believe in God? We have Scripture in James that says that the devils do believe, and tremble. Yet at the same time (and here I'm sort of channeling my inner Thomist) we can argue that the devil, and anyone who says he would _rather_ be in hell or would _rather_ be without God, doesn't really understand God. If you really understand God, you realize that it's _absurd_ to say that you would be _better off_ without God. Now, I can't say about the devil, but I know that when humans make statements like you envisage, "So that's what God's love is. In that case, I don't want God's love. I'd rather be in hell than be loved by God," they are at least acting like and thinking to themselves that they can have goodness without God. They are assuming, for example, that they will retain some kind of grandeur of their own integrity, some kind of dignity of their own, as they willfully separate themselves from God. In a sense, they are tacitly thinking of hell as a concentration camp to which they will be unjustly sent by an unworthy demigod for their refusal to bow to him. And, just as people retain their heroism in concentration camps, they tacitly think of themselves in such heroic terms. "I stood by my principles and refused to worship a God who would let my wife and child die in a crash as a supposed act of his love."

But in reality, it isn't like that, and Christianity teaches that it isn't like that.

There is no heroism or grandeur in hell, and God isn't a petty, dictatorial demigod.

Moreover, God is the source of all that is _really_ good and hence of all that we perceive as good. It's not like Christianity is turning black into white and white into black. What the pastor says to the grieving father doesn't mean, "God _really_ is what we would call a wicked sadist, but we give the word 'good' to that because God gets to define how words are used."

What this means is that if the person chooses to go to hell rather than to follow God, and if he does it in the name of his love for his family, he'll lose familial love as well. All the tenderness he felt for his wife and child will not be hugged to him forever in hell, as the concentration camp prisoner remembers all the good, sweet things that have been taken from him. There is no human tenderness in hell. God is the source of all that tenderness and human love. You can't have one without the other.

So I think there are a lot of actual _errors_ lurking implicitly behind the person's bitter declaration that he'd rather go to hell than accept the pain that accompanies divine love.

But at the same time I'm inclined strongly to think that they are _culpable_ mistakes in response to the pastor's wise words and that that kind of response is _precisely_ the sort of response that can really damn a soul. Naturally, someone like me comes along and tries to warn such a person (when I get a chance), with something like the paragraphs above. But nobody has to listen to the warning. So it may well be a case of, "Be careful what you wish for. You might get it."

Tony, I tend to interpret the verse about "the evidence of things not seen" in terms of the human tendency to be too wedded to specifically sensory evidence. I know that I sometimes feel the oddity of praying to a God I cannot see, and skeptics will make much of "your imaginary friend" and such. I hold that, as Lewis once wrote, faith is united with reason against emotion. And, I would add, against the crudest sort of empiricism that feeds emotion: How can I put my trust in a man who died long ago whom I never met? Etc. Hence, faith is _hanging on to_ what I know to be true rationally about God and acting upon that knowledge even when I _feel_ like it's false and even when I would like to have more personal, direct, sensory confirmation of its truth.

Thanks for the response Tony.

Joe, you lead me to suggest a distinction between *questions and puzzles* and "doubt" properly so called. I don't know how Protestants propose to speak of these, but in Catholic theology, there is all the difference in the world. A real doubt is a willed act of standing back, away from the movement of assent that the gift of faith provides. It is contrary to the living faith that St. James speaks of, and so implies the death of that grace in the soul. A person who has consented to an actual doubt (as defined) is already corrupted by that act, which is a sin (and therefore originates in the will, not in the intellect). His doubt is, even before any eventual conclusion that "Christianity is bunk", an affront to Christian faith.

I can't speak for Protestantism in general, but I agree with you concerning the distinction between doubt that arises in the intellect and doubt that arises in the will. My difficulty is that James appears to be addressing Christians, who (I would think) would would not have the "willed act of standing back, away from the movement of assent that the gift of faith provides." So I understand you quite well, but still have an issue reconciling my own experience (as a Christian with real doubts) from decades ago with what St James states, provided I have understood him correctly.

When someone approaches a believing Christian with a "problem" in the Bible or theology, something that looks like a paradox or a contradiction, the Christian should never respond (even interiorly) with anything like "well, that makes me uncertain of my faith, or of God, etc." No puzzle, conundrum, or paradox should produce such a result. The tried and true response is "I don't know how to solve that apparent contradiction, but I remain confident there is a solution." It is accepting the puzzle as the basis for a loss of that confidence that is the moral mis-step of doubt.

As have many (perhaps most) long-standing adult Christians, I have had issues that caused me years of discomfort because they looked like problems. But years, even a whole life, of acknowledging that a question is unsolved is perfectly OK. We ought to expect not to have answers for everything, we would have to be God to have all answers. People who get actively impatient with God for not supplying the answer "when I need it" are deciding for God when the right time is - they are dictating to God what His providence ought to say about the organization of the world. Humility means accepting it when you can't make sense out of a puzzle, and letting God have his way in whether (and when) to help you out of it.

Agreed, and that's my experience too. There are (for me) a few difficult problems in the gospels, and I have trouble believing certain parts of Genesis because they seem too fantastic. But I don't let a few problems overturn all the evidence and consonance with the things I have verified and studied. Fortunately, scripture has enough of a line of credit with me to where, when there are issues, I'm able to simply say "I don't know" but it doesn't affect my faith or standing. To paraphrase something I think CS Lewis said, I don't wake up each morning re-evaluating the evidence for Christianity. With age has come a sense of (as you say) not dictating to God when He needs to supply the answer, as well as humility. We can do this because there are lots of other things to give us confidence in Christianity, so a problem here or there is almost expected. Thus, I live with the problems, knowing they're probably never going to be solved in this lifetime, but I'm confident that there is a solution or there are more (as of yet unknown) facts that, if known, would make the problem vanish.


Hence, faith is _hanging on to_ what I know to be true rationally about God and acting upon that knowledge even when I _feel_ like it's false and even when I would like to have more personal, direct, sensory confirmation of its truth.

This is worth printing and framing!

After about five years as a Christian, I struggled through an intense period of doubt for about two years, though some lingering shadows of that doubt continue to this day I have come through it stronger than ever. At the beginning of this brewing storm, I asked for three specific signs from God to confirm my faith. All three (very specific) signs that I asked for came to pass and all very quickly....so....that should have been the end of my doubts right? Honestly, it was just the beginning of them and as I said I went through two years of very dark times, but I never let go of those confirmations even when my intellect and will failed me. I continued to believe through the doubts and to act faithfully through the doubts. Before this period my faith was very much intellectual in nature. I had all the "right" arguments and answers. Now my faith is a bit more raw, and I don't rely so heavily on canned responses. I learned many lessons through this time, but the main take away is that God is real even if I can't articulate the best arguments. I have learned that the best way to believe in Him is to actually experience life with Him daily. Each day I choose to believe and follow, and I do so despite not having all the answers, and He has not once let me down.

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