Redeeming THOMAS
HOW DOUBT HAS BECOME A STEPPING-STONE TO FAITH
Easter is an awkward time for the faithful skeptic, much more than Christmas. Even with its backstory of maternal virginity, the Christmas story does not especially strain credulity. It is a plausible sequence of events. A child is born in a stable, some rich guys show up with presents, local shepherds have a wild experience overnight on the hills. It would not be the first time.
But the elaborately impossible Easter story demands a longer leap of faith, far beyond the scene-setting earthquake, the curtain tearing in the Temple, the saints rising from their graves, to the grandest invitation to skepticism ever — the empty tomb.
The man who has come to embody this commonsensical squintyeyed view of the Easter tale is known as Doubting Thomas. It is not a term of Christian affection. He is meant as a cautionary tale. One of the 12 apostles, Thomas missed the moment when the risen Jesus first appeared to the others, and he would not believe in this resurrection until he felt the nail holes himself and even put his finger into the wound on Jesus’ side from the soldier’s spear. This incredulous gesture, almost defiling the body of Christ to satisfy his own intellectual desire for proof, became Thomas’ traditionally unsympathetic rendering in classical art.
After the scorn and mockery of Jesus’ persecution and trial, this was the newborn Christianity’s first internal encounter with skepticism, and typically, it was brushed aside with shame and stigma. By his failure, Thomas became the odd one out. As Jesus put it, throwing some of his trademark shade: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
“Doubting Thomas seems to have been devised by John (in his Gospel, the only one that tells this story) largely in order to invoke, exaggerate and then resolve doubt, and thereby to lay doubt to rest once and for all,” wrote Glen W. Most, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, and of Greek philology at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, in his book on Thomas. “Yet once Thomas has been invented, he is not so easy to get rid of: he lingers on, like the shadow of a guilty memory.”
The traditional moral is that Thomas had the wrong reaction. He should not have needed proof. Faith is a virtue precisely for this reason.
Over the centuries, this view has softened, and Christianity has made a kind of peace with its doubters. Skepticism has repeatedly shown its value as an intellectual tool, even for believers. Rather than an obstacle, doubt has been recast as, if not exactly a virtue, at least a stepping stone to faith. The stigma of doubt is weakening and as it does, Thomas is slowly redeemed.
Doubt is a key part of the modern Canadian experience of faith, according to a joint polling project of the Angus Reid Institute and Faith in Canada 150.
YET ONCE THOMAS HAS BEEN INVENTED, HE IS NOT SO EASY TO GET RID OF: HE LINGERS ON, LIKE THE SHADOW OF A GUILTY MEMORY. — GLEN W. MOST, PROF. OF SOCIAL THOUGHT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Even on the basic question of whether they believed in God, a majority of people who identified as “privately faithful” answered “yes, I think so,” which was almost exactly the same proportion as those who identified as “spiritually uncertain.” Even some of the self-professed non-believers fudged it, with more than a third declining to give the firm atheist response and instead saying, “no, I don't think so.”
Ironically, there may be a lesson in all this for science and the other great mysteries of human inquiry that inspire wonderment and doubt — physics, life's origins, climate change, consciousness.
After centuries of institutional stubbornness, Christianity, Catholicism in particular, has largely resolved itself with the pursuit of knowledge through skeptical science. The 20th century marked an important moment in that shift, as evolution and physics, backed by evidence and theory, caused crisis for the Christian creation stories.
Theologically, the threat was little different than in the 17th century when Galileo argued the Earth orbited the Sun, not vice versa. But the reaction could not have been more different. Galileo was called a heretic and died under house arrest. But Pope Pius XII's response in the 1950s to the idea that the universe originated in the Big Bang was almost embarrassingly enthusiastic. He wrote that science, “by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being witness to that primordial Fiat Lux (Latin for “let there be light”) when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and reunited in million of galaxies ... Hence, creation took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!”
Nor is it contradictory for a Catholic to believe in evolution, so long as it does not lead to denial of the immediate creation of souls by God. This modern position of the Vatican is what the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described as NOMA, the view that religion and science are Non-Overlapping Magisteria, each asking different questions that cannot be answered in terms of the other.
Pope John Paul II recognized this and formally acquitted Galileo in 1993, acknowledging he was correct. Modern science could learn from religion's experience of being put in its place. Though the philosophical attitude of skepticism dates to Ancient Greece, Prof. Most points out that until modern times it was “sporadic and culturally marginal.”
It was not really until the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes devised his famous thought experiment — doubt everything, then see what remains certain, which he took to be his own thinking self, or as he put it, “cogito ergo sum,” I think, therefore I am — that radical, principled doubt started to really show its usefulness.
Skeptics started to be lionized as intellectual exemplars, from French Catholics like Michel de Montaigne to American atheists like H.L. Mencken. Now, virtually all academia is based on skepticism. Every field of inquiry has felt its withering glare and been forced to justify its foundational tenets.
Some squirm more than others. But for many fields, the skeptic is now regarded less like the brave child who declares the emperor naked and more like a figure of scorn, suspected of stupidity or ulterior motives.
In climate science, skeptics are oil industry shills or alt-right culture warriors. In evolution, they are biblical fundamentalist creationists. In physics, they are contrarian cranks.
Partly this shift reflects the modern democratization of science, with more people taking part in scientific debates at various levels of sophistication. Partly it reflects the rise of the academic specialist, to whom the layperson can defer without actually understanding. And partly it reflects the role of science in informing the policies of governments, which want more certainty than science can usually offer. There can be an arrogance in certainty, all the worse when it is revealed as a pose, unjustified or poorly informed.
Even when science cannot provide satisfactory answers — Why is there more matter than antimatter? How did life begin? How does a material brain produce the subjective experience of thought? — those who are skeptical of the textbook answers are lonely voices among a faithful mainstream, and shamed for it.
Christianity neutralized the threat of Thomas's skepticism by eventually embracing it, by realizing that doubt can strengthen faith just as it reinforces knowledge. As Prof. Most put it, he is “a character with whom all modern readers can identify. Thomas stands for us.”