A lot of religious doubt is about scale. The sceptic will ask: How can God hear everyone who is praying at the same time? How can God be everywhere? How can a single person be all-powerful? How can someone live forever? How does God know all things? How can God be from everlasting to everlasting? The thing that these doubts have in common is an ‘every-all’ aspect and these are expressions of scale. Someone with faith might well say that when they think about these questions, they don’t know how to respond.
Thinking about these questions can lead to loss of faith altogether. This happens because they are perceived to have no answer, and because of this the concepts they express lose their force in a person’s life. So, people end up responding by saying that God isn’t everywhere; he doesn’t hear prayer; he is limited; people can’t live forever; and God can’t know all things.
One way to tackle doubt is to challenge the framework in which the doubt is expressed. If a person doubts that p, change the p to q so that they do not feel the same doubt about q. Often people with doubt do not see beyond the doubting of p to the possibility of faith in q. We have analysed this species of doubt as a ‘doubt of scale’ and this characterization is in itself a start to our handling doubt. Is it reasonable to have doubts of scale and, if so, is it reasonable to lose faith on account of such doubts? Often people are just caught up in the doubt and lose faith because they lose control of the intellectual framework of their faith.
This loss of faith is a loss of an intellectual framework and an emotional commitment to that framework. People don’t express it in these terms and are more likely to just say something like ‘I no longer believe in God’. But they have gone from belief in p to a belief in not-p rather than to a belief in q.
The most common defence to doubts of scale is to stop the thinking. People will quickly say, God is greater than our finite minds and we cannot grasp these things. They move their thinking away from dwelling on the doubts while retaining the belief that God does hear everyone’s prayer. Is this a reasonable and sensible response? The person experiencing doubt and continuing to experience doubt has not done this or maybe tried to do it and failed. What are they to do? If they cannot switch off the doubt, are they in effect the walking dead?
As we have said, one way to stop doubt is to change p to q. Another way is to have self-understanding about doubt and ‘live with it’. A better way is to stop doubting and have the facility of mind to do so; many have this facility. And of course, for many, doubts of scale do not arise in the first place and this is a good thing. But our concern in this article is with the doubt and what it means to change p to q.
Are doubts of scale rational? The question here is about the scale of our religious thinking. What should that scale be? We are individual human beings and persons; should the scale of our religious thinking be personal? The point here is that it is irrational to suppose that our spiritual thinking could be anything other than personal in scale because that is the scale of our existence. It is unreasonable for God not to have taken our scale into account in revealing himself to us. A spiritual scale of thinking that is not bound to our scale is unreal.
The best illustration of this point is prayer. We are not concerned here with the loss of an ability to pray when someone says that prayer is difficult or that they no longer pray. This is a different situation to one where someone asks the question how God can hear the prayers of everyone who is praying at the same time, say, a million people across the world. The person who genuinely asks this question is in a very different place to the one who has stopped praying.
The key element in the question is the expression ‘at the same time’. We can hear a few people at the same time but the mind boggles at hearing a million and this thought engenders the question and the doubt. But of course it is at this point that the doubt falls away because it assumes that time is the same for God as it is for us. It is at this point that the p becomes a q because we cease to doubt that God can hear all prayers made at the same time because for God they are not made at the same time. Two people praying at the same time on earth are heard at different times in heaven; we don’t know how God intersects with our time. Since God is from everlasting to everlasting, he has a lot of time from which he can allot time to each one of us.
This response is really all about validating the human scale for prayer, namely, that God hears our prayers, i.e. God hears me. It is irrational to suppose that my God does not hear my prayer. Prayer necessarily has a one-to-one dimension because we are persons. Of course, since God is a person, this reinforces the scale in which the spiritual life is conducted. The doubt that God cannot hear the prayers of everyone made at the same time is therefore misconceived and accordingly irrational.
Another way to see that the human scale is appropriate for our religious understanding is to think of our own standards in dealing with children, which are that we speak to them on their level. We have a scale and they have a scale and we choose to relate to them in terms they understand. That God is our father only shows that the Bible is consistently scaled to the human person and indeed the human family.
It is at this point that the doubt of scale adapts and the sceptic asks whether God is or can even be a person. Does it make any sense to suppose God is a person? Philosophers provide alternative concepts of God that are more abstract and have a different scale. For example, an existentialist might say that God is the ‘ground of all being’ or ‘that which is ultimate’; a deist might say that God is ‘the originating force behind all things and beyond the universe’, and so on. It doesn’t matter what is being offered here because they are all attempts to make God transcendent and give ‘him’ a bigger scale.
There is a prejudice at work here, and the counter-question to pose to the sceptic is whether there is some reason s/he has for saying that God cannot be a person. Is there something wrong with the idea that God is a person? The first reply here is likely to be that the persons we know are all limited in various ways and God is supposed to be unlimited. How can he be a person and be everywhere, or have all power, or be all-knowing?
That God is a person is a first principle of Scripture, but we are not invoking Scripture in this discussion. Rather, the philosophical point is that since persons are somewhere, have some power and some knowledge, there is nothing inherent in these concepts that make them inapplicable in our description of what it is to be a person. The problem here is that we look at ourselves as persons and take ourselves as the paradigm. This is the root cause of the problems of scale that give rise to doubt. Either we think God is completely other to us, and has an infinite scale, or we struggle to think of God as like us, like a person. A person doubts God can be a person and adopts a more abstract and distant view of God. Essentially, if belief in God as a person is p, the doubt here is not-p.
However, if we reverse the paradigm, and say that we are like God, an image of God, we dissolve the doubt. We say that God is the paradigm of what it is to be a person and that it is we who are scaled-down persons. This is actually changing the spiritual thinking so that we believe in q rather than p. We shift the source of the trouble from ‘how can God be one of us’ to ‘how is it that we are like him’ and this latter question is answered in Scripture, for we are made in the image of God. The problem is not how can God be a person but how can we be persons when we are so limited. In philosophical terms, we are doing nothing more here than shifting our philosophy from Aristotle to Plato.
Doubts of scale are philosophical problems that arise naturally and they don’t depend on our having studied philosophy. They share a lot in common; they tend to be doubts about the personal aspects of faith.
Reflections on the Potter and the Clay