Questioning Your Faith
possummomma talks about questioning your faith:
Is this really what theists are imagining when they say they’ve “questioned their faith”? I ask this sincerely because, if so, then this explains why so many theists will make the argument that atheists have become unhappy with God or angered by God. Is it really accurate for them to say that they’ve “questioned their faith”?
She’s refering to an article about a woman who is talking about her faith after her daughter was abducted. A very difficult situation, I have no doubt about that. The woman says:
Kate McCann said fear about what might have happened to Madeleine, who was taken from her bed in the family’s holiday apartment 102 days ago, led her to question her belief in God. “You find yourself asking, ‘Why do this to Madeleine? Why have you let this happen?’” she said.
But Mrs McCann said these “darker moments” of doubt were short-lived. “You realise that God hasn’t done this, somebody else has done this. I find myself asking God to help us find Madeleine and keep her safe”, she told the BBC’s Heaven and Earth programme.
Blaming god for something is not questioning your faith. If you blame something on god, then you still believe in his existance, you’re just questioning his motives. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good question to ask, but unrelated to faith itself.
A question of faith would be, ‘does this experience imply that god doesn’t exist?’ Asking that question is what lead many to eventually leave their faith. They see all the evil in the world, or experience it theirselves, and the question naturally arises, ‘what kind of god would allow this? doesn’t it make more sense that no god would, and that this is a godless universe?’ It harkens back to the problem of evil, which I’ve written about in the past.
There is an even deeper issue, though, and that is the question of meaning, and why most people refuse to take that next step. I’m current reading ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach,’ so I want to hold off talking about that more. Look for this post coming up, however! If you just can’t wait (yeah, right), I have talked about this in the past.
