Faith and Doubt

     The other day I read some of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis for a class assignment. For that particular assignment I had to read C. S. Lewis' take on faith. When I read the section, I found it to be very insightful and really helped me to get through an important issue that I believe each of us will inevitably go through at one point or another, "unreasonable doubt."

     C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, book 3 says this about faith:

"In the first sense it means simply Belief- accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people- at least it used to puzzle me- is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue- what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid."

     Later on in the chapter he goes on to bring up an important point, that often our emotions and imaginations make us not want to believe, even if our reason would say that everything we believe to be true, correct. I would classify this as doubt. Many times life comes our way and inevitably everything explodes, makes a huge mess, and leaves us sitting in the trash heap of life's lows. After sitting in the rubble for a while, our heart and emotion wants to tell us that our logic sucked and thus begins the battle between "faith and reason" and "emotion and imagination." On one end you think about your faith and your reason and it makes perfect sense and find no flaws in the arguments, your even able to defend against good objections, and then on the other end your heart wants to retreat and give up, thus what I call "unreasonable doubt." The only way out of our "unreasonable doubt" is to continual remind yourself of what your logic and reason first told you to be true before you got into the temporary mess of life's explosion. We all inevitably go through trials that WILL test our faith, but in the end will allow us to come bigger and stronger in the end. Sure, results aren't always immediate like we would like them to be, but if we keep pushing and continually pray for God's help, God will answer and will get you through, you just got to trust him.