Doubt stokes our internal wonderment, a desire for learning and growth - leading to change and development. The absent of doubt, leads to a feeling of superiority - a form of unteachable pride. Jesus teaches us to guard against this, we are to be humble and I think our humbleness helps to ensure we remain teachable. This humbleness enables us to be free to question our assumptions and is an antidote for our prejudices and predispositions.
Elton Trueblood said, "Faith is not belief without proof, but trust with reservations." I have faith because I see the proof of God's love towards his creation all around us, as Saint Paul states in Romans 1:20; "for since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made."
Faith coupled with doubt enables us to explore all of God's created world and continually realign ourselves with the story of the kingdom of God on earth. We can refuse to settle into the pattern of a hedgehog thinker as explained in Philip Tetlock's, Expert Political Judgment:
Hedgehog thinkers are thinkers who "know one big thing," aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who "do not get it," and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term.
Enabled by faith, our freedom to doubt lets us take advantage of what Tetlock calls fox like thinking;
Being thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible "ad hocery" that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.
2 comments:
Great post, Brian. I think I'm going to need to read that book.
I love the explanation of faith and how doubt plays a key role. To me, doubt is the vehicle which allows me to "work out my salvation with fear and trembling." I've seen that in my life and have often tried to recognize my own arrogance and to allow each and every one of my assumptions to be questioned and analyzed. Not always great at it--I see the arrogance of other much more easily--but I try.
Thanks - I must say that I haven't read Tetlock's book. His work is qouted in another very interesting book I'm listening to: The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It, by Joshua Cooper Ramo. It's very interesting and I find it full of supporting ideas like the Fox and Hedgehog.
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