Honest Doubt - Feedback

The last "appearance" of Honest Doubt was on the programme "Feedback" where listeners can comment on programs.

A number of listeners who were perhaps usually more cold towards religion felt the program was fascinating and worthwhile, while those who were more traditional Christians detected too much scepticism in the content.

I was reminded of the psychotherapist M. Scott Peck who was puzzled at how he saw patients come to him with problems who had a religious background, and left with their problems resolved but no longer religious, while he would also have patients with the same problems, with no religious background, leave with their problems resolved but now following a religious path.

How come the same treatment, from the same therapist, could result in such different outcomes?

His answer was that we are all on different spiritual paths and what is right for one person may not be right for another at that particular time in their lives.

It may also be that the usual picture of believers is of those with no questions or doubts, and for Richard Holloway to show how many believers have lived with doubt challenged stereotypes and perhaps made the religious option more believable for some people, or at least made religious people more normal.

At the time of writing there is a lot of excitement about the discovery of the Higgs boson "God particle". In science there is a clear distinction between the evidence and the explanation. Even with the discovery there is no final explanation, scientists are already talking about this opening up a whole new field of enquiry.

In science the whole notion of "certainty" is different - there are probabilities of evidence at this level, but statistically the evidence is highly probable, but the explanation is only just beginning, and it seems the explanations will go on and on.

If we have no more certainties in science, in life we have very little explanation that is certain either - there is all sorts of evidence that we have to weigh up and make judgements on. So it really is not unusual for spiritual or religious life to be any different. The issue is can we live with uncertainty, not can we avoid it.