See the way I look at the issue of skepticism is kinda like this: the problem of doubts is not merely an intellectual problem. People are people, not machines; they are not driven by intellectual motivations alone. We do have a certain freedom in choosing our beliefs, our emotions can play into our choices, and they have the potential to make our decisions biased toward either side. Psychologists, with their knowledge about the subconscious and other related issues, can shed more light on this. So it very well may be that the doubt in your mind owes its existence at least partially to emotional reasons. We will talk more about this a bit later.
But with this said, I also maintain that the problem of doubts isn’t merely an emotional or spiritual problem either. Some people mistakenly think whenever someone has a doubt, it is because of the fact that he is spiritually lacking; and therefore their solution to these is to bottle up the problems, instead of facing them. But it might very well be that the doubt in your mind is a valid, genuine, legitimate intellectual question, requiring an objective answer. Bottling up such a doubt will only increase the “itch”. In such a case you would have to get your hands dirty and do the research yourself from the proper sources.
Since doubts may potentially originate at either of the two levels: intellectual or spiritual, our defense against these doubts need to be at these two levels as well. Very often people forget this, they try to cater to their intellectual need, and completely ignore their spiritual need. This is what this article is about.
If you try to be perceptive about how your doubts work, you might notice the following phenomenon. Let’s say you have a doubt about Islaam. Panic kicks in, but you nonetheless try and work to find the solution. After a while you do find the solution, and it seems plausible. But even after this, it just doesn’t feel right. You have the answer to your doubt, there is nothing of merit that can be said against it, it seems sound overall, but still the agitation doesn’t go away. Or it could be that the problem you have is very, very small, so much so that it hardly challenges the Islaamic worldview at all, but for some inexplicable reason it’s giving you a hard time. In these cases, it is kind of apparent that the problem doesn’t have that much to do with intellect. At an intellectual level, you have your answer, things make sense on paper. Even so, you are lacking confidence or clarity, there isn’t tranquility in your heart. I have experienced this countless times. These are confusing times, because there is no doubt or problem to address, you already have your answer and it seems to make sense; but still at some inexplicable level, it doesn’t seem to make sense. Kind of like an awkward, pesky ‘what if it’s wrong?’ position that you can’t shake off. Many people, when faced with this situation, mistakenly assume their problem to be intellectual. “Maybe the evidence isn’t strong enough” they tell themselves, even after the evidence seems perfectly plausible on paper having no legitimate counters to it.
I have found a way out of this, and here it is. As stated above (and is kind of common sensical), human beings have two faculties, faculties of reason and faculties of emotion. My position is, the clarity of reason is not the same as clarity of emotion. Many people think emotional clarity is essentially a causal product of intellectual clarity. I would disagree. Just because something makes sense to the intellect, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna make sense to your emotional or spiritual faculties as well. In other words, your intellectual clarity- the fact that things make sense in paper- isn’t automatically going to translate into the tranquility of heart. The latter, in fact, might need a different sort of effort, namely prayer or asking help from Allah. People who mistakenly think this problem is purely intellectual might be averse to praying, because it would seem like praying is essentially indoctrinating themselves to a certain direction, done only to cover up the weakness of their intellectual position. So in order to be “intellectually honest”, they view seeking help from Allah or praying as something that fuels an unjustified bias. This mentality is patently flawed because as discussed above, because the problem is not intellectual to begin with, it is emotional; so the question of covering up intellectual gaps or indoctrination to a certain position just isn’t there.
See the thing is, you need to be able to diagnose the nature of your specific problem, you need to know if the problem you’re facing is intellectual or emotional. If you think your problem is intellectual when in reality it is not, then no amount of evidence is gonna give you clarity. To achieve this, you need to have perspective of things, and perceptive of what goes on between your head and heart. You need to be cautious enough to know an emotional problem when you see one, without getting it confused as an intellectual problem. From my personal experience, prayer actually helps in this situation. Maybe it’s the calmness of mind that prayer gives you, maybe it’s divine intervention, maybe both. But from multiple personal experiences, I have seen prayer not only generates emotional or spiritual clarity, it also gives you a clear, objective perspective of things as they are.
All of this is theory. Let me share some personal experiences.
I was on the bus one day, reading a Bradley Monton book. The author is an atheist, and he was talking about some of the refutations of the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. His counter arguments seemed strong and convincing. As a Muslim who takes intellectual arguments seriously, I was supposed to freak out. But I decided to remain calm, and told myself that I will think both sides through when I get home. When I went home, I washed and prayed calmly, and somewhere inbetween these, things started making sense. This is how: I remembered that although I liked to talk about natural theology (i.e. rational arguments for the existence of God), it wasn’t what gave me conviction in Islaam. My conviction in Islaam came more from the specific evidences for Islaam, e.g. the Qur’an’s literary characteristics, prophecies, and so on. So even if Dr. Monton’s arguments against the fine-tuning argument were fullproof, they couldn’t take anything from my faith since I didn’t base my faith on it to begin with. And this is only based on the assumption that Dr. Monton’s arguments are sound and nothing can be said against them. Other considerations popped into my head as well, but I think the point has been made. I was able to deal with the doubt while keeping both my heart and mind satisfied because I had perspective: perspective about the doubts themselves, the potential damage they may cause to my worldview, and the specific nature of my problem.
Here’s a contrasting example to further illustrate my point. A few months back, I stumbled upon an article about Dr. Richard Lenski’s “Long Term Evolution Experiment”. This was an experiment about bacterial evolution, and the results documented evidence of comparatively large-scale change in a species, which was said to be evidence for evolution to an extent. Unfortunately for me, this time I wasn’t able to take my doubt calmly. I promptly phased into panic, and this lasted for a painful couple of days. If I had perspective at that time, this would not have happened. Islaam is not opposed to the concept of changes from species to species at all, much less bacterial evolution (if you want to read up on Islaam’s view on evolution, this is perhaps the best place to go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXxQXX3l7mg); so this should not have troubled me at all. I guess all the propaganda about evolution being fatal to theism contributed to my sorry state of affairs. But anyways, I failed to deliver because I didn’t have perspective of things.
The take-away point from all of this is simple: the anatomy of a doubt is quite often hard to figure out. One thing is certain however, besides an intellectual element, a doubt can even have an emotional element, sometimes almost exclusively so. The Muslim going through his “skepticism” days need to keep this in mind, and work to properly diagnose the nature of his doubts. As a general advice however, do your study to address an intellectual doubt, but make sure you pray and ask Allah’s help to take care of the spiritual element of the problem.
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