Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, recently admitted that he sometimes had doubts about God. The story was picked up by the news, which found the idea of a doubting archbishop anywhere from remarkable to scandalous.

When you think about it, the idea that religious people have faith and non-religious people have doubt, and that the two are in perfect and distinct opposition, does not match our life experiences.

Before I was selected to train to be a priest in the Church of England, I had to attend a national panel with other candidates to test our vocation. One fellow candidate had the gift of disarming honesty.

When she went for her interview, the panel asked her to describe her faith. Without pausing to think about the consequences, she told them that, when she got up that morning, she was not sure whether she believed in God!

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While we might expect her to have been marked down or kicked out for such a bold statement of doubt, the panel had seen many candidates, like me, trying to be super-religious, but recognised in her a key to the reality of a life of faith: it involves a lot of doubt. She is, of course, now a priest with a blessed ministry.

Our lives are full of ‘known unknowns’, to borrow a phrase from former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. There are plenty of things we know that we don’t know, even we can’t know.

Of the ‘unknown unknowns’ little can be said, yet they bring joy and grief in unexpected quantities. Trees fall in the forest with no one around, physicists put cats in boxes and never open them, but their unknown state does not mean that they don’t exist or are imaginary.

The existence of so many ‘known unknowns’ can be a source of anxiety to some, whilst others remain agnostic, trying not to think about it. Atheists and theists are both alike in taking the ‘leap of faith’, for there is no evidence that God does not exist.

For Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the ‘leap of’ or ‘to faith’ was an important breaking free of the bonds of easy knowledge. Great research, innovation and world-changing ideas all require a pioneer spirit, ‘to boldly go where no one has gone before’.

Among the reality of ‘unknowns’, doubt and faith are a natural part of the landscape. Having faith does not mean the extermination of doubt; the leap of faith depends on which you choose to follow regardless of the quantity. A fundamentalist is one who has manufactured an inner world in which there is no doubt. It also means that the fundamentalist’s faith is nothing of the sort; it is more a delusion separate from the world. The human reality of faith and doubt is the mark of a person of faith.

For my holidays this year, I went walking in the Lake District. A clear night’s sky in a dark dale is brilliant with uncountable stars. There is still more dark than light. It does not take many stars to navigate through the darkness.

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