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Doubt is a Privilege When Faith is a Choice.

Doubt is a Privilege When Faith is a Choice.

Doubt is a Privilege When Faith is a Choice.

To doubt is to be, but who exactly has the privilege to doubt?

by

Mihika Malhotra

3 min read

3 min read

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@maslows _ hierarchy_ of memes

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@maslows _ hierarchy_ of memes


To doubt is to take a genuine pause before accepting the fact in front of you. It is to question what appears truly certain and to ask whether there might be another explanation for the dilemma presented. We often experience doubt as uncomfortable because certainty gives us something that uncertainty cannot: stability. To be certain is to feel that the ground beneath us is solid. To doubt is to discover that the ground is actually lava.


Still, in a philosophical regard, doubt is not necessarily the enemy of knowledge. It can also indicate the beginning of it. So, to doubt in this case becomes an interruption. It prevents the first answer that pops into someone’s head from becoming the final truth. Philosophy, at its most fundamental level, begins with disruption. It embodies the refusal to accept something simply because it has always been accepted.


The act of questioning has been celebrated immensely by the French polymath, René Descartes. He began by questioning almost everything he thought he knew. Could his senses deceive him? Could the world be an illusion? Could his memories be so utterly wrong? His radical doubt was an attempt to discover whether there was anything that could remain certain even after everything else had been questioned.



The answer to all the above was found in the act of questioning itself. If Descartes was doubting, then he had to be thinking. And if he was thinking, there had to be a thinker. He could doubt the existence of his body, his surroundings or even the reliability of his senses, but he could not doubt the existence of the person doing the doubting. The very attempt to deny his existence confirmed it.

The space caused between the probable physical body and dissatisfaction toward a thought occurring is what made the existence possible to comprehend.


This realization made Descartes settle on cogito, ergo sum. ‘I think, therefore I am.’


The vitality of the cogito is not simply that Descartes discovered that he existed. It is that doubt itself became the path to certainty. He carved a way through uncertainty. Doubt became productive because it forced him to separate what he merely assumed from what he could actually justify.


Deeply liberating is this kind of doubt that allows a person to question inherited beliefs, challenge authority, and reconsider what might appear obvious. Certainty becomes provisional. It reiterates the thought that you may be wrong, and therefore you should keep thinking. Keep doubting. Keep challenging.


Seems simple, doesn’t it?


Beneath this surface, there lies a space of doubt that is rarely acknowledged.


Who has the privilege of doubting?


@shraddha.potdar _

@wellnesswingsfoundation


Doubt requires space. It requires time to pause, reflect and remain uncertain. It requires a degree of security that allows a person to ask questions without immediately needing an answer. For someone whose basic needs are secure, doubt in some regard can be an intellectual exercise. For someone whose life is shaped by poverty, instability or suffering, uncertainty, doubt can become a privilege. This becomes particularly complicated when doubt enters the collision of social class and religion.


Faith is often treated as a matter of belief, but belief does not exist separately from the conditions in which a person lives. For someone who has experienced abundance throughout their life, the promise of an afterlife may be worth questioning. If the present worldly experiences already provide opportunity, security and most importantly, pleasure, what urgency is there in needing to believe that a transcendental world exists?


But imagine a life in which the present offers very little security. Living in poverty, fighting constant hunger or uncertainty. In such circumstances, the promise of a peaceful and eternal afterlife can mean more than an abstract theological claim. It can provide hope. It can give the current suffering a meaning beyond itself. It offers the possibility that the inequalities of this life will not be the final word.



I read a Substack article the other day titled ‘Is it religion or is it the oldest con in history?’ by Ashini Shashidaran. Within the article, she writes: ‘the world is a rich man’s heaven, and heaven is the poor man’s heaven.’


The article unveils an uncomfortable difference in the way heaven can function. For the wealthy, the world itself may already resemble aspects of what heaven promises. Heaven, therefore, becomes something that is easier to doubt because the loss or the questioning of the so-called eternal truth may not threaten the foundations of everyday life. Now, for the poor, however, heaven can represent what the present world refuses to provide. If earthly life is difficult to achieve, the possibility of eternal pleasure can become inseparable from hope itself.


This does not mean that the poor cannot doubt, nor that the affluent cannot have profound faith. Poverty does not eliminate intellectual curiosity, and wealth does not guarantee scepticism. The point is not who is capable of doubting. It is more so about what the doubt costs. To question a belief is easier when questioning it does not threaten the only source of meaning or hope available to you.


It creates a paradox. Doubt is valuable precisely because it prevents anything from becoming absolute. It is what makes us question our assumptions and recognise the possibility that we are wrong. In this sense, doubt is intellectual freedom. But if doubt is a privilege, then even the celebration of doubt needs to be questioned.


Perhaps the person who says, ‘I am not sure there is an afterlife, ’ is exercising a freedom that another person cannot experience in quite the same way. Perhaps the difference is not intelligence, education or even the strength of belief, but the conditions of life that make uncertainty bearable.



I read a Substack article the other day titled ‘Is it religion or is it the oldest con in history?’ by Ashini Shashidaran. Within the article, she writes: ‘the world is a rich man’s heaven, and heaven is the poor man’s heaven.’


The article unveils an uncomfortable difference in the way heaven can function. For the wealthy, the world itself may already resemble aspects of what heaven promises. Heaven, therefore, becomes something that is easier to doubt because the loss or the questioning of the so-called eternal truth may not threaten the foundations of everyday life. Now, for the poor, however, heaven can represent what the present world refuses to provide. If earthly life is difficult to achieve, the possibility of eternal pleasure can become inseparable from hope itself.


This does not mean that the poor cannot doubt, nor that the affluent cannot have profound faith. Poverty does not eliminate intellectual curiosity, and wealth does not guarantee scepticism. The point is not who is capable of doubting. It is more so about what the doubt costs. To question a belief is easier when questioning it does not threaten the only source of meaning or hope available to you.


It creates a paradox. Doubt is valuable precisely because it prevents anything from becoming absolute. It is what makes us question our assumptions and recognise the possibility that we are wrong. In this sense, doubt is intellectual freedom. But if doubt is a privilege, then even the celebration of doubt needs to be questioned.


Perhaps the person who says, ‘I am not sure there is an afterlife, ’ is exercising a freedom that another person cannot experience in quite the same way. Perhaps the difference is not intelligence, education or even the strength of belief, but the conditions of life that make uncertainty bearable.



This also complicates Descartes' ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes places thinking at the centre of certainty. But before a person can spend time questioning existence, there must be some room in their existence for that questioning. Who gets the luxury of asking what is true when survival itself demands immediate answers?


Nevertheless, recognising doubt as a privilege should not lead us to abandon doubt.


We should doubt the beliefs we inherit. We should doubt our assumptions about faith. We should doubt the idea that everyone has the same freedom to question. Most importantly, we should doubt the comfortable belief that the act of doubting is equally available to everyone.


Possibly, the greatest threat to faith is not doubt itself, but believing that doubt is unacceptable. In a similar way, the greatest danger of certainty is not that we might be wrong, but that we might become so certain that we stop noticing who never had the freedom to question anything in the first place.


@wellnesswingsfoundation

@ocdvstheworld

@ocdvstheworld

@shraddha.potdar _


This also complicates Descartes' ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Descartes places thinking at the centre of certainty. But before a person can spend time questioning existence, there must be some room in their existence for that questioning. Who gets the luxury of asking what is true when survival itself demands immediate answers?


Nevertheless, recognising doubt as a privilege should not lead us to abandon doubt.


We should doubt the beliefs we inherit. We should doubt our assumptions about faith. We should doubt the idea that everyone has the same freedom to question. Most importantly, we should doubt the comfortable belief that the act of doubting is equally available to everyone.


Possibly, the greatest threat to faith is not doubt itself, but believing that doubt is unacceptable. In a similar way, the greatest danger of certainty is not that we might be wrong, but that we might become so certain that we stop noticing who never had the freedom to question anything in the first place.



Doubt requires space. It requires time to pause, reflect and remain uncertain. It requires a degree of security that allows a person to ask questions without immediately needing an answer. For someone whose basic needs are secure, doubt in some regard can be an intellectual exercise. For someone whose life is shaped by poverty, instability or suffering, uncertainty, doubt can become a privilege. This becomes particularly complicated when doubt enters the collision of social class and religion.


Faith is often treated as a matter of belief, but belief does not exist separately from the conditions in which a person lives. For someone who has experienced abundance throughout their life, the promise of an afterlife may be worth questioning. If the present worldly experiences already provide opportunity, security and most importantly, pleasure, what urgency is there in needing to believe that a transcendental world exists?


But imagine a life in which the present offers very little security. Living in poverty, fighting constant hunger or uncertainty. In such circumstances, the promise of a peaceful and eternal afterlife can mean more than an abstract theological claim. It can provide hope. It can give the current suffering a meaning beyond itself. It offers the possibility that the inequalities of this life will not be the final word.


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