The Questions You're Afraid to Ask

We are strangely good at not thinking about the things that matter most. A person will research a television for a week and absorb a worldview by osmosis. We inherit our deepest convictions the way we inherit an accent — picked up from our surroundings, rarely chosen, almost never examined — and then we defend them as though we had reasoned our way in.

This is worth noticing before anything else, because it is the one habit that can quietly wreck an honest search. If you have never actually asked whether what you believe about God is true — not useful, not comfortable, not what your family believed, but true — then you have not yet begun. And most of us have never begun.

The difference between true and comfortable

There is a question we all learn to avoid, and it is disarmingly simple: what if I am wrong? Not wrong about small things — we admit those cheerfully — but wrong at the foundation. Wrong about whether there is a God, whether death is the end, whether right and wrong are real or just weather in the brain.

We avoid it because the stakes feel unbearable, and because our beliefs have grown comfortable, like a chair worn to the shape of us. The atheist has arranged a life around the assumption that no one is finally watching. The vaguely spiritual person has assembled a private god who conveniently agrees with them about everything. The lifelong religious person may be coasting on a faith they have never once stress-tested. All three have something to lose by asking the question honestly — and so all three, if they are not careful, will make sure never to ask it.

But comfort is not evidence. A belief can be soothing and false, or terrifying and true. The universe is under no obligation to arrange itself for our convenience. The only question that finally matters is not does this belief make me feel better but is it actually the case.

The myth of the permanently open mind

We are often told that the mature position is to keep an open mind — to hold every question forever unresolved, to treat all answers as equally likely and equally doubtful. This sounds humble. It is actually a way of never having to decide.

An open mind, as one writer put it, is like an open mouth: it is meant to close on something solid. The point of opening it is eventually to bite down. A person who prides himself on believing nothing has not achieved neutrality; he has simply settled on the belief that the truth cannot be found, or is not worth the trouble of finding — which is itself a large and unproven claim about reality. Doubt aimed at everyone else's position but never at your own is not skepticism. It is just bias wearing a lab coat.

Real honesty is not the refusal to conclude. It is the willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including to a conclusion you did not want. That is harder than easy skepticism and harder than easy belief, because it means you might have to change your life.

Following the evidence, even uphill

Here is the posture I want to invite you into for these essays. Not blind faith — the caricature where you switch off your mind and believe six impossible things before breakfast. And not its mirror image, the reflexive dismissal that decides in advance that no evidence could ever count, that any door marked God must lead nowhere and so need never be opened.

Instead: the willingness to weigh things. To ask of each claim, what would I expect to see if this were true, and do I in fact see it? To notice when I am resisting a conclusion not because it is poorly supported but because it is unwelcome. To grant that a case can be strong without being a mathematical proof — the way we convict in a courtroom, or trust a friend, or decide to marry, on evidence that is compelling without being coercive.

Almost nothing important is proved the way a theorem is proved. You did not marry your spouse by completing a proof. You weighed a great many things and committed on good grounds. The question of God is far more like that than like algebra, and pretending otherwise — demanding a certainty we require nowhere else in life — is not rigour. It is an excuse.

What you have to lose

I will be honest about the cost, because honesty is the whole point. If you take these questions seriously, you may find that the god you had quietly assembled for yourself — the vague, undemanding one — dissolves under examination. You may find that nothing at all is a harder position to defend than you had been led to believe. You may find yourself drawn, reluctantly, toward a specific claim made by a specific man in a specific corner of history, a claim you had long ago filed away as obviously not worth your time.

I am not asking you to believe any of that yet. I am asking for something smaller and much more demanding: that you stop protecting your conclusions from your questions. That for the length of these essays you agree to want the truth more than you want to be right.

The people who find things are the ones willing to look. The people who never find anything are usually the ones who decided, before they set out, what they were and were not allowed to find. The first move is not to believe. It is simply to ask — and to mean it.