Faith and Doubt

[sonofbarry]

Hi, everyone. I don’t know if this has been addressed before. (I feel it must have been.)

Anyway…

Does faith imply a degree of uncertainty, even a small degree? If faith is believing in spite of not seeing, then there must surely be an element of doubt. At the final moment, presumably, all doubt will be removed, eliminating the need for faith.
After all, the most faithful can have moments or long periods of questioning or even abandoning their faith. If it were a situation without any doubt, nobody would stray.
I would suggest that those who are unshakeably certain in their beliefs are not really being faithful, because they don’t need faith. That degree of certainty goes beyond faith.

 

[Vico]

Hi, everyone. I don’t know if this has been addressed before. (I feel it must have been.)

Anyway…

Does faith imply a degree of uncertainty, even a small degree? If faith is believing in spite of not seeing, then there must surely be an element of doubt. At the final moment, presumably, all doubt will be removed, eliminating the need for faith.
After all, the most faithful can have moments or long periods of questioning or even abandoning their faith. If it were a situation without any doubt, nobody would stray.
I would suggest that those who are unshakeably certain in their beliefs are not really being faithful, because they don’t need faith. That degree of certainty goes beyond faith.

Catechism

Faith is a grace
153 When St. Peter confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus declared to him that this revelation did not come “from flesh and blood”, but from “my Father who is in heaven”. 24 Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by him. “Before this faith can be exercised, man must have the grace of God to move and assist him; he must have the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and ‘makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth.’” 25

25 Dei Verbum 5; cf. DS 377; 3010.
26 Dei Filius 3enzinger-Schonmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (1965) 3008.

 

[Crusaderbear]

Faith overcomes doubt…so in a sense a belief starts in doubt, but ‘grows out of it’ so to speak.