A Professional Skeptic’s Approach to Faith

I am a professionally trained skeptic. As I write my doctoral dissertation, I’ve spent a great deal of time studying both historical records, the primary sources of the human experience, and the vast array of secondary literature analyzing and debating those records of our past. Peer review is central to my work: it annoys me to no end when discoveries in the humanities and sciences are promoted before they’ve been reviewed by other experts.

When it comes to matters of faith, I understand why many of my fellow academics are less religious than others. In my own view, as fascinating as it is to analyze my own faith, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition alike, from my own professional training as a historian, I’ve concluded that if what I’m looking for is the definitive origins of the original truth of the scripture writers using the historical method, then I’m likely going to be left wanting. My own faith has developed from one that understood God and all things sacred in a way that draws as much from cultural inspirations like Dante and his guide Virgil in their humancentric stories of heroes, angels, and demons dwelling in the worlds above and below as it does from properly theological sources. Yet now, while I see the benefit to such stories, I generally don’t think of my faith as being centered in physical things or places as we’d recognize them. I see God more in the infinite possibilities of reality than in any sunset.

In short, as much as my professional skepticism drives me to doubt an idea of God, Heaven, or Hell in a physical way, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. Belief is not a rational thing; I believe because not everything can be understood through logic or reasoning. It means there’s always more to learn, even things not knowable in our current physical state of mind.

Oh Lord, in your mysteries my imagination is humbled. Amen.

Seán is a Ph.D. Candidate in History in New York.