There have always been questions about God, but it was only recently that these took the form of doubt. Our ancestors studied the Scriptures and enquired from their priests and prophets, not because they expected a final and definitive solution but because they encountered a mystery that gave no rest to a questioning mind. Each answer gave rise to new questions, driving people on in their search, awakening in them a desire for a knowledge that could only be satisfied in the beatific vision.

But for the present generation a new and more basic question has emerged, a question that is of a different kind because it asks to be settled before we engage ourselves in the further search for God. First we need to know whether belief is not based upon an illusion. How are we to be certain about God’s existence; how can we dissolve our doubts as to whether the object of our faith is real?

Unfortunately the ‘proofs’ have done little to convince those who are not already convinced; others are left with their doubts. Most philosophers now profess that God, if he exists, is necessarily beyond the limited scope of our knowledge, a mystery on which every purely rational thought is wasted, a dimension too inaccessable to be explored, a matter of faith rather than of demonstration.

And so, in one sense, we seem to have returned to the time before the Enlightenment when true knowledge of God was given with faith and not with rational insight.

But doubt is still with us, and it would be naive to presume that it will be dissolved in a vigorous faith. For how can faith be vigorous when it begins with doubt ? Is it not inevitably somewhat supercilious, conditional because we cannot be certain that it is about anything at all ?It is hard to commit oneself to something which may be an illusion, and it is unrealistic to expect that our doubt will be dispelled by a total faith to which that very doubt is an obstacle.