Coconuts and Caterpillars: Learning to Doubt Doubt

Imagine that we have a friend named Angiki who lives southwest of the Hawaiian Islands in the heart of the South Pacific in Samoa. Angiki, as we know, is an avid volleyball player and works hard to keep himself in exceptional physical condition. Every four months he participates in a volleyball tournament in Apia, his shelves virtual trophy cases and his walls papered with ribbons. Angiki does not just play volleyball: he lives, eats, drinks, and breathes the sport. A practice that began in his youth when he was too poor to afford a ball of his own and has continued long since he has become a man of modest means, part of his secret is that he spends a certain amount of time each morning and evening along the beach “serving” coconuts. He tosses a fruit of the palm up into the air, and, doubling his hands with practiced ease, connects at just the precise moment, deftly propelling the hard-cased “volleyball” across an imaginary net and into the waves lapping softly against the shore. Now, when he encounters a real volleyball, his hands, conditioned far beyond those of his peers, laugh at the soft, dancing white ball.

Earlier this morning, we received an animated e-mail from Angiki. It seems that while he was serving coconuts along the beach yesterday evening, the oddest thing happened. He tossed a coconut up into the air, doubled his hands with practiced ease, and connected as he has so many times before—except this time, the volleyball did not gracefully arc across the sky. In stunned amazement, Angiki watched the coconut travel higher and higher into the sky until it eventually disappeared from sight, never showing any sign of letting up from its heavenly course. He swears that he hit it no harder than he ever has and we have personally witnessed him serving coconuts, marveling at the deftness with which he propels these hard-cased bombshells. Even more distressingly, when Angiki tried serving further coconut volleyballs, they simply traveled in a gentle arc through the air as expected and landed with a soft splash in the ocean. In fact, he spent all evening trying to replicate the feat and nearly wore himself out this morning before typing us the e-mail on his laptop.

Now then, if Angiki wrote and recounted this story, we would probably not be very inclined to believe his words, at least without seeking an alternate explanation. Perhaps Angiki simply thought he saw the coconut disappear from the horizon: maybe the sun was in his eyes or perhaps he was suffering from some kind of momentary mental delusion: perhaps someone spiked his piña colada with liquid LSD. We are certain there is some reason he believed what he believed—people do not generally go around believing things for no apparent reason—and we know Angiki to be the paragon of virtue. We do not even question that he believes what he is telling us, but we find it difficult to give our full assent to what he claimed he witnessed. We want to believe him. So why are we inclined to disbelieve? Have we ever personally practiced our volleyball serves with a coconut? In fact, have we ever even so much as tossed a coconut into the air? So why is our first inclination to come up with a series of alternate explanations for the event that Angiki described?

In all our years of living under the sun, we have never even once seen an ordinary object that has mass—whether that object be a rock, a stick, a clod of dirt, some kind of ball, or even a coconut—take off and leave the stratosphere when an ordinary person propels it in an ordinary way, unless that object has wings or there is otherwise some obvious explanation for why it continues its ascent without falling back down toward the earth. Further, we are not accustomed to hearing people make such novel claims, and it seems completely contrary to everything we know of the law of gravity and basic physics. Now perhaps we do end up believing Angiki because we have such great faith in his integrity that we say, “Well, I’ve never known such a thing to happen before, but Angiki said it and therefore I believe it.” If we are not inclined to believe so readily, however, perhaps the one thing that would convince us (if anything could) would be to see it firsthand—or perhaps even more persuasively, to pick up a coconut ourselves, and, after assuring ourselves that it is a real, ordinary coconut from a real, ordinary coconut palm tree, to serve it ourselves in an ordinary way (as any volleyball player would), knowing that we have done nothing out of the ordinary, and then watching in disbelief as it ascends into the heavens and disappears from our sight. Indeed, we might then be far more disposed to believe Angiki’s story without question or alternate explanation!

We do not believe, in many cases, simply because we have never seen. Experience, whether it should be or not, is for most of us everything: it is how we judge our world and the people we find living within it. Thus, if it accords with our experience, it is feasible; if it does not accord with our experience, it is not feasible. People often boast that they evaluate claims impartially based purely on logic and that may be to some degree true for some people, but the underlying logic of their claims is still necessarily predicated on experience. Perhaps, however, we would do well to suspend our judgment a bit more often than we do. After all, if we have never experienced something, how then can we claim to be an authority on the subject (for that is essentially what we are claiming when we say that something is not feasible)? Can we ever completely rule something out if we have never experienced it; can we ever say anything definitively when we speak of what we have never personally known? With similar thoughts in mind, I have been doing some serious thinking about the allegory we cited near the end of The Wise Man and the King: A Postmodern Parable recounted by Malcolm Muggeridge in his book Jesus: The Man Who Lives:

The illustration of the caterpillar and the butterfly is a classic metaphor for spiritual rebirth; most of us have heard it before and perhaps even spoken of it with others. However, ever since reading Muggeridge’s version of this classic tale, I have been struck by how a caterpillar really would feel if he had emotions and thoughts like we do as humans. We know—again, through experience—that certain types of caterpillars do indeed go through an evolutionary period after which time they emerge as completely different creatures. We may not have seen it ourselves in nature, but at the least, we have probably read about it in books as children or seen the transformation performed for our benefit before the voyeuristic cameras of PBS with some dry, British voiceover pontificating about the wonder of this particular natural adaptation. Imagine if we tried to explain this metamorphosis to someone who lived on another planet where no such caterpillars exist (or, for that matter, any creatures of transformation). Could we blame him if he did not initially believe us when we told him that such fantastic creatures really do exist? The thought does not seem strange to us, for at the least we have all heard others speak of caterpillars turning into butterflies and seen enough pictures to know that caterpillars are worm-like creatures with many legs and butterflies are beautiful winged creatures that waft upon the breeze. Now imagine if we showed our extraterrestrial friend two specimens, one a caterpillar before the transformation and the other a butterfly after the transformation: he would probably still be inclined to disbelieve. If we taped the PBS special to show him, he might be inclined to accuse of us of altering the picture with CGI, just as he has read about in the Interplanetary Weekly about Earthling’s strange habits of watching, ah . . . what were they called again? Animated films? Ah yes, that is what they were called.

Now perhaps if enough earth creatures like ourselves kept repeating the same account over and over with obvious belief and sincerity—and especially if one of us could convince one of the extraterrestrial journalists of Interplanetary Weekly to write up a feature—he might begin to think: “Okay, perhaps such a fantastic thing does happen on this strange planet. I have not seen it with my own compound eyes but there is nothing in the laws of physics (which also operate on my world too, thank you very much) that would preclude the possibility, though such a story remains admittedly fantastical: one creature looks so little like the other: a clunky land creature metamorphosing into a graceful creature of the skies? Hard to conceive, yes, very hard, but not entirely inconceivable either. After all, one must keep an open mind about such things: anything is possible, you know.” And so, our imaginary interplanetary friend might slowly begin to admit that such things are not only possible, but may in fact exist somewhere in this vast galaxy we call home.

It strikes me that some doubts are better founded than others. Disbelieving a friend who claims that when serving an ordinary coconut in an ordinary “volleyball” sort of way it took off like a rocket may, in fact, be a realistic doubt. But there are other doubts that upon closer examination have far less empirical basis. For example, many of the claims that we encounter in personal testimonies or in Scripture are of the sort of the caterpillar and the butterfly. We feel predisposed to disbelieve them, and yet they are outside the realm of obvious dismissal, at least for most of us; very often we question and doubt things that are in nowise obviously true or false, for we have had little to no experience concerning them. It is not unlikely that Kathleen Norris has something similar in mind when she writes in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith: “Perhaps my most important breakthrough with regard to belief came when I learned to be as consciously skeptical and questioning of my disbelief and my doubts as I was of my burgeoning faith.” That is a striking thought. In wishing to discover the truth, have we ever considered doubting our doubts just as much as we question our beliefs? Or what of doubting the doubts expressed by others, particularly those that speak as if doubt could be a thing of unquestionable certainty? Associate professor of theology Timothy Larsen of Wheaton College reminds us in Victorian Skeptics on the Road to Damascus that it is far “easier to seem clever when tearing down than when building up”:

There is indeed a type of doubt that is almost always learned; it comes in the guise of intellectual sophistication. We often feel that being able to break something down into its constituent parts amounts to the same thing as mastery and authorizes our subsequent dismissal of any claims outside this narrow dissection. Let us turn briefly to a passage in Mark that recently struck me in exactly this light:

A botanist might be inclined to chafe at this idea that “the seed sprouts and grows without his knowing how it happened.” Yet let us assume that this scientist has spent his whole life carefully studying seeds and how they grow. He prepared his Master’s thesis and Doctrinal dissertation on the subject, and now, twenty years later has published many definitive books, written hundreds of articles for scholarly journals, and helped contribute to a wide assortment of textbooks and encyclopedia entries on plants and their processes. Even so, does the botanist really know how the process happens? Think about it for a moment. He is an observer, not a creator. He knows what does happen, but he still does not know how it happens. Empiricism may reveal the steps of the process and in that sense show him how the process happens, but the simple fact is, he was born into a world in which seeds sprout and he will likewise die in a world in which seeds sprout. Even with all his journal articles, books, papers, and encyclopedia entries he could not do a thing to change that fact if he tried. Perhaps he has learned how to clone seeds and how to tinker with the embryonic cycle—he has learned that “if I do A, B, and C under conditions D, then E happens”—but if he has solved the puzzle, why does he have to do A, B, and C under conditions D to see E happen? It seems he has merely uncovered underlying laws governing the universe that he did not engineer and cannot move beyond; everything he does must accord with the “way things are,” a factor over which he has no control and never will. The Scripture is just as true of him as any other mortal man when it says, “the seed sprouts and grows without his knowing how it happens,” though he will likely be inclined to vehemently disagree, for he believes that in the process of carefully observing a mystery, he has somehow gained mastery over it (as though by staring at something long enough one could ever make it any more or less miraculous).

Nevertheless, we are very prone to think that when we are able to dissect something, we render it innocuous: declawed and toothless. It is just such a sense of intellectual mastery that Sadhu Sundar Singh challenges in his own straightforward way when he recounts an encounter he once had with a chemist:

In accordance with breaking milk down into lactose and its other constituent parts as an interpretative principle applicable to Scripture, the Sadhu questions a similar hermeneutic regarding the “book of nature” as well:

Not only is it good to note that there may indeed be purpose in pain and suffering, it is particularly revealing to me to note that we “cannot judge the truthfulness of any book merely by reading it.” Personally, I can not think of a single exception to that statement, for the very criteria by which we evaluate the truthfulness of any given book—including the “book of nature”—is imported, external to the text itself. Thus, when we find our faith fast fleeing, it certainly helps to know that many of the things we doubt are not blatantly false, but things that seem to us improbable simply because of our lack of perspective or experience. Regarding lack of perspective, I have often noticed that when there is sin in my life—I have noticed that after I have yielded to temptation, been led astray, and fallen—I tend to have a much greater struggle with doubt, perhaps partly because I have numbed my spiritual sensitivity making God seem far more distant and my own pressing uncertainty that much more certain. Thus, if we have recently been sinning, we almost certainly need to doubt our doubt; we have to walk in the light we do have if we wish to receive any more light. And if we lack experience, then surely we should also doubt our doubt, for how can we know for certain what we have never experienced? If we thus suspend our disbelief and “try it and see” (the theme of Eating is the Proof of the Pudding), we will begin to see real spiritual growth take place in our lives.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

Since doubt tends to be more emotional than intellectual at heart, it is not easily overcome and may indeed encompass a lifetime of struggle. However, if we, like Norris, begin consciously doubting our doubt just as much as we question our burgeoning belief we will have a much easier go of dark days; if we begin doubting our doubt, like the Victorian skeptics, we might find that the alternative has even less of substance to offer than our faith. The path ahead may look dark and foreboding but the path behind or on either side is often even darker, and if we stop and consider for a moment where we have been, at the least we know that whatever the answer might be, it either was not there or else what light we did find has carried us here. Thus, forward is the only direction: forward is progress and progress is the only path to greater truth. It is unknown, yes. And that is why we must go; that is why we must doubt our doubt, for doubt is often little more than fearfulness superimposed over the unknown that lies ahead. And what if we are wrong? Perhaps a better question is: “How will we ever know that we are right if we do not try and see?” For to try and fail is to learn; never to try at all is to fail utterly. Doubt your doubt! Generally all you have to do is consider the alternative or remember where you have been.

Subscribe to Le Penseur Réfléchit, the Mr. Renaissance bi-weekly newsletter.

Previous E-mail | Next E-mail