Curiosity, Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Faith

Can a critical thinker also be a person of traditional religious faith? It is true that many are, or at least appear to be, but who knows what goes on in another’s mind. As a purely theoretical question, the answer must be: perhaps. Two variables skew the response: the thinker’s curiosity and the reasonableness of the article of faith. Faith may not demand that critical thinkers affirm something they know to be patently false. Critical thinkers by their very nature are curious. Leading them to evaluate and critique the evidence before making a decision, or making a faith commitment. Curiosity is the mother’s milk of critical thinking. Without it there will be little critical thought.

            Religion in Western culture is generally conservative and offers its propositional truths as paradigmatically absolute; they are the product of divine revelation, we are told, to be questioned only at the risk of one’s immortal soul. Nevertheless, critical thinkers are not typically so generous as to affirm without critiquing. Regardless of the stakes, an individual who suppresses curiosity and affirms a religious proposition without serious challenge is not thinking critically.

            The real difficulty with religious truths, however, is that the absolute religious truth of one group frequently refutes the absolute religious truth of another group. Here is an example of one divine truth canceling another. Catholics regard the wine and bread of the Mass as transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Lutherans reject this view but affirm that in some way Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Baptists and others, on the other hand, regard the bread and grape juice (for Baptists certainly not wine!) of the Lord’s Supper as only symbolical. The bread and grape juice only represent the body and blood of Christ. As long as such ideas as these are considered simply different “beliefs” between religious groups, it is merely an oddity prompting the response, “how odd. How can people in the same religion who use the same holy books believe such remarkably different things?” But when it is remembered that these three groups hold that their respective views are absolutely binding on their memberships as the product of divine wisdom, it should strike a critical thinker as a curiosity for further investigation, particularly into the rationale of each group. Of course, they cannot all be the result of divine revelation! But the solution is not as easy as determining which is the correct view and eliminating the other two.

            The problem really goes to the nature of “religious truth.” Religious truth is not objective like mathematics—like 2+2=4, for example. Rather religious truth is only subjective truth in every case. Like beauty, religious truth lies in the eye, or in this case mind, of the beholder. That the character of the propositional truth is absolute is only true for the one who believes it is true. It is unlike Einstein’s theory of relativity E = MC², which is universally true—although true believers are scarcely apt to agree. Such an uncritical perspective is apt to strike the critical thinker as suspicious—if not worthy of complete skepticism.*

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*This essay first appeared in Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 39–41. It appears here newly edited and under a new title.