By Randall Smith.

Let's say you're on "Jeopardy," and you choose a panel that says: "This exists between certainty and doubt." You say: "What is faith?" Correct! The audience cheers, but most remain puzzled. You know, however, that if you were certain, there would be no need for faith. If you were in absolute doubt, we wouldn't say that you "have faith."

So, is doubt the sign of a lack of faith? Can faith and doubt co-exist? Do people who have faith also have doubts?

We don't need to speculate abstractly; we have the examples of the saints. St. John the Baptist seems convinced that Jesus is "the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world" when he saw Him coming for baptism - so convinced, he considers himself unworthy to baptize Him. Later, however, when he is in prison, John wants to know, "Are you the Christ?" Given the way things have turned out, he has some doubts.

And of course, all the apostles had doubts. They all abandoned Him. Does that suggest a strong faith? Peter denied that he even knew Jesus. And then there is the apostle whose name has become synonymous with doubting. Poor Thomas. He is known to history as "Doubting Thomas" just because he wanted the confirmation that nearly everyone would want.

Even though he had been with Jesus, listened to His words, and seen the miracles, Thomas still had doubts. In the modern age, we have the examples of St. Therese of Lisieux and Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Both were animated by a powerful faith, but both also suffered from darkness and doubts.

Joseph Ratzinger, in Introduction to Christianity, writes that, "the believer does not live immune to doubt but is always threatened by the plunge into the void," but so too does the unbeliever. "However vigorously he may assert that he is a pure positivist, who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses, and now accepts only what is immediately certain, he will never be free of the secret uncertainty whether positivism really has the last word."

Ratzinger continues:

The unbeliever may be just as troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of which the which he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole. He can never be absolutely certain of the autonomy of what he has seen and interpreted as whole; he remains threatened by the question whether belief is not after all the reality which it claims to be. Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man. Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth.

The title of a satirical article in The Babylon Bee captured this same paradox: "Life's Struggles Causing Atheist To Lose His Faith In The Existence Of Nothing." It begins: "Wimbly said that all his life, he had prided himself on his ability to face life's challenges with an unshakable faith in absolutely nothing, but several recent events had admittedly led him to thinking about the possibility of a divine and loving creator."

"Things were getting so hard, I accidentally prayed the other day," said Wimbly, shaking his head with embarrassment. "Who was I praying to? Is someone there?. . . .I'm afraid I'm on the edge of losing my faith in the existence of cold, blind determinism and nihilism." "I don't know what's gotten into Steve," said one close friend. "I'm afraid he might be deconstructing his Atheism."

Yes, it's terrifying. The universe just might have meaning and purpose. It just might be true, as Ratzinger writes elsewhere, that "God created the universe in order to enter into a history of love with humankind; He created it so that love could exist." It just...