The Times online article, 2007, a Bad Year for God Squadders, is filled with pious nonsense.

Now that I have your attention, allow me to explain.

The article is about the waning of religious sentiment about the holidays. Though the hints are subtle at first, it clearly becomes a lament of the secularization of the holidays. I find much in the tone of the article to take offense to, such as misrepresenting the goals of atheist books and Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. But I find this bit at the end most insulting to my intelligence:

That someone as self-evidently devout as Mother Teresa could have been tormented for so long by such doubts should not be read as confirmation that the atheists have got it right. The lesson of Mother Teresa's long, dark night of the soul is precisely the opposite, in fact. That faith, by its very nature, entails doubt. If we could be really, truly certain, about the existence of God, what, really, would be the point of it all?

It goes on to say:

You'd have thought (and certainly the pre-Christians did) that the Son of God, when He chose, would enter the world in a way that would leave no doubt who He was or that He existed.

But He chose instead to come in a way that ensured just about the maximum room for doubt; merely another barely noticed nativity in the most miserable of circumstances. If you were lucky enough to be one of those shepherds on the hills around Bethlehem who got the news from the angelic host, or one of the wise men who followed that star, you were lucky. No long, dark night of the soul for you. Instead, just one brilliant flash of celestial light and the secret of the universe was revealed.

But for the rest of us, forced to ponder the complexity of our existence and the competing implausibilities of faith and unbelief, that was surely the point of the manger, the stable, the ox and the ass. That God would choose to come among us in such a way is so strange, so inexplicable, so unbelievable, it compels us to believe.

Where shall I begin? The author misconstrues the meaning of Mother Teresa's "dark night of the soul." He implies that atheists take her lack of faith as evidence for the nonexistence of god, an erroneous position in his view. He then goes on to co-opt doubt as a part of faith, implying that the existence of doubt makes the case for faith in a personal god stronger. The end of the article continues this train of thought, wherein he claims that faith would be meaningless without doubt, and that the dubious nature of the nativity is exactly what makes belief in a god legitimate.

This may make sense to a believer, but form where I understand this assertion is absolutely ridiculous. First of all, the faith or doubt of a particular individual, even Mother Teresa, has no effect on the veracity of religious claims. Nor do atheists take her doubt as evidence Yahweh does not exist. Speaking as an atheist, it is symptomatic of the unfairness of holding blind faith as a virtue in face of so little evidence to back it up.

But according to the article's author, the lack of evidence makes the case for the Nativity and the existence of Yahweh even stronger, "That God would choose to come among us in this way is so strange, so inexplicable, so unbelievable, it compels us to believe." The uncertainty is part of the point of it all.

A metaphor may be appropriate: if a child stays up all night on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa and the jolly old man doesn't come, is it virtuous for that child to believe in spite of his doubt? Does the invisibility of the laughing old bag o' red and the unlikeliness of his existence make the idea any more plausible, any more compelling? Or is it, simply, a case of that which cannot be seen, cannot be tasted, cannot be touched, and cannot exist?

But Santa Claus is a legend, you say. We're talking about God.

And, pray tell, what is the difference?

To persist in believing, or trying to believe, in something in defiance of your doubt is a sin against truth and reason. Doubt is a call for investigation, for confirmation. It moves us to learn more about the world, to refine our thinking to better reflect and interact with reality. To ignore doubt is to persist in willful ignorance.

Perhaps that is the point of the article. Perhaps the author's goal is to de-legitimize doubt by calling it a part of faith, a necessary step on the path. When it comes to certain kinds of faith, such as faith in one's self, perhaps there is truth to that. Doubt is part of the territory. But even then doubt cannot be ignored. It must be transcended by facing reality. The author of this article, on the other hand, seems to take joy in the fuzzy realm between belief and disbelief, where his superstitions can thrive. Uncertainty is definitely a part of life. We cannot be absolutely certain that there is no personal god. But it is intellectually dishonest to use uncertainty to entertain a fantasy as fact.