First a word to the faithful who cannot fathom a doubting “Christian”: I would not hold myself up as a example in this. (I would only plead that this is my “personal shape”.) I do not subscribe to any great value in doubt. And were it to wound your conscience on the matter, I prefer that you at least avoid the articles on my blog for the time being.

Instead I wanted to talk to those of a more doubtful frame of mind. And I do so by featuring my doubt; I “flash my creds” when I talk to doubters. My name is John. I am a doubter.

Doubt filters. What am I filtering? A lot of things that people say. A lot of rules on how I should live my life and how I should know that this is the way to live my life.

I believe in “facts”. That I’m extremely unlikely to float over the Grand Canyon like Wyle E. Coyote should I find myself there, to me is a fact. So, says the skeptic (me), that Jesus could have walked on water is extremely unlikely as well, right?

Well, the Bible does not represent the case as likely. It does not suggest that a great many people walked on water. And it does present the case that when the disciples saw somebody that might have been walking on water, they thought it was a ghost. In that thought, neither do the disciples easily accept that it is likely that a person is walking on water. So the Bible as well affirms an “unlikeliness” to it. They also attribute an “unlikeliness” for Jesus to calm storms. “Who is he?” the disciples ask.

Could they have made the whole thing up? Sure. That’s not outside the realm of possibility.

And they could have feigned disbelief just like people in infomercials.

I accept that the role of “doubter” can often present a sort of community of “former doubters” who say “I was blind, but now I see.” You can see too. When we hear someone who expresses that they doubted until they believed, our own circumstance of doubt can be socialized away from us, by entertaining the idea that it is socially acceptable to come to belief because we’re not singular in this. Other people don’t think you’re crazy for thinking that a mop can really clean a car engine–”I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!”

Likewise, Thomas can be a motif, used in the Bible to make the incredible just a touch more credible. “I would have never believed that Jesus rose from the dead, had I not put my hand in his side–but he did!” Wow! Thomas was a realist just like me!

In fact, I could even be convinced that this is all I’m doing here. I’d have to think long and hard about it, though. And I may yet do so.

So because the “doubt” of the apostles could have made their stories more credible, I have a rationale for the depiction of doubt in the stories. And some people say that because I have a “more reasonable” case for its depiction, that I don’t need to consider any others.

Here’s where I part company with you, good skeptics. “More what-able?”

Erich Fromm said:

“What the majority of people consider to be ‘reasonable’ is that about which there is agreement, if not among all, at least among a substantial number of people; ‘reasonable’ for most people, has nothing to do with reason, but with consensus.”

So a majority of the people think (or thought) they see “reasonable” in a consensus. But, they are wrong, according to Fromm, it has little to do with “reason”. Now I can imagine that a majority of people can be wrong about something. But just as well, I can imagine that a minority can be wrong as well. Both occur.

In this case, I don’t think a standard of “reasonability” exists without siding one way or the other. But since I can observe a use of “reasonability” as “the way one ought to think” in a number of cases, this generally distributed tendency is enough to consider about any claim for “reasonability” and I don’t need to think any further—in order to be “more reasonable”!

I really don’t need to consider the case that anything is “reasonable”, but then again, the lure of reasonability (or “thinking the way one “ought”) is why I decided to reduce the equation to simple human foibles, isn’t it? So if I can use a reductionistic way to reduce “reasonable” out of the equation, what is left of the lure to reductionism? Is it really the case that once I’m there, I really need look “no further”? Thus, such simple reductionism, to me is a iffy heuristic.

Let’s try this one (often used on God as well): if God (something unseen) existed, we wouldn’t have such various opinions about Him/Her/It!

So we would have consensus were God reasonable! So is Fromm correct or not? Let’s not assume that we know. We cannot see the criteria of “reason”. Various people believe various things are “reasonable”, we might be able to conclude that if there were something definite there, more people would agree on what it was. Thus reasonability would have greater ties to consensus, because the frequency of people associating what is “reasonable” with what is “agreed”.