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Two, three weeks ago I went for coffee with a student and three of my colleagues. The student had some nagging questions, and the colleagues each approached those doubts with very coherent, erudite explanations and recommended readings. I was out of my depth, so I did a lot of nodding. But on the walk back, I made one contribution to the rap. Last week, the student mentioned in an email that what I said was helpful, so I decided to stick it here in case it helps anyone else. It's a good description, in just a handful of moves, of how I understand faith.

Do your parents love you? Have they included you, protected you, encouraged you, lavished affection on you, because they love you? If the answer isn't yes, then it's time for a nimble detour on this flow chart to address some serious, chronic trauma. But in most cases, the answer is yes.

At my most cynical, I could make the case that your parents had done all those things from purely selfish motives. They did them to fit in, to win acceptance from peers, to appear normal, to satisfy their own parents or spouse, and the list of plausible motives could stretch as long as necessary to make the point. Give me enough time to weave my argument and I could have you believing that they never loved you for one moment, from your birth to now.

Neither explanation would finally dismiss the other. I could raise a lot of doubt in your mind, but I couldn't construct a proof that necessarily excluded the possibility that your parents loved you. Similarly, every heartwarming story you could tell, all put together, could not stop me from my competing narrative that they behaved as they did to please themselves, to use you as a prop in their self-presentation.

You're left in a very Heisenbergian suspension. You either live in a world in which you have loving parents, or in a world in which your parents are cold, calculating, and very convincing liars. You have no real way of settling which world is real.

Pivotal question: in which of the worlds is your life better? Then live in that one. Live as though that's the correct explanation. If, in doing so, you find out that your life is, in fact, better, then you chose wisely. You might not know which explanation is really the correct one, but you were never offered the option of perfect, unquestionable certainty in the first place, so you lose nothing.

Transference of this analogy from your family to your faith is left as an exercise for the student.