DOUBT AND BELIEF. [This entry is a philosophical discussion of the interrelation of doubt and belief in the Western tradition.]

Doubt and skepticism, although popularly accounted antithetical to religious belief and alien to the religious attitude, are in fact inseparable from every deeply religious disposition. The fact that twentieth-century philosophical critique of religion focused on questions of meaning rather than on questions of truth (the usual preoccupation in the nineteenth century, when T. H. Huxley coined the term agnostic) does not at all diminish the importance of doubt as part of the intellectual process of religious belief. All authentic religious faith, indeed, may be viewed as a descant on doubt.

The Meaning of Doubt

The word doubt, although often regarded as the opposite of belief, signifies primarily vacillation, perplexity, irresolution. These primary meanings are discoverable in the Latin word from which doubt is derived...