How God Works S10 Episode 3 Ð Doubt, Part 1

Dave DeSteno, Host
Christian Wiman
Julie Exline
Dave DeSteno

Dave DeSteno, Host: Does God exist? What happens when we die? Is it really so 
bad if I tell a little lie or cheat on this test? Religion can help provide answers to 
many questions in lifeÑbig and smallÑand, in doing so, it gives a sense of security 
and understanding of the world and our place in it. For some forms of Christianity in 
particular, accepting these answers might just be all that matters when it comes to 
who will be saved from eternal damnation.
So, by that logic, the opposite of faith seems pretty clear: doubt. As more and more 
people leave organized religion, is doubt the problem, or could it actually be the 
answer to the modern crisis of faith? Now, it's true that doubt can erode trust in God. 
And be a key reason for people to leave faith behind.
But that's not the only story. Studies show that many religious people experience 
prolonged periods of doubt about the very existence of God and still remain religious. 
In fact, sometimes it's actually by doubting, by questioning deep religious beliefs, that 
faith can ultimately grow stronger. The question, of course, is what determines that 
path?
When is doubt a gift, even if you have to suffer a bit because of it, as opposed to a 
curse? And what wisdom do different traditions offer about how to approach doubt 
and even embrace it?
We are going to explore these questions over the next two episodes in this special 
series on doubt and faith. On our first episode, we'll talk with author, poet, and Yale 
Divinity School lecturer Christian Wiman about his arduous path to spiritual growth 
and what it means to have certainty that God exists, while also harboring major 
doubts about how to approach the divine.
Christian Wiman: I don't find myself walking around questioning the existence of 
God, but I often doubt whether I can have a relationship with God, whether we as 
humans can. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: And we'll talk to University of Virginia psychologist Julie Exline 
about her research on the roots of doubt and spiritual struggle and hear her 
recommendations for constructive ways to embrace uncertainty regardless of faith.
Julie Exline: Doubting is associated with what's called a quest orientation to religion, 
where you're searching for meaning in life and holding religious beliefs that are more 
universal and more complex. So, there's a lot to be excited about in terms of people 
who have the courage to question their beliefs. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: And in our next episode, part two of this series, we'll continue 
the conversation with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl about how certain forms of Judaism 
encourage doubt as a form of spiritual seeking and what we all might take from that 
wisdom, whatever our beliefs.
I am Dave DeSteno, and this is How God Works, the science behind spirituality.

Growing up Evangelical in a small West Texas town, Christian Wiman never had 
much cause to question his faith. 
Christian Wiman: I would say it seemed very clear. I didn't meet a person who 
didn't believe in God until I was 18 years old. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: But when he arrived at his small liberal arts college, he 
started encountering different points of view, especially the work of one philosopher 
who made him question, well, everything.
Nietzsche was a body blow for me. He was just so directly contradicting and 
annihilating everything that I had been taughtÑeverything that I'd come out ofÑno 
one had ever told me that this whole other line of thought existed. So, it was quite a 
shock. Just scrambled me up pretty good. So yes, I would've called myself an 
unbeliever, but in truth, I don't think I was.
For the next two decades, Christian was what he calls an ambivalent atheist. His 
faith in his twenties and thirties took a backseat to a more secular life and 
professional pursuits. He became a poet, a professor, and the editor of Poetry 
Magazine. But then, at 39 years old, everything changed. 
Christian Wiman: I got sick, and we got a really bad diagnosis, and that drove me to 
want to find some form for the feelings that had already been stirred up in me.
Dave DeSteno, Host: Christian was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and told 
he had only several years left to live. It was around that time that he returned to his 
Christian faith and has maintained it through years of treatment, debilitating pain, 
and the promise of death close at hand. But rediscovering religion wasn't the end of 
his suffering or his doubt.
Rather, they took on a different form. 
Christian Wiman: I have not found faith to be a great comfort generally in my life. I 
find it to be an anguish a lot, that I'm unable to live up to. I don't feel at peace. It's 
more of a visceral experience of loneliness and of not feeling God. That's the form 
that doubt usually takes for me.
Dave DeSteno, Host: In many ways, Christian's faith has been a source of suffering 
unto itself. Maybe best illustrated in his famous words, "I never truly felt the pain of 
unbelief until I began to believe." He's explored this tension in his writing, publishing 
a memoir and many books of poetry and essays, including My Bright Abyss: 
Meditation of a Modern Believer and Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. 
He most recently collaborated with the theologian Miroslav Volf on Glimmerings: 
Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian, where the two discuss deep 
questions of faith. 
Christian Wiman: We were talking about the kind of hunger that I have for God, and 
Miroslav said that he wished he had that hunger. And I was shocked, 'cause I was 
like, why would you want this? But it was really an interesting, revealing moment. Is it 
a necessary thing? No. His faith seems to me strong and durable. But is it an 
inevitable thing for some people? Yes. I think it is. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Now, almost two decades after he received a terminal 
diagnosis, the cancer that looked certain to end his life has gone into remission, and 
yet his doubt and anguish around religious belief are still present as ever. We 
wanted to talk with Christian about his faith journey and ask how, in the face of great 
suffering, can a belief riddled with doubt still be a source of comfort and even 
spiritual growth. How can doubt exist not at the expense of his faith, but rather in 
service of it? 
Christian Wiman: What good it can do? Hopefully it keeps faith fresh. I mean, I 
have a line in my book My Bright Abyss, ÒGod calls some people to unbelief so that 
faith can find new forms.Ó And I think that God is always seeking new forms of faith.
Dave DeSteno: To start us off, I'm wondering if we can just begin with a basic 
definition. So, as you would define it, what is doubt in the context of faith? What do 
you mean by that term? 
Christian Wiman: Well, a couple of different things. I think usually what people 
mean when they think of doubt in the context of faith, they're doubting simply 
whether God exists. And questioning the purpose of their lives. In the past, people 
didn't really have that doubt, the doubt that they had was whether they were fit for 
God. And that's a very different sort of doubt. Doubt for meÑI don't find myself 
walking around questioning the existence of God, it seems to me pretty much a 
givenÑbut I often doubt whether I can have a relationship with God. 
Dave DeSteno: Well, let's explore a little bit about that type of doubt. One thing that I 
know you've said is that God, at least in your understanding, is unknowable, right? 
We're never going to have certainty in our understanding of God. 
Christian Wiman: I mean, when you say unknowable, I think you're using the word 
like in the way we know the physical reality, and God is knowable in a different 
sense. There's a wonderful novel called Septology, and it's about a painter and he's 
a Catholic convert, and at one point, he says, "It's not that I believe, I don't believe, 
but I know." And I think that reverses the terms for most people. "I believe, but I don't 
know" is what most people would say. But his state of mind is closer to mine, which 
is that I don't really believe most of the time, but I know. I know that there's a God, 
but it's not knowledge in the way that we think of knowledge in the West, an 
intellectual possession.  
Dave DeSteno: Is doubt within the context of faithÑsomething I think you've talked 
about as devotional doubtÑis that fundamentally different, do you think, than other 
types of doubt? You know, I can say, "I doubt I'll win the lottery," or "I doubt aliens 
exist"Ñwhich I don't, I actually think aliens probably do exist given the size of the 
universe. But it seems like it's something different in terms of devotional doubt. 
Christian Wiman: Yeah, it's an existential condition. I think itÕs not an intellectual 
formulation. The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel has a great thought 
where he says, "Faith is mostly being faithful to the times when we had faith." You're 
given this moment of joy, this moment of insight, and then it's gone, and a year 
passes and you're like, "Well, did that happen? I don't know." But if you can find 
some way of being faithful to the person you were in that moment, then maybe that's 
a form of faithfulness to God. 
Dave DeSteno: When you've talked about devotional doubt being something that 
can be productive for people, you often talk about three qualities. One is humility, 
one is insufficiency, and one is mystery. What do you mean by those? 
Christian Wiman: I mean, humility is coming to terms with the fact that you cannot 
know in the way that you know things about the physical world or about your life. The 
second one is driven by a lack. What you do know is that you have a lack in your life. 
And that lack drives you towards fulfilling it. It can't ever be fulfilled, but I think it does 
keep you in pursuit. 
Dave DeSteno: And that mysteryÑthe third elementÑit sounds like that thing that is 
unknowable, but you're yearning for. That is kind of tugging you upward. Is that 
right? 
Christian Wiman: Yeah, and I mean, it's not just some inchoate, completely 
unknowable mystery, we are given these moments in our livesÑsome of us truly 
visionary experiencesÑwhere we do have a taste of what it is that fulfills us. And I 
think that's what a spiritual life consists of. Richard Wilbur has a poem where he talks 
about a beautiful description of a place called Hamlen Brook, and then it says, "How 
can I drink all this?" And the last stanza is: "Joy's trick is to supply dry lips with what 
can cool and slake, leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy." 
So, there's certain moments in our life when we feel completely fulfilled. But on the 
other side of that experience, and even within that experience, there is the sense 
that this is not the full experience. What you're being given is a foretaste of truth and 
not truth itself. And so it propels you forward. 
Dave DeSteno: It sounds similarÑwe had David Brooks on the show a while ago, 
and we were talking about his journey to faith, and he described faith not so much as 
a possession, but as a yearning. Not something that you know, but something that 
you're kind of longing for, even though you don't exactly know what God is. And it 
sounds similar to what you're saying. Do you think so? 
Christian Wiman: Absolutely. Yeah. I don't think it's a possession at all. I mean, I 
don't think it's something that you can have or something that you can will. It's 
something that you are given at times. You can orient your life towards a form of 
readiness, towards those moments, and try to live in such a way that you become 
someone to whom they could happen. You're not so simply immune to miracles or 
immune to whatever might present itself in your life, but you can't own it. And the will 
is a very limited instrument. I think it's a grace. 
Dave DeSteno: Yeah. It sounds like that unknowing makes room for that context of 
awe or wonder. And as you rightly point out, you know, we talk about awe these 
days as this positive emotional experience, but it has this element of fear in it as well. 
Christian Wiman: Yeah. I mean, all of the encounters in the Bible. When someone 
encounters GodÑalmost every timeÑit is accompanied by terror. It is not this 
peaceful experience. There is a visionary experience as with Job at the end of the 
Book of Job. But it is terrible in the biblical sense. I mean it wipes a person out.
Dave DeSteno, Host: Christian calls this divine force that can inspire awe and 
terror, "a wild God." 
Christian Wiman: The importance of religion is giving some framework to the wild 
God, to those moments of volatility, which you can't really handle on your own. I 
mean, you need some form for those things, and some way of sharing your life with 
others.
And so, I do go to church. I think in good theologyÑand in good church lifeÑthere is 
a way of maintaining dogmas. You have to have dogmas that have religion. It can't 
just be this formless inchoate thing where everybody's just doing their own thing, but 
you have to preserve the ultimate unknowingness in the midst of it, and, you know, 
some religions are better at this than others. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: While church can help make sense of a wild God by offering a 
framework to understand and approach it in community, that container can also be 
limiting. This unknowable quality of God, and the questioning it can inspire, is what 
infuses religion with the power of awe and wonder.
In that sense, doubt is a fundamental aspect of faith. As Christian has said, the 
opposite of faith is not doubt, it's certainty, and that certainty can be a dangerous 
thing. 
Christian Wiman: I think that's endemic to religion as it exists, certainly in this 
country, but in a lot of the world. Where religion is thought of as this thing that gives 
you certainty, and that's a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Dave DeSteno: Why is it dangerous? 
Christian Wiman: Because then you're certain you can force it on others. You can 
make the law of your life, the law of others, and that's nothing but poison. I mean, it 
seems to be one of the great teachings of Jesus is just how anti-religious he was. I 
mean, so much of what he says is against the religion that he sees around him. I 
often think of that phrase "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am 
also, Jesus said." And usually if you hear a sermon on that, they'll say, "If you can't 
make it to church, you can still have a communion with people.Ó Or if, you know, if 
the church is under assault, you still can have these gatherings in your home or 
whatever. And then, that makes a church.
But what if Jesus was actually saying, "Where there's intimacyÑreal intimacy and 
real honesty and real authenticityÑthere I am. But where there's not, when the form 
of it becomes corrupted, then I'm not there. Where 500 are gathered, there I am not." 
Maybe when religion gets too big, it becomes too human, and it becomes corrupted 
for us.
Dave DeSteno: That's an interesting point. It sounds like, in some ways, what you're 
suggesting is that the dogma or the strict theology that comes from some institutions 
and some hierarchies that tends to happen when religion gets institutionalizedÑand 
the certainty that seems to offer about the way things should beÑmight be more of a 
problem in approaching God than a solution.
Christian Wiman: Oh, I think it's completely a problem, completely a problem. The 
mystical element of religion has to be preserved. And so many churches are justÑ
not only do they not preserve it, but they're a actively against it. And for me, that's 
been a great difficulty in reconciling my own religious life with churches, with public 
religious life.
I found that to be a pretty much unsolvable tension. It certainly enriches my life. But I 
still feel unable to reconcile the intensity of my feeling, in my work and in my mind, 
with the forms of religious expression that are available to me. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: The Christian philosopher Paul Tillich often spoke about faith, 
reason, and doubt as complimentary. He defined faith as a state of being ultimately 
concerned with a singular infinite cause and argued that true faith is not blind belief, 
but rather an act of courage, a leap that intrinsically includes doubt. There's an 
element of insecurity in every existential truth, he argued. And yet we still dare to 
take that risk and believe. Humility is accepting our human limitations to know fully, 
while also dedicating ourselves to reaching the infinite good of God.
But the church, Christian says, still has some work to do. 
Christian Wiman: I do think that the revolution within religion is gonna happen 
whether religion wants it to happen or not. It's either gonna die away, or it's going to 
have to accommodate the need for a form of unknowingness. 
Dave DeSteno: I've seen you often talk about faith as kind of something that's full of 
change, that's mutable, that's messy, right? That we have to kind of get in and 
discover. Do you think for a lot of people, when we don't allow space for that 
unknowingness that may reveal itself later, that we've kind of sterilized it too much? 
Or that we've given faith this sense of toxic positivity? You know, God will take care 
of everything.
Christian Wiman: Yeah, both the neuroscientist and philosopher and literary critic 
Iain McGilchrist wrote a book recently called The Matter With Things, which I thought 
was one of the greatest books I've ever read. And he talks about how our entire 
Western cultureÑand it is WesternÑhas been co-opted by left brain kind of thinking 
of analysis and algorithms and a kind of pure intellection. And religion isÑin this 
countryÑit's affected by it. Religion is not the cause of it. Where it tells you exactly 
what to believe, exactly what needs to be done in order to be saved. That does not 
admit what we don't know, which is the purview of the right side of the brain, which 
makes art, these leaps of imagination, that makes every great advance in science.
Dave DeSteno, Host: This left brain approach to faith isn't just problematic because 
it can stifle our sense of mystery in the face of the divine. If a religion leaves no room 
for addressing doubt, it can turn even a seemingly small uncertainty into a crisis of 
faith and make believers feel like they have to choose between tamping down their 
questions and leaving religion altogether.
This is something psychologist Julie Exline has studied in her work on religious 
struggles and doubt. She's also experienced it firsthand.
Julie Exline: I was raised in a very strict Fundamentalist church. It was a Baptist 
congregation, so I was raised with the belief that the default for human beings was to 
end up in hell. And if you didn't receive Jesus Christ as your personal savior, you 
were going to hell, and there weren't very many loopholes.
That was a pretty scary belief to grow up with, along with this belief in the rapture, 
that Jesus could come back at any moment, and you'll be left behind if you haven't 
surrendered your life to Jesus. So, where there's really not any room for questioning 
or for challenging, or for doing something different, this is the way it has to be done 
or else. And that's really a terrifying position to be in. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Julie, like Christian, really started to question her faith around 
young adulthood. This is true of many young people in modern industrialized 
societies who are going to college, getting their first job, moving away from home or 
falling in love. It's a time of great possibility, opportunity, and exploration, and that 
can challenge existing worldviews and lead to questions around belief in religious 
institutions.
Julie Exline: Doubt is a major, major reason why people leave religion. You know, 
they have doubts about the correctness of the beliefs. They have doubts about some 
of the interpersonal issues, things that they don't agree with, maybe views about 
certain social groups or political issues. So, doubts are often a big part of what gets 
people to the exit door. But what often happens is that a lot of the beliefs end up 
persisting. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Spiritual doubt doesn't only affect people who identify as 
religious. In a survey of 17,000 U.S. adults, over 70% struggled with doubts about 
spiritual matters. Questions like: What do I believe about religion? Is my non-belief 
even correct? What if there were a God, am I going to hell? 
Julie Exline: We've done a number of studies with atheists and agnostics showing 
that a lot of them have spiritual struggles too. The struggles of ultimate meaning, you 
know, wondering if your life really has any kind of deeper meaning or purpose. 
Those tend to be elevated among people who aren't religious or people who've left 
religion.
And that makes sense given that people often do find religion to be a meaning 
system. Some atheists and agnostics also have some energy around the idea of 
God and may have believed in God in the past, agnostics might still have kind of an 
open door that there could be a God. So, people who identify as spiritual but not 
religious, or as what we call religious dones, who've left religion, they're the ones 
who tend to report the highest scores on doubt.
Dave DeSteno, Host: But even though non-religious people might doubt more, what 
Julie found was they're ultimately less bothered by it. 
Julie Exline: The link between the amount of doubt you have and the amount of 
depression you have is stronger the more religious you are. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Calling into question deeply held beliefs can, for some highly 
religious people, upend their entire worldview and sense of security, resulting in 
more ill effects.
Julie Exline: There are quite a few studies, including ours, that show that having a 
lot of doubts around your religion, and especially the doubt-related struggles that we 
focus on in our research, they are correlated with things like more depression, more 
anxiety, more stress, more anger, lower self-esteem, lower life satisfaction, and less 
of a sense of meaning in life.
But overall, it's the number of doubts that you have, the number of things that are 
raising questions for you about religion, and the amount that you're wrestling with 
them, that can contribute to greater distress in all of the types that I just mentioned. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: No one is immune to spiritual struggle, not even the non-
religious.
No matter who you are or what you believe, doubt will creep in at times. The 
question then is: What do you do with that doubt? Julie says a simple first step can 
just be around messaging. 
Julie Exline: So, for a lot of people, just knowing that there can be healing and 
growth in questioning, just feeling that that option of doing that and that openness 
could really help to break some people free.
Dave DeSteno, Host: The ultimate effects of that doubt have a lot to do with how 
comfortable people feel expressing it. Julie says that by making certain adjustments 
to how you frame these questions can begin to transform doubt into a healthy 
process. One that can actually stress test faith and maybe ultimately deepen it.
Julie Exline: It really is true that doubt is often part of a very healthy developmental 
process where people are looking at their faith, that they were maybe raised in. And 
they're having good questions. Maybe things had to be simplified to be taught to 
them as a child, and now it makes sense that they need to reflect on those things 
and maybe challenge them so that they can maybe make some shifts in what they 
believe or more firmly commit to the belief as something that really has integrity for 
them.
Dave DeSteno: As a clinical psychologist, what do you see as the appropriate or 
necessary guardrails for nudging doubt into helping you grow spiritually rather than 
into anxiety or depression? Or what do you counsel people who come to see you 
about this?  
Julie Exline: Well, I think just having people have a safe place to express their 
doubts is huge.
I mean, this is probably the biggest take home point of any of the clinical papers that 
we've written on spiritual struggle. It's this idea that people need to know that these 
spiritual struggles, including doubts, are really, really common. The majority of 
people report some level of spiritual struggle.
In a survey in 2023, they found that over half of the U.S. population reported having 
some level of religious or spiritual doubt quite recently. And when they looked at 
Christians, 50% of Christians, or people that had at least a Christian background, 
said that they had had a period, at least one period, of prolonged religious doubt.
I thought, that's a really stunning figure. So, to be able to tell people that it's okay, a 
lot of people feel this way, so that they don't feel like they're in a minority, will help 
them to feel less stigma around the doubt. 
Dave DeSteno: So Julie, in your writing, you are often careful to warn people 
against reflexively pathologizing doubt. And as we've been discussing, it can lead to 
positive benefits for spiritual growth, but also negative consequences for mental 
health. So based on your own experience of spiritual struggles and the research that 
you're conducting and others that you've read, what advice do you have for listeners 
who might be uncomfortable with the doubt they're feeling? How can they work 
through that more productively or live with it more productively? 
Julie Exline: Something that might be helpful is just the idea that, you know, God 
knows everything, but we don't. And if God loves us, but knows that we're imperfect, 
that there's not an expectation that we're going to be seeing everything clearly. In 
fact, it might be prideful to think that we humans can figure it all out. You know, 
there's the Bible verse that we see through a glass darkly. So part of being a devout 
person in many cases is this type of humility about your beliefs, intellectual humility 
about your beliefs, as opposed to more of a dogmatism where you feel like you have 
to have this absolute certainty.
So, basically anything that can help people to feel more assured of God's love, and 
the unconditionality of that love, is going to help them to feel safer, making mistakes, 
having questions, having doubts. Questioning doesn't have to mean disrespect 
toward an authority. You can ask tough questions and still be respectful toward 
religious leaders, respectful reading a religious text, respecting God. Giving yourself 
that space to ask the tough questions, I think, is part of a life of integrity. And, having 
the courage to face doubts, even if you're nervous about it, I think is really part of 
having a heroic life. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Normalizing doubt can help remove the stigma, but Julie's 
research hasn't only revealed ways to minimize the negative effects of doubt, it also 
suggests ways to harness doubt for positive growth. 
Julie Exline: Doubting is associated with what's called a quest orientation to religion. 
An open, curious, humble approach where you're always wanting to keep growing 
and changing. And in this case, it's focused on religion and religious doubt and 
embracing your doubts.
And when people have this quest orientation to religion, it's also associated with 
things like intellectual humility, you know, not being too attached to your ideas, the 
trait of openness to experience, searching for meaning in life, and holding religious 
beliefs that are more universal and more complex.
These are vital human activities, so there's a lot to be excited about in terms of 
people who have the courage to question their beliefs. And I think to the extent that a 
person can really feel that their doubts are being heard, that they have a safe place 
to explore them, and just given a clear message that, Hey, did you know that the 
doubt is distressing, but it also at the same time could be a pathway toward growth? 
That's gonna help the person feel free.
Dave DeSteno, Host: Thinking of spiritual growth as a quest or journey can really 
change the dynamic in important ways. Suddenly, faith and belief aren't something 
you have or you don't. They're something you explore. 
Julie Exline: You could see doubt as just kind of a creative exercise, kind of 
dabbling with alternate possibilities or explanations. So, there's something really 
positive about the openness to the other and the humility of that that can be part of 
doubt.
Dave DeSteno, Host: Whether doubt breaks or builds faith depends less on the 
doubt itself and more on the response. Trying to reconcile faith and doubt can cause 
such dissonance that some people will leave religion or never seek it out in the first 
place. But as Christian and Julia have argued, doubt can also open up a doorway to 
growth.
Christian Wiman: But a lot of the medieval mystics talked about the dark night of 
the soul. Even further back, the cloud of unknowing, about the kind of vision that can 
arise from darkness if the darkness isn't simply something that you're fighting, that 
you have to learn to see God's presence in that darkness. And I can't claim that I can 
do that, but I have learned a lot from those people. 
Dave DeSteno: So, is doubt in some ways then a root to revelation? 
Christian Wiman: That's the hope. I mean, I think some people aren't granted that, 
but sure that's the hope, that the dark night of the soul leads you to revelation. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Through his writing and his teaching, Christian has found a 
way to embrace some of what Julie described as creative thinking around deeply 
held beliefs, and maybe even find comfort for his own questions in those of his 
students.
Christian Wiman: I teach a course called Poetry and Faith to the undergrads and 
they're juniors and seniors, and they come from all different disciplines. And it's a 
fascinating class because a lot of them, they would be people who would say 
spiritual but not religious. Although they would say it ironicallyÑthey realize it's 
ironic.
Some are from backgrounds similar to mine, a good number of Jewish students, 
often students from other traditions, Muslim or Hindu, and they all come together. 
And they vary, in the degree to which they believe or have faith, but an ongoing 
difficulty for the majority of them is the insufficiency of the language that they've been 
given to deal with what they're feeling.
And poetry is just perfect for that because it gives them a way of focusing on this 
language, and talking about all of these things. But the poem is like a safe space, 
rather than talking about them abstractly. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Poetry has become, for him, a kind of bridge to the divine. A 
way of expressing and working through those doubts, maybe even speaking with 
God. As with much in life that moves us, frightens us, pains us, or brings us joy, the 
language of art can sometimes offer a better way to approach and experience the 
mysteries of the divine then the language of logic and reason. 
Christian Wiman: The Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, has a poem that went to my heart 
when I was very young. The woman who he was in love with, she wouldn't ever 
reciprocate his feelings, but he, at one point, asked if she had just loved him when 
he was young. He says, "I might have thrown poor words away and been content to 
live." And so, a big part of the project of my own life has been trying to see my own 
work in light of that. 
Dave DeSteno, Host: Christian, though quick to quote others, is becoming part of 
that canon of devotional prose himself. So, we'll end with Christian's own words, 
here from the opening line of his book My Bright Abyss. 
Christian Wiman: My God, my bright abyss into which all my longing will not go. 
Once more, I come to the edge of all I know and, believing nothing, believe in this.
Dave DeSteno, Host: If we treat doubt as a journey rather than a failure, we're 
embracing a hope that future revelation is worth the discomfort uncertainty brings. 
And while that's true for all faiths, some are more explicit about it than others.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: I might say that Judaism is almost more about asking the 
right questions than receiving a definitive answer.
Dave DeSteno, Host: So, we'll continue our exploration of faith and doubt in our 
next episode, where we'll speak with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl about a Jewish 
approach to doubt, why uncertainty about God and other religious beliefs can be 
healthy for a faith, and what lessons we can all learn from that wisdom wherever we 
are in our spiritual life.
How God Works is hosted by me, Dave DeSteno. This episode was written by Josie 
Holtzman and me. Our senior producer is Josie Holtzman. Our producer is Sophie 
Isenberg. Our associate producer is Emmanuel Desarme, executive producer is 
Genevieve Sponsler. Our fact checker is Natsumi Ajisaka. Merritt Jacob is our mix 
engineer and composed our theme, which was arranged by Chloe DeSteno.
The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. This podcast was 
made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation. To learn more 
about the show and access episode transcripts, you can find our website at 
howgodworks.org. And for episode shorts, extras, and my ruminations on science 
and spirituality, check us out on Instagram @howgodworkspod, and you can also 
see all of our episodes, along with special bonus show material, on our YouTube 
page @HowGodWorksPod.