Article

Belief

Creed

Doubt

Faith

Royalty

5 February 2024

8 min read

Prince William's doubt is normal - it's impossible to be certain whether there is a God

Our limited human understanding means we will never fully understand God in this life, writes Graham Tomlin.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A young man wearing a dark suit talks to a minister wearing regalia.

Prince William talks with the Dean of Westminster Abbey, 2019.

LPhot Belinda Alker, OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons.

A new book, serialised in the Daily Mail, suggests Prince William is wondering whether he really wants to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. While he respects the Church, it claims, he doesn’t consider himself particularly religious and doubts if he should head up a church he doesn’t attend much. There has been a fair amount of comment on the contrast between his grandmother’s strong Christian faith, increasingly evident in her Christmas broadcasts as she came to the end of her life, and that of his father, who has also made a point since his accession to the throne of emphasising his own personal Christian commitment, both in statements around the time he became king, and in his Christmas broadcast this past year.

William, however, is less forthcoming. He was dutifully confirmed at Eton at the age of 14, and goes to church at Christmas and Easter, so presumably is not a hardened Dawkins-esque atheist. Like many of his generation he probably has his doubts about God and religion, doesn't often speak publicly about faith and so it's hard to know from the outside whether this really is a motivating force in his life or not.

Of course, there is a whole separate argument about why personal faith, while it helps, is not strictly necessary for such a role. Many British monarchs in the past have not had a very strong Christian faith. The significance of the role rests in the office not the person - it is a constitutional not a personal, arrangement. But that is a different story. What interests me is what this story tells us about faith and doubt and the experience of what it is to believe.

Like in my atheist days, I have days when I wake up and wonder whether it's all true. Am I deceiving myself?

I was once an atheist. Yet, like most atheists, I had my doubts. I tried to get on with my life not believing in God, yet every now and again something would happen to make me doubt my atheism. I would meet a Christian with a profoundly impressive life motivated by their faith and it disturbed me. An argument from a Christian writer momentarily seemed strangely plausible. An encounter of the beauty and wonder of nature suddenly might lodge the thought in my mind that maybe there is a Creator after all? Like all good atheists, however, I managed to push these thoughts to the back of my mind. I learn to doubt and resist these impulses and return to my central take on the world which was that there definitely is no God.

As it happened, in time, my doubts became too strong for me, and I began to think that Christian faith made more sense of the world than atheism did. And so, eventually and slowly, I became a Christian. Of course, the process happens the other way around as well. People with a notional Christian faith start to doubt it to the extent that it no longer makes sense to them.

I have now been a Christian for many years and a Bishop for a few of those. Like in my atheist days, I have days when I wake up and wonder whether it's all true. Am I deceiving myself? Have I wasted most of my life on something that is not real? I might read a book that is sceptical about some aspect of the Christian story and a doubt niggles away in the back of my mind. God suddenly appears silent in answer to heartfelt prayers, and for a moment I wonder if he is there at all. I have doubts, just as I did in my atheist days.

But just like I did when I was an atheist, I learned to doubt my doubts. Atheists often challenge Christians to come up with a piece of evidence that would suggest that God exists. And sometimes we try, with arguments from the design of the universe, apparent miracles, fulfilment of biblical prophecies and so on. But they never quite convince. The reason they don't convince is that the atheist can always come up with an alternative explanation. And that takes us to the heart of the issue.

For Christians, and for other believers in God for that matter, God is not another object in the universe that can be proved or disproved. I might find indications that point in the direction of there being a God but, as the atheist points out, you can always explain them away in some form or other.

Instead, atheism and belief in God are better seen, not as the result of a process of sifting evidence, looking for proof one way or another, but as different ways of looking at the world.

A cartoon etching of a duck that looks like a rabbit. — Wittgenstein's cartoon.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once picked up a common cartoon that circulated in German comic newspapers in the late nineteenth century to make a similar point. Looked at one way, it looks like a rabbit. Look at it another way it looks like a duck. Whether you see a rabbit or a duck is dependent upon other factors. Children who have just been to the local duckpond might be inclined to see a duck. Someone with a pet rabbit might be inclined to see a rabbit. Wittgenstein’s point was about the way concepts in our mind shape our perceptions of reality. We may perceive the same thing, but we see it as something different.

This idea of ‘seeing as’ – seeing something not just in itself, but ‘as’ something shaped by our mind’s perceptions, became well known in philosophy after Wittgenstein’s use of the image. It may help us in thinking about belief in God as well.

On a Christmas Day edition of ‘The Rest is Politics’ with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart (soon after his appearance on Re-Enchanting’), two of the most popular podcasts of our times met when Tom Holland of ‘The Rest is History’ came on the podcast. As it was Christmas Day, Alistair Campbell asked Tom Holland whether he believed the Christmas story and all the rest of the Bible. His reply referred to this very picture of the duck / rabbit, and he said: “There are times where I can believe it, and there are other times where I look at the stories and think this is absolutely ridiculous - how could it possibly be true? I think the Infinity of space, I think of vast geological time and I think it's absolutely nonsense. So I kind of veer between the two.”

In a way he’s right. You can’t decide between the two ways of looking at the picture by some process of forensic scientific evidence. There is no ultimate way of deciding whether it is a duck or a rabbit.

Now the analogy with faith is imperfect. The picture could be a rabbit, it could be a duck. Whereas, to put it bluntly - there either is or is not a God – both can’t be true. Where the image helps us, is that in our limited understanding of things it is impossible for any of us to say, whether believer or atheist, that we know 100 per cent definitively that there is or is not a God. Even Richard Dawkins agrees on that point!

The other difference is that you can’t be neutral on this. Whether you see it as a duck or a rabbit probably makes no difference to your life. Yet faith is more than just an opinion. It is a way of life. To ‘believe’ in God, in the Christian sense of ‘believe’ is not just to hold the opinion in your head that God exists, but to decide to live as if it true that God exists, that he is revealed in Jesus Christ, that each person you meet each day is a precious soul, for whom Jesus died and so on.

The American philosopher Michael Novak put it like this:

“The centre of the argument concerns whether I should think of the universe as impersonal and indifferent to me, and ruled by randomness and chance. Or whether I should interpret it as personal through and through, in such a way that all things that are and have been and will be dwell in the presence of God a person who understands and chooses all that he brings out of nothingness into existence.”

Whatever faith position you take up - to believe that there is a God or that there isn't, you will have doubts. But the nature of faith is not to have an absence of doubt, but it's how you treat those doubts. At the end of the day, each of us has to decide which approach makes most sense of the world that we experience every day. Does the problem of Evil – why bad things sometimes happen - mean you can’t believe in God? Or does the problem of Good – why good things sometimes happen – mean you can’t be an atheist?

Prince William, and Tom Holland for that matter may have their doubts about faith, But that is no reason not to decide to believe.

When I became a Christian it was because the world no longer made sense to me as a place that emerged by chance, that has no ultimate purpose, that our intelligence emerged literally from non-sense. Our deep need for love seemed to fit better with the idea that this world emerged out of love, than that it emerged from a heartless, random void. Seeing the world in that way makes better sense to me than the alternative. It doesn't mean everything suddenly makes sense, but it does offer me a better way of thinking and living in the world. I can't prove it. I have my days of doubt. But that's the way I choose to believe, and choose to live.

Essay

Books

Creed

Easter

Poetry

16 April 2025

7 min read

Of trees and truth: Tolkien on cultivating greenness

The literature of Herbert, Lewis and Tolkien all helps us see the seen and unseen better.

Jim Beitler

Jim is Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and Professor of English at Wheaton College, where he holds the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought.

a row of flowers with green stalks and blue flowers.

Isabella Fischer on Unsplash.

Each Easter season I return to a poem called “The Flower,” written by the Anglican priest George Herbert and published shortly after his death in a collection called The Temple. In both its growth and its withering, the flower of the poem represents the poet’s spiritual life, and the verses speak powerfully to the renewal that only God can bring. “The Flower” opens in joyful exclamation—

“How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring”

—but my favorite image appears at the start of the second stanza, where the poet marvels,

“Who would have thought my shriveled heart

Could have recovered greenness?”

C.S. Lewis took note of the second stanza as well. At the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, where I work, we care for nearly 2,500 of the books that Lewis had in his personal library, many of which include his notes and underlinings. Lewis’s copy of The Temple is no exception. The back pages of the book contain a carefully constructed index in Lewis’s own hand, and one of the index entries points us back to the concluding words of the second stanza of “The Flower.” Turning to the poem, we find a hand-drawn line, very likely added by Lewis himself, running down the page alongside the stanza. I find that line to be heartening—a pointer, perhaps, to a shared interest. And though the connection between poem’s verses and the book’s appearance is purely coincidental, I appreciate the fact that Lewis’s copy of The Temple has a weathered green cover.

What I love about “The Flower,” and about Herbert’s poetry more generally, is that it helps us see the seen thing better, helps us pay attention to it, so that we may glimpse the unseen thing. By bringing the flower into clearer focus, Herbert helps strengthen the eyes of faith. Herbert does not present nature itself as divine—the flower is a metaphor, after all—but he does represent nature in ways that point to its beauty while testifying to who God is and who we are in relation to Him.

How during this Easter season might we recover greenness in Herbert’s sense? The poetry of The Temple is an excellent starting place. But if you are looking for another literary guide, I recommend turning (or returning) to another writer whose works we collect at the Wade Center—J.R.R. Tolkien. Should you visit the Wade to pore over the annotations in Lewis’s books, you’ll also have the chance to examine the small oak desk upon which Tolkien penned The Hobbit.

In a note to his American publisher in June of 1955, Tolkien wrote,

“I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and have always been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.”

The parenthetical “obviously” is significant. Though Tolkien didn’t view The Lord of the Rings as autobiographical, he was willing to admit that his love of plants and trees was on full display in his life and work.

Tolkien’s faith was on display in his writing as well, as Holly Ordway argues in her remarkable book Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. Ordway’s first chapter begins with Tolkien’s own words on the matter: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” As with Tolkien’s “obviously” so too with his “of course.” After calling our attention to the latter, Ordway persuasively demonstrates the truth of Tolkien’s words, exploring in detail how his religious convictions and practices were indeed fundamental to him and his work. “The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of the Gospels or a tale didactically expressing Christianity,” she writes. “Rather, the whole world of Middle-earth and everything in it is infused with, rooted in, its author’s Christian vision of reality.”

Ordway’s metaphor of rootedness is a fitting one, and—in our pursuit of Herbert’s greenness—it is worth exploring the entanglements between the obvious and fundamental aspects of Tolkien’s work: his love of “growing things” (to borrow a phrase from Treebeard) and his faith.

Consider a few of the trees that we find across Tolkien’s writings.

In his poem “Mythopoeia,” Tolkien responds to C.S. Lewis’s view (before Lewis converted back to Christianity) that myths are beautiful yet untrue. Tolkien begins the poem among the trees, expressing Lewis’s views as follows:

“You look at trees and label them just so,

(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’).”

The problem with viewing nature in such purely naturalistic terms, Tolkien goes on to suggest, is that it ignores the origins of terms like “tree.” It leaves out the humans who name the things of the world and develop myths about them and, more importantly, it leaves out the Source of such creativity. For Tolkien, human creativity finds its beginnings in God, and we reflect Him through acts of sub-creation. Thus he writes,

“The heart of man is not compound of lies,

but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,

and still recalls him.”

Whether it is the simple act of identifying a tree by name or the complex development of stories across time and place—what Tolkien describes elsewhere as “the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales”—our creativity flows from, and is a form of reverence for, the One who created all things.

In The Lord of the Rings, we encounter not just trees but also the tree-like Ents. Referring to himself and the other Ents as “tree-herds,” Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin that the Ents help the trees grow and develop:

“We keep off strangers and the foolhardy; and we train and we teach, we walk and we weed.”

In line with Ordway’s quotation above, Tolkien’s Ents are not meant to be read allegorically; however, the tree-herding activity of the Ents reinforces the theme of stewardship in The Lord of the Rings—a theme that echoes Scripture’s call to humans to care for creation and, just maybe, encourages us to take up similar work in our own places. (For further encouragement along these lines, check out Kristen Page’s book The Wonders of Creation: Learning Stewardship from Narnia and Middle-Earth, which grew out of Page’s lectures for our annual Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship at the Wade Center.)

And in Tolkien’s short story Leaf by Niggle, we encounter an artist desperately trying to work on his painting of, yes, a tree. This tree stands for our efforts to create art, which, though frequently frustrated and often motivated by self-interest in this life, may be purified and brought to fruition in the age to come.

Tolkien’s trees testify to the beginning, middle, and end of Christian story. Among their roots and trunks and branches, we encounter illustrations of his views about creation, the proper ways to care for it, and its culmination.

In a 1945 letter, Tolkien told his son Christopher about an essay by Lewis on the truth and beauty that we find in the story of Scripture. In the essay, which Ordway observes is likely his piece “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis argued that people of faith are, in the words of Tolkien’s letter, “meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth” of the story. But what of the person without faith who “clings” only to its beauty? According to Tolkien, Lewis maintained that such readers “still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life.”

Greenness for Herbert is ultimately the Lord’s doing. We should seek, therefore, to find nourishment in the truth and the beauty of Scripture, the source of the sap of life. Growing things spring up from these pages as well: fruit trees and fig trees and oak trees and olive trees; vines and branches; a new shoot springing forth from a stump, a crown of thorns, the wood of the cross. And as the Psalmist reminds us, the one who “meditates day and night” on the law shall be “like a tree.” When we read and digest the Word of life, we grow greener.

C.S. Lewis's copy of The Temple

Herbert, George. The Temple & A Priest to the Temple. J.M. Dent, 1908. C.S. Lewis Library. Marion E. Wade Center. Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.

A vintage green cover and spine of a book.

Frontispiece and title page.

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