Those days, church buildings were frequently damaged by lightning strikes and in many cases, the buildings would catch fire (as they were most times built out of wood) and be completely destroyed. You’d think that 18th century people welcomed the news of Franklin’s invention with such gladness and relief, and you’d be wrong — and that’s the interesting bit of the story. The ‘superstitious’ belief of the day was that lightning was God’s sign of judgment on the sin of the church and that Franklin and his rod were somehow standing in the way of God’s will.

Before we laugh off and dismiss this superstitious nonsense as something that doesn’t belong in our modern times, Skye Jethani (in one of his ‘SKYEPod’ episodes) helpfully drew a parallel between Franklin’s story and the Covid lockdown debate that some churches faced few years ago when they wondered whether to accept government mandates to wear masks and whether or not it would be a sign of rejecting the faith and lack of trust in God (or if it’d look as giving in to government overreach and other such conspiracy theories). We really aren’t that much different, or that much more evolved from people of previous centuries as we’d like to think.

Jethani also used this story to talk about the concept of certainty: on one hand we have a group of people that is completely sure its understands the meaning of lightning and its implications and on the other hand we have a Benjamin Franklin who is “curious”, inquisitive and capable of questioning and rethinking commonly held assumptions and exploring alternative interpretations.

According to Jethani, there is a quality that makes one reject absolutism and makes one question given assumptions. It is a sort of humility that accepts that one doesn’t know everything and that in turn opens oneself to other possibilities that can turn out to be for the better. There’s also, in contrast, a kind of certainty that ironically closes the door of understanding and wisdom on you, it isolates you and like-minded people in a perpetual echo chamber of confirmation bias; it is a certainty that flirts with stupidity.

Skye Jethani was very insightful in his analysis and I understand his plan to focus, in that particular episode, on this wrong kind of certainty (I’d have preferred he used the word “stubbornness” instead). The story was very helpful (and the lessons drawn from it), but it’s my view that balancing this perspective a bit is called for. Let me explain.

I agree that there should be a place for questioning one’s own beliefs and pre-suppositions, but the goal, as he repeatedly said, shouldn’t be to reject them but to know for sure that they can hold water against what could be seen as contradicting evidence. If we don’t allow our views to be put under a microscope, then we’re the arrogant people Jethani is rightly rebuking. This kind of certainty that isn’t open to scrutiny is one I also do not wish to have.

However, in my opinion, all “certainty” isn’t bad and I think that casting certainty as entirely and completely negative can in turn create a kind of paralysis whereby one cannot believe anything, because one can’t be absolutely sure of anything as we cannot know anything exhaustively. Unless full, total and absolute knowledge is acquired (which can never be attained no matter how thorough our explorations), the logical thing would be to always doubt, constantly aware that our knowledge is shallow and unreliable, continuously ready to completely rethink everything from scratch and accept to never be certain about anything. All should be held loosely, and we should always expect, at any moment, new information that will potentially shift our paradigms and surrender to a life of perpetual doubt. But could anyone live like this?

I think this is an untenable way of life and I think no one practically and actually lives like this. If we turn back to Benjamin Franklin, it won’t be wrong to suppose that he must have reached a level of certainty in particular about the anatomy of lightning. Perhaps he was humble enough not to conclude that his groundbreaking study of electricity could never be improved, but we can safely assume that he never doubted his lightning rod and its usefulness.

There are those who doubt all sorts religious propositions, but their agnosticism is certainly not about doubting every tiny aspect of life. Life has a way of pushing us to look for a place to ground it because it can’t all be shifting sand. And if we’re made to look for a place to lay our roots, perhaps that is an indication that a solid ground somehow somewhere exists!

In addition, how is it that the God who is all-knowing talks to us as if we can have convictions or as if we have the capacity to know some things for sure? Why does He address us in such a way, knowing full well how little we know and understand? Why does He commend unwavering faith and steadfastness? Why does the Bible say that He is “displeased” by double-mindedness and by those who are “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine”?

Moreover, this God goes above and beyond to sustain us and is ready to rescue us when we’re in doubt. He is the one who gives us faith and “holds us fast”. By His Spirit we have “assurance”. Would it be wrong to conclude that His will is for us to really be certain? He has guaranteed that heaven and earth will have to first pass away before “the smallest letter, or one stroke of a letter” of what He said becomes unreliable. In fact, the very first Psalm portrays the man He blesses as a firm and stable tree that is not shaken, contrasting it with the “wicked” man who is as unstable as “chaff that the wind drives away”.

Certainty isn’t equivalent to stupidity. Therefore, we should not hesitate to live, as Karen Swallow Prior puts it, as people with ‘fierce convictions’. Certainty isn’t a ‘sin’ and it is certainly not the opposite of faith. It is human, commendable and faithful!