Why Persistent Doubt May Reveal the Very God It Denies

“You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek Me with all your heart.”

— Jeremiah 29:13 (ESV)

There are moments in apologetics when a familiar question suddenly opens a new door. Someone recently asked whether doubt could point toward God—much like how evil points toward goodness. It made me pause, because we rarely speak about doubt with philosophical depth. We tend to treat doubt as purely intellectual. But doubt may be telling us something far deeper about the structure of the human soul.

If Christian philosophy is right that evil is the absence or privation of goodness, then doubt may be the absence or distortion of a faculty meant for faith. In that sense, doubt may be to faith what darkness is to light, and what evil is to good—something that can only exist because something real stands behind it.

This blog develops what I call The Argument from Counterfeit Longing: the idea that persistent objection, relentless skepticism, and obsessive denial may actually reveal the very God they protest.

This is not an insult to skeptics, nor a dismissal of genuine seekers. It is simply an attempt to take doubt seriously enough to ask what it signifies.

Faith, Doubt, and the Privation Principle

Augustine famously taught that evil is not a “thing” but a privation—a lack, a corruption of something that ought to be good.¹ Rot implies a tree. Rust implies metal. A wound implies a healthy body.

Doubt may function similarly.

To say doubt is a privation of faith is not to call doubt sinful by definition. It is to recognize that doubt is parasitic. It depends on the very category it resists. Blindness presupposes sight. Silence presupposes sound. And doubt presupposes faith.

This becomes obvious when we look at how humans behave. No one forms an online forum dedicated to disproving leprechauns. No one loses sleep over whether Zeus exists. No bestselling author writes The Unicorn Delusion. But God? Thousands of books, debates, podcasts, courses, and arguments are devoted to disproving Him.

If God does not exist, why does the idea of God exert such gravitational pull on the human heart and mind?

The Human Soul Appears Geared Toward God

If Christian theism is true, humans were created with an innate orientation toward God. Alvin Plantinga describes this as the sensus divinitatis—the natural sense of the divine embedded within human cognition.² Augustine described the human heart as “restless until it finds its rest in God.”³ Pascal wrote that humans carry within them an “infinite abyss” that only God can fill.⁴

Scripture affirms this intuition repeatedly:

• “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).
• God “has set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
• People “suppress the truth” rather than lack access to it (Romans 1:18–20).
• Jesus calls unbelievers not uninformed but “blind” (John 9:39–41).

Blindness implies vision.
Suppression implies awareness.
Resistance implies relationship.

Thus, doubt—especially persistent doubt—may reveal a soul structured for God-relation.

Persistent Doubt as Counterfeit Longing

Some doubt is honest. Some is intellectual. Some is born of trauma or confusion. Scripture records episodes of doubt from Abraham, Moses, Thomas, and even John the Baptist. What I am describing here is something different.

There is a kind of doubt that is existentially charged, deeply emotional, unavoidably personal—obsessive even. It appears not as mere uncertainty but as resistance. This sort of doubt appears in:

• individuals who spend years arguing against a God they claim is imaginary
• skeptics who demand infinite evidence yet offer no plausible defeater
• atheists who cannot stop debating the one subject they insist does not matter
• those who react more passionately to God than to any other philosophical question

This is not neutral skepticism. This is relational tension.

Kierkegaard called this despair—a soul misaligned with the God it was made to know.⁵ It is not the absence of relationship, but the presence of a damaged one. It is longing turned sideways.

This is what I mean by counterfeit longing.
A longing expressed through resistance.
A desire smuggled inside denial.
A relationship revealed in rejection.

A Personal Example

I want to speak personally here—but honestly. I have never gone through a season of unbelief. From the time I came to Christ at nine years old, I have believed. I don’t say that with pride, as if my faith were something I constructed. I say it as a simple fact—and as a testimony to the faithfulness of God.

My life has certainly included pain and trials, as everyone’s life does. Like anyone, I have doubted myself, others, events, and have asked God “why” when facing difficulties of life (the loss of a child, the loss of a spouse, a wayward loved one). But those experiences did not push me away from God; they drew me closer. For many believers, suffering sharpens and deepens faith rather than undermining it. Trials can make faith more resilient, not more fragile.

I have never doubted God’s existence, not because I am immune to hard questions, but because God has sustained me from childhood to now. My faith has been strengthened through life, not weakened by it.

So when I speak about doubt, I am not projecting my story onto others. I am describing patterns I have observed over years of conversations with skeptics and seekers. I have seen the emotional weight of doubt in others—and it often resembles someone struggling not with an idea but with a Person.

A Syllogism for the Argument from Counterfeit Longing

Here is the philosophical core of the argument:

Premise 1: A privation can exist only where a proper faculty or good is intended to exist.
Premise 2: Persistent, existential doubt about God functions as a privation of the human faculty for faith and divine awareness.
Premise 3: This faculty cannot be missing or distorted unless it is originally present and oriented toward something real.
Conclusion: Therefore, the existence of persistent doubt presupposes that the human soul is oriented toward God, and thus serves as evidence for God’s existence.

This is not claiming that atheists secretly believe in God. It claims that the capacity for such doubt reveals something about how humans are constituted—namely, that we are made for God.

Why This Does Not Belittle Honest Seekers

This argument is not aimed at those sincerely wrestling. Doubt can be part of faith’s growth. It can be holy. Scripture honors the prayer “I believe; help my unbelief.” But persistent, prolonged, anxious, often angry doubt tells a different story.

People do not obsess over what they truly consider irrelevant.

This is why the God-question feels heavier than any other philosophical question. The weight itself may be telling us something.

Could This Be Evidence of Running From God?

C.S. Lewis described his pre-conversion experience as resisting God “like a rat in a trap.”⁶ He called himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He did not want Christianity to be true. His unbelief was not about logic—it was about desire. Or rather, a desire not to desire God.

Lewis famously wrote, “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”⁷

Likewise:

A person does not call faith crooked unless he has some idea of what a straight faith would be.
A person does not resist God unless he perceives the reality of the One he resists.
A person does not run unless something is pursuing him.

Persistent doubt may not be evidence of God’s absence, but of His nearness.

Answering a Common Objection

A skeptic may say, “I simply don’t find the evidence convincing. My doubt reflects lack of proof.” It sounds reasonable—until we press deeper.

Most skeptics cannot articulate a coherent defeater for the classical arguments already presented. The claim “I’m unconvinced” is often a psychological posture rather than an intellectual conclusion.

The demand for “more evidence” becomes a way to avoid the evidence already given.

Pascal identified this pattern: people do not reject God for lack of evidence, but because they lack the desire for Him to be real.⁸

Doubt, therefore, is not neutral. It is existential.

Why Doubt Is Not Neutral

People do not experience existential crisis over unicorns. No one deconstructs from atheism because they stopped believing in Poseidon. People do not anguish over whether Thor exists.

But they do over God.

This suggests that doubt is responding to something real.

A Challenge to Atheistic Thinking

If you are a skeptic reading this, consider this respectfully:

Why does the question of God matter so deeply to you?

If God does not exist, why expend so much energy, time, emotion, and passion on disproving Him? Why debate Christians? Why write books against Him? Why build an identity around denial?

Despair, Kierkegaard wrote, is “misrelation in the self.”⁹ It is the soul resisting what it is made to relate to.

What if your doubt is not proof of God’s absence, but evidence of His presence pressing in on you?

What if the shadow you’re fighting is cast by a real Light?

The Shadow That Reveals the Light

Darkness exists only where light exists.
Cold exists only where heat exists.
Evil exists only where goodness exists.

And doubt—persistent, existential, obsessive doubt—exists only because the soul is wired for God.

Doubt is the shadow cast by the presence of God.

This is The Argument from Counterfeit Longing. It does not belittle those who wrestle. It honors the struggle by showing what the struggle itself reveals: that your soul is not neutral to God. It is oriented toward Him—even when resisting Him.

The shadow only appears when the Light is behind you.

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Endnotes

1. Augustine, Enchiridion, on the privation theory of evil.
2. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. Augustine, Confessions, I.1.
4. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fragment 148.
5. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849).
6. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955).
7. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952).
8. Pascal, Pensées, fragment 194.
9. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death.