![](http://humanities.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/Dean-Miller-tabel-8-225x300.jpg)
Sustaining our belief can be hard because it is not a sure knowledge, indeed cannot be, but is rather “knowledge hoped for,” a kind of trust that requires commitment in the face of contradictory evidence. In that sense, belief is a species of endurance, the endurance of imagination. Doubt is the reverse, the extinction of what belief imagines. This issue of Humanities explores the ongoing dance between doubt and belief as it plays out in the human experience. Faculty and alumni share insights about that dance, drawn from their studies, observations, and personal lives. Although we often view doubt as something that diminishes as our belief grows, I see doubt as belief’s shadow, growing and shrinking in direct proportion: the stronger our belief and the greater we place our trust in something or someone, the larger doubt’s possibilities loom. Yet doubt may itself open up doors to understanding and knowledge. Sometimes doubt may lead us to confront false assumptions: we begin with a misgiving about a received truth and, through investigation, either discover our suspicions to be groundless or gain new insight. Hypothesis and conjecture drive science and research as preludes to new discoveries, and in the humanities, our own, idiosyncratic reactions to art or literature can take us into uncharted realms of discovery as we challenge traditional interpretations.
This journey of discovery, fueled sometimes by doubt of received wisdom and at other times by belief in a hunch, allows us to find greater beauty and hope in the world. The course of our lives is determined largely by the small decisions we make, some in faith, tiny wagers of belief placed on this or that principle that we hope will eventually prove fruitful, and others in doubt, suspicions that may protect us but that can also block our growth. All learning proceeds from a delicate balance of doubt and belief that allows us to suspend final judgments and decisons in spite of contrary evidence. We live in a toxic age where the hard work of respecting different views and establishing truth has been abandoned for dismissive polemic and spin, which goes against the very grain of the learning process and can confine us in a state of perpetual ignorance. As lifelong student of the humanities, and as observers of humanity, we trust that there is goodness, even divinity, in ourselves and in others. Maintaining that belief may sometimes require a good deal of tenacity when we witness phishing scams or other, more extreme, acts of inhumanity, and we can be sorely tempted to abandon our faith in ourselves and others. But we can also cultivate the practice of trust in and love for humankind, and choose to be skeptical of the false logic that suggests our temporary inhumanity negates our fundamental humanity.