Confidence and Clarity: Finding Balance in Expectations

There are people who, for various personal reasons, suffer from an inner sense of low self confidence. Such a difficulty rightly calls for reflection and emotional work in order to heal it. That is indeed the proper approach. Here, however, I would like to describe one possible consequence of low self confidence in the realm of faith: the excessive demand for absolute certainty about reality, at the level of one hundred percent certainty.

This is a black and white, all or nothing error in thinking. In order to correct it, one must learn to adjust expectations.

Absolute Knowledge Belongs Only to God

To understand this, let us reflect on God. God is all knowing, eternal, infinite, and present everywhere at once. No detail in reality, large or small, is hidden from Him. He exists beyond time, seeing past, present, and future simultaneously and without interruption. His awareness and wisdom are infinite and cannot be added to, and therefore He never errs. There is no doubt that God knows Himself and reality with complete and absolute certainty.

This is an illustration of absolute knowledge, infinite and eternal knowledge.

We must acknowledge that knowledge on this level is something we can never attain. Unlike God, the human being is inherently limited. A person is limited by space and time, and each person has a finite level of intellect. Moral clarity depends on maturity and the refinement of character traits, and there are many other limitations as well.

Adjusting Expectations With Humility

Once this is understood, it becomes much easier to adjust expectations. We are not expected to be all knowing, and we have no right to demand divine level certainty. Absolute certainty belongs to God alone. To demand it for ourselves reflects a kind of grandiosity, like a person who insists on seeing the entire universe at once with limited human eyes.

We learn from this that in order to reach genuine intellectual understanding, one must first be humble and modest in one’s demand for knowledge.

The Inconsistency of Rejecting Reason

Someone who struggles with low self confidence may respond that if absolute certainty cannot be achieved through reason, then reason should not be trusted at all.

However, if a person were to doubt their own memory, they would be unable to trust any prior knowledge of reality. They could not even trust the simple memory that they have a home on a certain street, or that they have two hands. In practice, every person trusts that reality is real and governed by consistent laws of cause and effect, because they avoid danger in order to stay alive. A person who doubted the laws of reality would not protect themselves from fire or illness.

Human beings learn from the past and plan for the future. All of this testifies to an underlying trust in reason. Therefore, a consistent and honest person must also arrive at rational conclusions about the existence of God and His will for us, just as they reach rational conclusions in every other area of life.

Reasonable Faith and Healthy Confidence

I often say to those who feel uncertain: you are a human being, not God. You are not expected to know things with absolute certainty. It is enough that you trust your spiritual purpose at least to the same degree that you trust all other knowledge by which you live and function in the world.

This is what is required of you, and of every sincere and logical person. Self confidence, then, begins with adjusting expectations.