Apologist Alycia Wood on the myth that believers are non-thinkers, the real limits of science, why Doubting Thomas got evidence first, and why honest doubt is not the enemy of faith.
The Jude 3 Project · Featuring Alycia Wood · Draft for review
The short answer: no. Wood says the picture of faith as believing without evidence gets Christianity backward. Science is real but limited, and it is not the only way human beings know things to be true. When Thomas doubted, Jesus handed him evidence first and then asked for trust. Doubt itself is not a sin. It is an invitation to go looking for an answer.
Do Atheists Really Think Christians Are Unintelligent?
After years in apologetics, Alycia Wood says she learned something she had not fully expected going in. Many atheists do not merely disagree with Christians on the facts. They assume, as a baseline, that believers are not very bright. To them, faith is a fairy tale that thoughtful, educated people eventually outgrow.
“Atheists truly believe that religious people are stupid.” – Alycia Wood
A degree does not change the assumption. In Wood's experience, it just gets reframed as a degree in fairy tales rather than evidence the believer might actually know what they are talking about. And when a Christian cannot explain why they believe what they believe, the bias gets confirmed rather than challenged. Wood's own phrase for this gap is sharp: too many believers have lived on milk and never moved to the meat, content with simple answers when the moment calls for something sturdier.
If Science Explains So Much, Doesn't That Make Faith Unnecessary?
This is the strongest version of the objection, and Wood takes it seriously rather than dismissing it. She is quick to say she likes science. She believes in evidence, history, and archaeology, and she is not interested in pretending otherwise to score a rhetorical point.
But science, she argues, has edges, and pretending it does not have edges is itself a kind of intellectual dishonesty. Science can tell you how to send a chimpanzee into space. It cannot tell you whether you should. It cannot settle questions of morality, or beauty, or ultimate meaning. Those are real questions, and science is simply not built to answer them, not because it has failed, but because that was never its job.
“Science can't determine morality.” – Alycia Wood
Is Science the Only Reliable Way We Know Anything Is True?
Wood pushes one step further than most people expect. Science is not even the only path to truth that reasonable people already use every day, often without noticing.
“You don't have to scientifically prove using DNA that your mother is your mother in order for her to be your mother.” – Alycia Wood
Ask how you know your own mother is your mother and you will likely point to memory, family history, photographs, a whole life lived together. Nobody demands a DNA test before believing it, and no one calls that belief irrational. Human beings hold enormous amounts of true, reasonable belief without laboratory proof, all the time, in every area of life. Faith built on testimony, relationship, and accumulated evidence is not a special, lesser category. It is how knowledge actually works for almost everything that matters most.
What Does the Story of Doubting Thomas Actually Show About Faith?
If there is one biblical scene that should settle whether the Bible itself praises blind faith, Wood points to John 20. Thomas says plainly that he will not believe until he can see and touch the wounds himself. He is not gently encouraged to just believe anyway. Jesus appears and offers him exactly the evidence he asked for.
“If faith is blind, if there's no evidence in faith, then Jesus got it wrong.” – Alycia Wood
The order matters more than people usually notice. Evidence comes first. Trust follows. The Greek word translated "believe" in that passage is the same word behind "faith" throughout the New Testament. Biblical faith, in this scene and consistently elsewhere, is informed trust built on something real, not a blindfold you put on to avoid asking questions.
Rasool Berry, a pastor who has thought hard about why people leave churches that cannot handle hard questions, makes a related observation about Jesus's own pattern. “It fascinates me that Jesus was harder on religious people than he was with the sinners,” he notes. Jesus repeatedly engaged honest doubt and honest sin with patience, and reserved his sharpest words for confident religious certainty that had stopped examining itself. That pattern should shape how the church treats a doubting Thomas in its own pews today.
Is Doubt a Sin Christians Should Hide?
Wood is candid that she has doubted her own faith, not as a hypothetical exercise but as something she actually walked through. She believes the church often fails to prepare people for this moment, so the first genuinely hard question that arrives sends them straight out the door, on the assumption that there simply are no answers worth finding.
“I don't have to forsake my mind in order to believe.” – Alycia Wood
The better response to doubt, in Wood's framing, is not shame and not silence. It is to go looking for the answer, the same way you would investigate any other claim you cared about getting right. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, names the deeper reason this matters pastorally: “If you don't listen for the pain point, you'll be arguing about things that are issues, but not the root of their issue,” she says. A doubting friend, or a doubting version of yourself, usually needs a patient listener before they need a clever argument.
Isn't This Just Special Pleading to Make Faith Look Smarter Than It Is?
A fair skeptic might push back here: of course a Christian apologist is going to argue faith is reasonable, but does the argument actually hold up, or is it just motivated reasoning dressed up in academic language? Wood's answer rests on a distinction worth taking seriously rather than waving away: the claim is not that faith requires zero trust beyond what a microscope can verify. The claim is that every reasonable person, including committed atheists, already operates that way about most of what they believe.
Trusting historical testimony, trusting your own memory, trusting another person's character based on a track record rather than a controlled experiment, these are not lapses in rationality. They are how human knowledge actually works for nearly everything that matters. Wood's argument is not that faith gets a special exemption from evidence. It is that faith is held to the same kind of evidence everyone already accepts everywhere else in life, and that demanding a stricter standard only for religious claims is itself the move that needs justifying.
That does not settle every historical or philosophical question a skeptic might raise about Christianity specifically. It does remove the most common shortcut, the claim that faith is automatically irrational simply because it is faith. That claim does not survive close examination, and Wood's own experience moving through real doubt rather than around it is part of why she can say so with confidence rather than slogans.
What Should You Actually Do With a Question You Cannot Answer?
Wood's whole approach points to a practical habit worth building rather than just admiring from a distance. When a hard question lands, whether from a skeptical friend or from your own mind at two in the morning, the instinct to either panic or pretend is exactly backward. The better instinct is curiosity: treat the question as worth investigating rather than as a threat to manage.
That is a learnable habit, not a personality trait reserved for trained apologists. It starts with the same honesty Thabiti Anyabwile recommends for hard conversations with people of other faiths: it is fine to say "I don't know, but I'll find out," rather than bluffing your way past a question you have not actually examined. Faith that can say that sentence without panic is faith that has nothing to hide and everything to gain from a closer look.
Quick Answers
- Is Christianity anti-intellectual? No. Wood argues faith and evidence belong together, and that believers should be able to explain why they believe.
- Has science replaced the need for God? No. Wood says science is real but limited. It explains how, not whether we should, and cannot settle morality or meaning.
- Does the Bible praise blind faith? No. In John 20 Jesus gives Thomas evidence first, then asks him to believe.
- Is it a sin to doubt? Wood says no. Doubt is an invitation to go looking for answers, not a reason for shame.
What Changes Once You Stop Treating Doubt as Disqualifying?
There is a practical payoff to all of this that goes beyond winning an argument with a skeptic. If faith is genuinely evidence-friendly rather than evidence-allergic, then a believer's own doubts stop being a secret source of shame and start being a normal, even healthy, part of taking faith seriously.
Wood's willingness to admit her own doubt out loud is itself a kind of evidence, not for any particular doctrine, but for the claim that Christianity can survive honest questioning. A faith that required hiding every hard question would be exactly the fragile, irrational thing its critics accuse it of being. A faith that invites the questions in, and has historically produced serious answers to them across centuries, is doing something closer to what Wood describes: thinking, not just believing.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear Alycia Wood on faith, evidence, and doubt in her full Jude 3 Project conversations on atheism and the existence of God.
Guest: Alycia Wood, a Christian apologist and speaker. She appeared with the Jude 3 Project.