More to Question, More to Believe with Dr. Katie Paxman

Intro

From Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute Podcast: Faith Illuminating Scholarship.

My name is Rosalynde Welch, I host the podcast, and today I have for you the fourth and final in a series of interviews with the Maxwell Institute’s new cohort of faculty fellows—this time featuring the wonderful Dr. Katie Paxman, who is visiting us from her home department of Philosophy.

First, though, I want to remind you of a project we’ve had running all year, which will be wrapping up at the end of 2025. We’ve gathered some of the best of Elder Neal A. Maxwell’s previously unpublished speeches from across his career and ministry, and every two weeks we post one of those speeches on our blog. I’ve been sharing these speeches with my son, who doesn’t remember Elder Maxwell personally but has come to love his signature style of reasoned, literate faith. The speeches will remain archived on our website, but don’t miss the last of the series as we roll them out.

Turning now to my conversation with Dr. Katie Paxman. Dr. Paxman has joined us at the Institute to work on a book for our Living Faith series, tentatively titled More to Question, More to Believe. As that title suggests, she doesn’t see questions and belief as opposites, but as partners that expand and build on each other. Katie specializes in epistemology—the study of what we know and how we know it—and she uses her expertise to dig into how we form religious beliefs, what happens when we question those beliefs, and how we can approach the whole thing with more joy and confidence.

Katie helped me see that although it feels like my beliefs and questions reside in my own head, they actually are deeply social processes—and if I feel stuck, the way forward may be social as well as mental. We explored the difference between doubt and questioning: doubt is a disposition, while questioning is a tool for seeking knowledge. It’s possible, for instance, to be a dogmatic doubter with no questions at all. And Katie gave one of the most insightful explanations I’ve heard of Elder Dieter Uchtdorf’s famous admonition to “doubt your doubts.”

This is actually the second time Dr. Paxman has spoken with me on the podcast; in 2023 she joined me for a great discussion about skepticism, philosophy, and faith. So if you like today’s episode, make sure to go back and find our earlier conversation.

And with that, please enjoy this interview with Dr. Katie Paxman.

Interview

Rosalynde Welch:
Katie Paxman, welcome back to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Katie Paxman:
I always like talking to you, so I’m happy to be here.

Welch:
Katie, you are an epistemologist and you’re here at the Maxwell Institute to work on a project about epistemology. To a lot of readers that may sound sort of dry, irrelevant, complex—but I want to make the case, and I think you will also, that it’s actually very relevant to our lives.

So think about this scenario—I think it’s happened to all of us. You’re talking with somebody, maybe you’re conversing online, and suddenly something that you believe is challenged, and you respond in a very visceral way. Let me put it in personal terms: I respond in a very visceral way. This happens to me. I feel panicky. I feel threatened. It doesn’t happen to me every time I’m questioned or challenged, but there are certain topics where I’ll respond in this deeply visceral way to having what I think I know—what I believe—challenged.

What’s happening in that situation? Is that a question of epistemology right there in that very human moment?

Paxman:
I think that’s a question of psychology—human psychology—and it’s human psychology as it pertains to our social epistemic practices. Philosophers like big words partly because technical terms let us talk precisely about complicated concepts. I often tell my students that big words can be shortcuts so I don’t have to spend a paragraph describing a single idea.

So, with that aside, what I mean is: we have certain belief-forming practices as a matter of fact, and those practices—along with the presence of beliefs and how we come to hold them—are really importantly integrated with how we understand ourselves in our social context.

My sense of identity is often tied up with my beliefs. My sense of whether or not I’m justified in asserting that identity is tied up with how I take myself to have justified those beliefs. And maybe more importantly in the scenario you’re talking about, I’m going to worry about whether others—those I’m engaging—are going to think I’m justified in holding those beliefs.

That’s not because most of us are academics or scientists who say, “The most important thing to me is the truth, and therefore I have to make sure I have real clarity on the warrant for the beliefs I hold.” For most of us, it has more to do with whether I can show up with a certain degree of confidence and self-assurance if my identity is tied to a set of beliefs, or if I understand that a set of beliefs is important to my identity.

I think a lot of people read something online and—whether they consciously think, “My identity is in danger” or not—they respond as if it is. We respond as though it’s a threat to who we are, to the spaces we stand in, and to whether or not we’re right to be standing in those spaces. And given that those spaces are often places where we feel secure, we feel comfort, we feel belonging, challenges to that status can trigger a fight, flight, or freeze response.

When you come to the internet understanding how many people might already be in that heightened state when they engage in online debate, it really changes how you perceive what’s going on. You see what looks like aggression not simply as “that person’s mean,” but as, “That person is responding as though they’re being threatened. I wonder why?”

Welch:
Yeah. That’s a really good point, and I appreciate that because you’ve shifted me from only thinking about how I’m responding in those moments—and you’re right, it often happens online, but sometimes in person too—to realizing that other people are having that same experience as well. So as you say, what looks like aggression or somebody just coming on way too strong might actually be its opposite. It might not be an overabundance of confidence; it might actually be masking a kind of shame.

If we feel confident when we hold beliefs that are justified—when we feel calm and able to defend those beliefs—the flip side is that when we start to question, we can feel shame. And maybe we try to bury that shame or compensate for it in some way.

So talk to me about the relationship between uncertainty and shame.

Paxman:
Yes, this is a great question. We tend to find uncertainty really uncomfortable. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is that discomfort isn’t actually our starting position with uncertainty.

By that I mean: children are uncertain. They don’t know anything yet, right? Some children, even at early ages, begin to get anxious about not having the answers—they might learn that from watching adults. But if you look at developmental psychology, there’s this great book by Alison Gopnik, who’s a psychologist and philosopher, called The Philosophical Baby. She tracks development and learning, especially through the early years—from infancy to toddlerhood—and she basically argues that little people are little philosophers. They’re little scientists. They are incredibly driven to understand the world around them. And that’s an advantage to a young creature: to be curious and constantly seeking.

I don’t think the experience of not knowing is unpleasant in that setting. In fact, I think it’s often energizing and motivating.

Welch:
Mm-hmm. I’ve heard that talked about as “beginner’s mindset,” right? If you can put yourself in the mindset of a beginner, you don’t feel shame about not knowing anything—you just feel excitement about what you can still learn. It’s once we start to think of ourselves as experts or as knowledgeable that shame can set in when we realize, “Oh… I don’t know.”

Paxman:
Yeah, exactly. One of the things Gopnik tracks that I think is really interesting is that humans actually function really well having both innovators and questioners—which a lot of the time is the young—and also having adults who have learned patterns.

We know our brains make a ton of new connections when we’re young, and then they start pruning. There’s this idea that as we learn which patterns, which beliefs about cause and effect and the structure of the world are practical for us, the world stops looking like this wide-open set of questions and uncertainties where I’m investigating everything.

A toddler drops something once, picks it up, and does it again because they don’t yet know that it’s going to fall every single time. You see babies and toddlers testing things from all different angles. In some of Gopnik’s studies, they can actually see how thorough toddlers are in gathering information. It turns out they are very good, systematic little scientists and inquirers.

But as adults, it’s actually much more practical if we’re not constantly seeking and reevaluating. We’re more functional when we’ve begun to map the world—the causal world. We’ve got it set in our minds: A is tied to B in this particular way, and I can expect it to happen that way every time. Now I can make decisions quickly. I can evaluate situations quickly. And most of what we’ve learned is serving us well and getting us where we need to go.

So why does shame—why does discomfort and maybe even shame—become part of feeling those patterns challenged? Discomfort, I think, is partly because we have a greater sense of responsibility to make things work. We’re trying to function well in our world. We’re social creatures. And as we age, we get an increased sense not of our dependence on others, but of others’ dependence on us.

Welch:
Yeah, maybe we think of ourselves as teachers, or as people who are looked up to as authorities, or we’ve testified of these beliefs in the past. And suddenly it’s a lot scarier to think, “Maybe I don’t know all those things I said.”

Paxman:
Yes. And shame is importantly not something we feel purely in private. We don’t tend to feel shame in an entirely private way when we make a mistake. We feel shame because we perceive that others have perceived.

Now, it’s possible to feel shame about something no one else knows about—maybe because you think God has seen you. But we also have a relationship with ourselves, and the self can be pretty judgmental. Raise your hand if you’ve ever thought not-nice things about yourself.

In all these cases, shame is a kind of social phenomenon. We’re worried about our social status. So when the systems we’ve come to use, that are serving us well, are challenged, we’re going to feel uncomfortable—not just because, “I don’t like not knowing what to do,” or, “I don’t like the suggestion that I don’t know what to do,” but also because we’re so hyper-aware of the social world.

I like to say that the human world is “socially saturated.” Even when I’m alone, the things I see have meaning to me because of the way they figure into my social status or my position or my security or my belonging.

So the shame comes because I’m very aware of how other people are depending on me, how other people might be evaluating me, who I want to appear to be to other people, whether or not I belong, and whether I’ll continue to experience social security through acceptance. All of these are in the background of the discomfort we feel and, as you say, sometimes overcompensate for—getting aggressive or panicked because we’re trying to defend that sense of self and security.

Welch:
I think these principles apply broadly across many aspects of our life, but they’re especially salient in our religious lives—especially as Latter-day Saints. First, we have a very thick community, right? We know our wards, we love the people there, and we care about what they think about us. So all those social mechanisms you were talking about come into play.

And second, beliefs are very important in our religious lives. We do identify with them. I think of myself: I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—I believe such-and-such and such-and-such. So our religious lives as members of the church are kind of a recipe for a certain way of relating to questions and even doubts that can breed a lot of shame, a lot of fear, a lot of panic.

I love the way I’ve heard you talking in the past about how we form beliefs and how we approach questions. One of the things you’ve made me really reconsider is the relationship between questions and answers.

If I were playing an opposites game with a kid and I said, “What’s the opposite of a question?” they’d probably say, “An answer.” But as I’ve heard you talk and gotten to know you, I’ve started to think differently. Maybe questions and answers—questions and beliefs—aren’t actually opposites. Maybe they’re more like partners. Maybe it’s not a zero-sum relationship, where the more I question, the less I know. Maybe it’s a positive-sum relationship: the more we question, the more we can know; and the more we know, the more we can question.

So talk to me about this relationship between questions and beliefs—questions and answers.

Paxman:
I love this topic. Here’s one way I like to think about it.

You know how when you’re getting advice for a job interview, one of the things you’re told to anticipate is that they’ll ask you if you have any questions. And yes, as an interviewer I might genuinely want to answer their questions so they understand the job. But that moment is also a kind of interview question.

For someone to have thoughtful questions, they have to have given real thought to the workplace, to the role. Questions often indicate how well people understand something. That’s really interesting because we tend to think, “If I say ‘no questions,’ that’s a great way to broadcast confidence—that I understand so completely I don’t need to ask anything.” But actually, if you have a lot of robust questions, that’s usually an indication you’ve really grappled with the ideas.

Your questions don’t need to indicate a total lack of understanding. In fact, if you don’t understand what we’re talking about, you might only have one vague question—something like “Huh?”—because nothing is articulated yet. That’s not really a question; it’s just an indication that you don’t even know where to start.

On the other hand, a fun game philosophers play is to take something that’s “common sense,” something you know and are sure you know, and see how many questions you can ask about it. Rene Descartes famously says, “I think, therefore I am”—“I am, I exist.” That’s supposed to be this bit of knowledge that can’t be doubted. But does that mean I don’t have any questions about it? Not at all.

Look at that phrase: “I think, therefore I am.” I might say, “Yes, I believe that’s true.” Do I have questions about it? For sure. What do I mean by “I”? What is it to think—does it require consciousness? Is it just a series of algorithms that can play out without feeling? What is it to be?

So even if I’m not doubting that claim, it can generate many, many questions. That’s exactly your point: indubitability does not mean unquestionability.

Welch:
That’s so good. So Descartes wanted to get down to what is undoubtable—what’s indubitable. Once he lands on “I think, therefore I am,” that’s something he says he can’t doubt. But what you’re saying is that not being able to doubt a belief doesn’t mean we can’t, or shouldn’t, question it.

We can be secure in a belief that we no longer experience doubt around, and nevertheless—and almost because of that security—it can generate many questions from that place of knowledge and understanding.

Paxman:
Exactly. You know the book I’m working on is tentatively titled More to Question, More to Believe. This is a really good illustration of that. If I believe, “I am, I exist,” and I have no further questions, that’s actually a pretty small amount of content.

But if I have a whole series of questions about the nature of thinking, the nature of the self—the “I” that’s being discussed here—the nature of being and existence, what I mean when I make a claim like that—if I have that series of questions, it indicates there’s more content in my mind about that initial claim, even if that content opens lots of doors to things I don’t know yet.

It turns out “more to question,” with the right sorts of questions, is an indication of “more to believe”—an indication of a more robust set of ideas you’re committing to, that you’re interested in, that you’re able to grapple with. My experience has been that questioning results in more: more to understand, more to believe, more to feel, more to connect with—and more to simultaneously question and also feel a sense of self-efficacy and identity.

Welch:
Let’s take a brief moment to acknowledge an enthusiasm that you and I share, which is for a little-known musical film starring Barbra Streisand called Yentl. I was absolutely delighted to find out that this has been a major touchstone for you. In fact, it’s the source of the title of your book, More to Question, More to Believe.

Yentl is a film I knew so well growing up. My mother loved it. We listened to it on vinyl records and then on cassette tapes in the car. It’s a wonderful story. Briefly tell us about Yentl and the relationship of that story to this project.

Paxman:
Absolutely—I always talk about Yentl. I watched it for the first time when I was around 11 or 12. My mom showed it to me. It was on a VHS taped off of TV—for any younger members of the audience, you can Google what that process was. I just fell in love with it.

It’s about a Jewish girl in her late teens or twenties at the turn of the last century. She lives in a very conservative, very Orthodox community in Europe. Her father has secretly taught her to read. She hasn’t gotten married. That’s where the film starts: she has all these questions, and many of them are tied up with her identity. She feels like she’s getting messaging from her community that she ought to be married, she ought to be having children, she doesn’t need to read, she shouldn’t be asking so many questions. But that’s not her internal experience.

She feels like God has given her the ability to think, and God has given her these questions, and she wants to know God. She loves God. At the beginning of the film—this isn’t really a spoiler, this is the setup—her father passes away, and it looks like the community is going to ensure that she gets married and “taken care of.” Yentl doesn’t want that, so she pulls a Mulan before Mulan: she cuts her hair, dresses as a boy, and travels so she can go to a yeshiva, a school. The film plays out from there; it’s very dramatic.

A theme that runs through it is someone grappling with these overwhelming questions in her life—this tendency to question that fills her up, that feels like a gift from God—and yet often ends up being the source of social conflict and trouble. She’s not able to passively accept what the world is handing her.

As a young person, I got super excited about this. I mean, it’s Barbra Streisand singing her inner monologues about being misunderstood by her community. I was the girl in Young Women who wanted to talk more about the scriptures, and when someone brought in their baby, everyone else stopped to play with the baby. I had nothing against babies, but I was like, “I’m here to talk about scriptures. Can we talk now?”

Later in the film—this is slightly spoilery—Yentl actually learns better to appreciate the traditional female roles she didn’t initially understand or connect with. That’s been an exciting process in my life as well—starting with my nephews and then having my own children, realizing how many good questions I have about motherhood and about the distinctive things the female body can do, and what that means for the social roles we play. It’s a great movie.

Welch:
Yeah, I’ve really noticed that about you, Katie. I love how, when you’re talking about the most complex philosophical questions and problems, you’ll bring them back to a relationship between a parent and a child or to a familiar household scenario that we’ve all experienced. I love how you do that.

Let’s go back just a little, thinking more about questions versus doubts. Sometimes I’ve noticed—and maybe I’ve done it myself—that I can use the idea of a question as a euphemism for doubt, or a way to make doubt seem less scary. If I’m concerned that my child is having doubts about their beliefs in the gospel, I might frame that as, “You have questions.”

Talk to me: is it the case that questions and doubts really share a lot in common? Are they distinct? And especially, I want to hear you talk about Elder Uchtdorf’s famous encouragement in his 2013 conference talk, “Come, Join With Us,” to “doubt your doubts.” Talk to me about doubt.

Paxman:
First of all, Elder Uchtdorf—I don’t know if he would identify as an epistemologist, but I have ample evidence from his talks that he is frequently doing very good epistemology, and I appreciate that.

We do in casual ways use “doubt” and “question” synonymously. We probably ought not to—at least in the sense that if someone says they have a question, I shouldn’t automatically hear, “They have doubts.” Similarly, if someone says, “I have doubts,” that doesn’t necessarily mean they have questions.

Doubting is a disposition toward a particular claim or belief. I can be very dogmatically doubting without engaging in any curiosity or seeking. Someone can make a claim and I can say, “I don’t believe that.” That’s not the same as saying, “Here’s a question I have about that claim. Here’s something I don’t understand about it. Here’s why I’m hesitant. Let me ask you this…”

That’s really different from simply saying, “I doubt it.”

Similarly, you might have someone whose doubt isn’t defensive against a claim, but is internal. Sometimes our doubt is just the fear that we might be wrong. Whether or not we have good reasons for thinking that, we can feel that fear.

So doubt is a very distinct phenomenon from questioning. As I said earlier, I can say, “I believe I am, I exist,” and then have a whole series of follow-up questions. That doesn’t amount to doubt.

I don’t want to make doubt sound like the villain, though. Once we identify doubt with things like fear, it’s never helpful to tell yourself, “I ought not to feel this way.” Instead, when I’m having a doubt-response—where I feel myself not curious, shutting down, not wanting to ask questions, thinking, “Either I have to dogmatically hold on and put on my blinders and go la-la-la, or I can’t be certain so I’ll become a complete skeptic”—it can help to stop and pay attention to what I’m feeling and then start asking questions about my feelings.

Why is this so scary? Why is this so hard? What do I think is going to happen? Is this about relationships in my life? Am I worried someone won’t accept or love me? Is this about not being sure I’ve done the right thing?

You can see how many different questions we can start to ask if we get curious about our own feelings. And there’s this great thing where, when I notice the feeling and accept it and allow myself to feel it, it actually frees up my brain from that fight-or-flight freeze state. It frees me up to process, and maybe feel more comfortable, more secure, more self-accepting.

Welch:
That’s amazing. Questions can be the remedy to that feeling we started with—the feeling of “I’m trapped, I’m ashamed, I’m being attacked.” Questions can actually be one way to move beyond that state of mind.

Paxman:
Yes. So when Elder Uchtdorf says “doubt your doubts,” I’ve occasionally heard people use that phrase—not meaning to be unkind, I think—but in a way that shuts down questioning. As in, “You shouldn’t bring up that question in Sunday School because it makes people uncomfortable. Doubt your doubts.” The message becomes: stop making everyone feel uncomfortable.

Especially if you look at the context of the talk, that’s not what Elder Uchtdorf is saying.

I think what he’s saying is more similar to something the philosopher I study, David Hume, says. Hume is famously skeptical in a lot of his philosophical methodology. At the end of an important section of his Treatise on Human Nature, he has just considered a ton of really difficult skeptical arguments against pretty fundamental things like the nature of causality, or whether I can know that an object I perceive has identity over time—whether my laptop is the same laptop over time, and so on.

These are the kinds of things that make people wonder why philosophers are paid, but I promise they matter, because among other things they help us clarify what we mean when we say we believe in certain things.

Hume has just exposed himself and his readers to all these really difficult questions, and he hasn’t then swooped in to rescue everyone. He hasn’t said, “Don’t worry, here’s a knock-down argument.” He kind of leaves you out at sea. He uses that metaphor—he says he’s trying to sail around the earth in a leaky rowboat. That’s what he thinks human reason is: an attempt at a really big task with an instrument that seems not quite up to it.

It’s in that context that he reminds himself that he ought to be diffident—cautious—about his philosophical doubts just as much as about any attempts at certainty. He basically says, “Look, I’ve gotten really good at looking at my beliefs and challenging them. I ought to be just as good at looking at the source of my doubts and questioning that.”

I think that’s what Elder Uchtdorf is saying. Shifting to a different dogmatic belief, or shifting to some space where you say, “I don’t want to feel uncertain, so I’m going to make everything black and white”—that move needs to be treated with the same careful questioning. We ought to doubt our doubts when doubt becomes our default experience: that shutting down, that alienated place we talked about earlier.

And it’s not always just about more questions. Often it’s also a case of social insecurity or disconnectedness. When I’m in that space, I might cut myself off from other people. I might think, “I’m deep. I’ve thought all these deep thoughts. I’m in an angsty place.” There can be pride connected with it. Or there can be this belief that I’m so fundamentally different from other people because I’m experiencing this that I have to be alone.

In that section, Hume describes himself as a monster. He looks at the people around him who are connecting with each other and functioning well, and he can’t imagine how someone like him could re-enter that space. How many of us have felt this? We’re feeling really alienated and we look out and see people who, by the way, probably have all kinds of anxieties of their own—they’re just masking it—and they’re talking to each other and seem to belong. We compare ourselves to them and think, “I don’t have that.”

Hume says he feels too monstrous, that no one would want him as part of their group. But then he writes that the real solution to this feeling is not more philosophy. He says he needs to go play a board game with his friends. I’m not kidding—he literally talks about going to play backgammon. He talks about the need to reconnect socially, and that once he’s reconnected socially—what we might now call “regulated”—he can return to these big ideas and questions in a way that is once again a pleasure instead of a source of deep anxiety and insecurity.

I think another thing that’s so important to remember is how often in scripture we’re told to be like children. When a child is feeling sad or upset, most of the time they let that vulnerability be obvious. We do this thing as adults where we think we have to already have “managed ourselves” so we won’t appear needy. We don’t want to be needy, so we deny ourselves social connection until we feel like we can mask our pain.

But that’s not what children do. And I think when we’re told to be like children, we are certainly encouraged to come to God as a child—come to God in your hurt, tell Him what hurts, what feels vulnerable. But I think we’re also meant to form relationships with others where we’re willing to do that.

So when you’re feeling that deep disconnect, maybe it’s too big an ask to say, “Okay, pull up your socks and go play a board game,” or “Go make small talk.” I think we ought to take seriously the possibility that what we really ought to do is go to someone and say, “I feel horrible. I want to hide. I’m feeling so disconnected.”

You might say, “Well, I need a person it’s safe to do that with.” Ideally those are our closest friends and family. When that’s not available or feels unsafe, I think that’s part of the reason we have ministering and local church leaders—because having someone in a position where the expectation is that they’ll be available to others’ vulnerability gives us a social structure that allows us to find that space, especially if other relationships in our life are fraught.

Welch:
I love that vision of ministering. In addition to meeting emergent physical needs—that’s such an important role too—but what if I can’t do that for some reason for my ministering sister? What if I can be that person she can come to when meaning has crumbled in her life and she’s feeling that deep social alienation? What if I were the one she felt safe coming to? What an honor, what a privilege. That would truly be a ministry.

Katie, this has been such a great conversation. We’re going to draw it to a close now. As we wrap up, I’d just like to hear briefly: what makes for an excellent question? We’ve talked about questioning; it’s important, it’s different from doubting, it supports belief and leads us to better-justified beliefs. But not all questions are created equal. So what makes an excellent question, and what’s a practical thing listeners can do to improve their questions—to practice asking better questions?

Paxman:
I want to talk really quickly about two kinds of problematic questions.

The first kind is an ill-formed question that builds in some assumption about the world that might not be true, and then appears to force you to choose. In philosophy, we call this a false dichotomy. For example: “Either there is a God, and because He’s all-good no one ever experiences pain, or people experience pain and that means there is no God.” Framed as a question, that’s a false dichotomy: “Is it A or B?” But reality might be C, D, or something else entirely.

Questions like that can be really distorting. They can lead us down paths where we’re working really hard to choose between two options, neither of which actually describes the world. One way a question can be weaker or stronger is the degree to which it bakes in assumptions that themselves need to be questioned.

We do this without meaning to. We do it all the time. It’s part of the process. I never want someone to stop questioning because they’re worried they’re asking the “wrong” question. But that’s where questioning our questions becomes really useful.

The second problematic kind is about intent. We’ve all been in scenarios where a question is framed like a false dichotomy and we suspect it’s been done that way on purpose—there’s something manipulative or insincere going on. Why is the questioner asking that question? Is it meant to impact the listener, manipulate them, or make them feel badly about themselves?

It’s interesting: I was looking at two of the most important “questions” in scripture. Moroni encourages us to ask whether the Book of Mormon is true. And James tells us that if we lack wisdom, we should ask of God. In both cases, faith is highlighted—and I think in this context faith is best understood as trust in God; it’s relational.

So the first thing about a good question—especially in a social or spiritual context—is that there’s some love, some real relationship and trust between the parties. Then both passages talk about a “sincere heart” and “real intent.” In other words, I’m asking in earnest. I’m not asking to manipulate someone or to force their hand or to prove a point that’s disconnected from truth. I’m asking because I really want to know.

Questions that have a lot of manipulative energy behind them, or that seem designed to bully or push others—those are questions we should step back from and examine.

Now, how to ask good questions. This is a big topic, but here’s a practical starting place that I like. If you look at a question, it’s just a bunch of words—and all those words have meaning. Philosophers love to point out how many sentences we take ourselves to understand, but if we actually focus on the individual words and concepts, we discover we have a lot of questions.

That’s what I modeled earlier with “I think, therefore I am.” Common sense says I know what all those words mean. I understand what someone means when they say that to me. But if I slow down and consider the components—“I,” “think,” “am”—I can generate all kinds of questions. I can think more deeply about the details. That applies to all kinds of claims, including scriptural ones.

That’s not the only way to generate questions, but I think it’s a really neat starting place: slow down, look at the concepts and how they relate, and use that to start generating thoughtful questions.

Welch:
I think “slow down” is good advice in many contexts, and I think it’s spectacular advice in the context of reading, understanding, seeking, and questioning.

Thank you, Katie Paxman, for joining us today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Paxman:
It was so much fun. Thank you—great questions about questions.

Conclusion

That’s it for my interview with Dr. Katie Paxman. We’re delighted to have her with us for the next couple of years, and I can’t wait to see what she writes during her time at the Maxwell Institute.

If you want to hear more from Katie, check out her Wonder of Scripture lecture from October 2025, available on the Maxwell Institute website and YouTube channel. It’s titled “Wonder, Curiosity, and Reading Scripture Like a Child,” and it’s just as good as it sounds.

If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you’ll tell somebody about it! I’ll be back soon with another episode. Thanks for listening. It really does mean so much.