The book A Prayer for Owen Meany brings forth various themes and questions that can't be answered easily. One of these questions is "Can religious faith exist alongside doubt, or are the two mutually exclusive?" There are several different possible takes on this question may be answered. How a person answers this question is related to their belief in faith.
Of the various answers to this question, I'll start out with "faith cannot exist alongside doubt." The two ARE mutually exclusive. This goes with the fact that complete faith means just that. Faith means "complete confidence that a person or a plan etc" (according to WordNet). To us, to have faith you cannot doubt. One example of this would be when Owen keeps asking John whether or not the statue is there, even though he can't see it through the fog. John's only answer is "I just know it." Owen replies with "that's how I feel about God." Now, John's "belief" is based on the fact that he's seen the statue in this position before, and he reasons that it could not have moved since he last saw it. Owen takes it a step farther and calls it faith.
The next answer to this question could be "I have faith, but I also have some doubt." This is the answer that most people can identify with. Very rarely will you find a person that has complete faith, and also rarely will you find person with complete doubt. Everybody believes something, yet almost nobody believes in something purely. This is much like John. Throughout the book, John develops from not believing in God, to believing in God, too (at the end of the story) mostly believing yet having a little doubt. Throughout the book, John has faith yet has doubt. When he mo ...