A couple of months ago I wrote about Mike, a young evangelical Protestant who told me he's not into theology or doctrine — he's “just into Jesus.”

Mike's Christianity is woefully incomplete, but at least he's had a genuine conversion experience and he truly loves the Lord. So it was that, despite major differences, we found some common ground to stand on.

It's much harder to find any such acreage when talking to people I call “SNBers” — “seekers, not believers.”

A recent e-mail from an SNBer captured the essence of this worldview by confidently informing me that he was not a narrow-minded believer but an open-minded “seeker.” Seeking is open-minded, believing is close-minded.

Seeking is smart, believing is silly. Seeking is enlightened, believing is superstitious.

Most SNBers I've had contact with preach an uneasy mixture of certitude and doubt. It often seems the only thing they know for sure is that nothing can be known for sure. Oddly, many seem to revel in this confusion.

In the Northwest where I live, a popular bumper sticker exhorts: “Question reality.” Of course, the very act of questioning reality assumes we can find answers and that inquiry is a logical, meaningful activity. But it's not evident that SNBers really want to find answers; they often seem intent on asking questions in order to avoid answers.

Just as important to SNBers is the drive to question authority. All authority, but especially religious authority. This was admitted frankly by Dan Brown, SNBer and author of The Da Vinci Code, in a Washington Post interview. After expressing doubt that we can really know anything about history because it was written “by the winners,” Brown said: “We're entering an age … when we've started to question every-thing. In the past, knowledge was something that was handed down by authority figures; now we seek and discover for ourselves.”

Another bumper sticker shouts: “Question authority!” Ques tion reality based on whose authority? Who has the authority to tell others to question authority? Logically, this simply means other peoples' authority is bad but my authority is good. In which case my authority is “other's authority” to everyone but me, which means no one's authority has any meaning for others.

This confused fragmentation is the one found in a recent best seller, the title a perfect summation of the SNBer mantra: Beyond Belief. Written by neo-gnostic Elaine Pagels, the book attempts to rehabilitate heretics of the early Church era by (surprise!) describing them as people who “seek for God” — but don't necessarily believe in God.

For Pagels, true faith is all about seeking and choice, having nothing to do with certainty and dogma. Heresy is described as choosing differently than orthodox Christianity and rejecting the falsehoods foisted upon history by hierarchy and dogma. The jacket for her book assures readers of the merits of this open-minded position: “Pagels shows that what matters about Christianity involves much more than any one set of beliefs” and “the impulse to seek God overflows the narrow banks of a single tradition.” That sounds agreeable, but it doesn't hold water: You can seek all the rivers you want, but you can only float your boat on one river at a time.

The nature of seeking is based on the belief that there is something worth seeking. Choosing not to find anything is simply cognitive dissonance. As G.K. Chesterton said: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” Now there's something to chew on.

Carl E. Olson, author of Will Catholics Be ‘Left Behind’? and editor of Envoy magazine, writes from Eugene, Oregon.