DOUBT: A HISTORY
22 January 2004

"Faith can be a wonderful thing,
but it is not the only wonderful thing."

Here's a short book report that focuses on the introduction to "Doubt: A History" by Jennifer Michael Hecht. I am sending this out as an e-mail for those who may have trouble accessing my Web site on The Plain Dealer computer system.

We have recently upgraded some of our equipment, and I find I cannot call up my Web page because of a "gateway error." I hope systems can resolve the problem. This information will appear on the Web site for those who would rather read it in that format. Quoted material is from Hecht; non-quoted material is my effort to tie sections together; bracketed material is my clarification or comment on Hecht.

"Like belief, doubt takes a lot of different forms, from ancient Skepticism to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief."

"Doubters in every century made use of that which came before."

"This is a study of religious doubt, all over the world, from the beginning of recorded history to the present day. The story builds and does so in the same erratic, wildly creative way that the history of belief does. Once we see it as its own story, rather than as a mere collection of shadows on the history of belief, a whole new drama appears and new archetypes begin to come into focus. Without having the doubt story sketched out as such, it's hard to see how patterns of questioning have mirrored certain types of social change, for instance, it's hard to identify doubt's enduring themes."

A GREAT SCHISM

"Great believers and great doubters seem like opposites, but they are more similar to each other than the mass of relatively disinterested and acquiescent men and women. This is because they are both awake to the fact that we live between two divergent realities: On the one side, there is a world in our heads — and in our lives, so long as we are not contradicted by death and disaster — and that is the world of reason and plans, love and purpose. On the other side, there is the world beyond human life — an equally real world in which there is no sign of caring or value, planning or judgment, love or joy. We live in a meaning-rupture because we are human and the universe is not.

"Great doubters, like great believers, have been people occupied with this problem, trying to figure out whether the universe actually has a hidden version of humanness [postulated through belief in gods or God], or whether humanness is an error and people would be better off weaning themselves from their sense of narrative, justice, and love [postulated by the great nontheistic "atheist" religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism and by some western philosophers].

JUSTICE

Another aspect of the Great Schism has to do with fairness. We seem to have an innate notion of what's right and fair, but fate and the universe often upset those notions profoundly, and this causes us no end of pain and confusion. Our efforts to make sense of this result in both belief and doubt.

KNOWLEDGE

Another aspect of the Great Schism has to do with our passion to know. "We have an almost violent desire to understand things, and our brains seem to take the whole of life as a great puzzle." But there's a difference between problems and mysteries. Problems can and should be solved; mysteries can't be solved, but they can be enjoyed. One of the joys of doubt is the savoring of mystery. And yet, "there is serious weirdness to the mind, thinking amid the vast unthinking world."

OUR PLACE IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS

Yet another aspect of the Great Schism is the mixture of feelings we have about our inferiority — or is it our superiority that bothers us so? "The universe is more powerful than we, but when it comes to demonstration of sentience and will, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being the smartest, most powerful creatures around. Thus there is a rupture between daily life, in which individuals are rarely the highest authority, and the larger picture, the macro-reality of humankind, in which we as a group are the authority on everything.

CLOSING THE GAPS

"Faced with two contradictory truths — that of the human world and that of the universe — religious virtuosos have all suggested some kind of reconciliation. They all say the schism is illusory, either because the universe is really possessed of human attributes and only looks chaotic, uncaring and without direction [God or gods are in charge], or because our sense of meaning is ridiculous, and we ought to train ourselves away from out struggle to invent, succeed and sustain [the way of nontheism]."

So on the one hand we have "a preacher reading a human-type meaning back into the universe" or a monk or a guru reading a nonhuman-universe meaning back into human life.

It's not just religion and philosophy that try to close the gap; the arts have been preoccupied with the schism between human and nonhuman ways of decoding existence.

MORE GAPS

"The great doubters and believers have been preoccupied with another Great Schism: the one between what human beings are and what we wish we were, what we do and what we understand. ... The fact that the human heart so often disagrees with and disobeys the human brain [and vice versa] also seems to demand explanation." [The birth of morality and moral philosophizing.]

"The terms we use to define God tend to be descriptions of the ruptures between human beings and the universe: meaning, purpose, infinity and eternity. The terms we use to define the personality of God tend to be descriptions of the ruptures between our real selves and our potential selves: honesty, kindness, love and compassion. Great doubters have been as profoundly invested in these questions as have great believers, and they have offered a bounty of answers ... The history of doubt is not only a history of the denial of God; it is also a history of those who have grappled with the religious questions and found the possibility of other answers." [Morality without theistic belief.]

PATTERNS OF DOUBT

"We can describe some loose relationships between certain types of communities and certain kinds of religious doubt. We start where belief starts: in a relatively isolated group of people, concerned with a very local religious world. ... Where everyone seems to believe the same thing, doubt is calm: when scientists or philosophers begin to question religious lore, they do so from within the religion, merely trying to get it all correct. The best religious minds help to question the specifics without hostility to the old version of things. [But over time] what was understood as history and science is increasingly seen as allegory [and the first erosion of certainty ignites the first spark of doubt]."

In these early days of doubt, "marveling at the mechanism [the workings of the universe or the mystery of mind] is regarded as a sufficient replacement for faith." [Curiosity as a form of faith. The Greek way.]

DIVERSITY AND DOUBT

"By peaceful trade or a hostile clash or general upheaval, the interaction of small groups has led to one big group [and] a massive mixing of peoples and cultures." This can give birth to what Hecht calls, "cosmopolitan doubt."

"If my ostensibly universal God demands rest on a different day than your ostensibly universal God, we are both going to notice the glitch and wonder who's got it right, if anyone. So difference alone leads to a more questioning, critical attitude toward received truths, i.e. truths that have tradition as their primary proof or source or authority. But it is more than that: The heterogeneous society results from, and leads to, a shakeup of cultural constraints, so that eventually nothing feels unified and integrated. ... The effect is that religion here tends to reflect that homelessness and doubt."

WHEN COSMOPOLITANISM GIVES WAY

While diversity can promote renewed belief or even rabid fundamentalism in some people, it can also free others from traditional beliefs, leaving them somewhat adrift. What Hecht calls "graceful-life philosophies" step in to close the gap between traditional religious belief and rampant, aimless secularism. "The message of such graceful-life philosophies tends to be: We don't need answers and we don't need much stuff, we just need to figure out the best way to live. Cosmopolitan doubt is often harrowing, but it is also experienced as amusing and empowering — these people feel savvy and free in comparison to their forerunners. They go to the theater."

As cosmopolitanism progresses Hecht says, "Finally, within the mixed, increasingly skeptical community, something new arises: a committed, ardent belief, where the idea of doubt is written into the idea of the religion [Jesus in the garden]. Here expressions of doubt can feel threatening very quickly because the feeling of lost certainty and the pain that accompanies it are now very well known ... the group feels it must consciously police its membership against doubt." [And the members themselves often feel the need to police themselves against doubt!]

SEVEN CATEGORIES OF DOUBT

• Science: materialism and rationalism. [Coming to us from the pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece.]

• Nontheistic transcendence programs (often religions without gods). [Hinduism is truly "that old-time religion," and the Carvaka were history's first recorded doubters. "The Carvaka believed that there was no afterlife whatsoever, and they thought it was pretty funny that anyone believed otherwise."]

• Cosmopolitan relativism: What happens when people mix and begin taking their own traditions with a grain of salt.

• The moral rejection of injustice: like the doubt of Job and other victims and survivors.

• Graceful-life philosophies, which present themselves with guides for life without traditional religious belief.

• Philosophical Skepticism, "which questions our ability to know the world at all, including our ability to claim God's existence." This begins with pre-Socratic questioning and takes off when the ancient Greeks "acquire a multitude of philosophies and that great variety makes some people reject them all."

• And finally, there is the doubt of the ardent believer — great certainty in her own beliefs amounts to a great doubt about alternative ways of viewing the world.

CLOSING REMARKS FROM THE INTRO

"A few things about religion become visible from the history of doubt. One is that there was belief before there was doubt, but only after there was a culture of doubt could there be the kind of active believing that is the center of modern faiths. Until the Greeks filled libraries with skepticism and secularism, no one ever thought of having a religion where the central, active gesture was to believe. Another is that doubt inspired religion in every age: from Plato to Augustine, to Descartes, to Pascal, religion has defined itself through doubt's questions. [Just as doubt has defined itself through religion's assertions.] Of course, this extends up to today."

"Doubters have been remarkably productive, for the obvious reason that they have a tendency toward investigation, and also are often drawn to invest their own days with meaning. ... The earliest doubt on record was 2,600 years ago, which makes doubt older than most faiths. Faith can be a wonderful thing, but it is not the only wonderful thing. Doubt has been just as vibrant in it prescription for a good life and just as passionate for the truth. By many standards, it's had tremendous success. This is its story."