A book report on Chapter One of "Doubt: A History," by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

Hecht says that much of history centers on times of certainty, that the pinnacle of a culture occurs when all members of a society seem to be emotionally and intellectually well nourished by the same ideas, practices and values. The history of doubt, on the other hand, highlights what happens between periods of certainty.

"In the heyday of the ancient Greek polis, or city-state, the gods oversaw a very well-integrated society." The strength of the polis centered on certainty, an almost complete lack of doubt in the reality of the Greek pantheon.

The city-state was a shelter against life's difficulties. "If humanity's central existential difficulty comes from the fact that we have humanness — consciousness, hopes, dreams, loneliness, shame, plans, memory, a sense of fairness, love — and the universe does not, that means we are constantly trying to wrangle our needs out of a universe that does not tend in such directions. The polis expanded humanness ..."

The gods not only protected and sustained the polis, their fickle nature "gave an external cause for human inconsistency or illogic ..." And people saw no reason to doubt the gods or the dreams they brought or the messages their prophets gleaned from reading animal entrails or watching the flights of birds. "Oracular prophecy came true often enough to feel like evidence ... ordinary lives generated more evidence for the gods. ... For a long time and for most people it would have been absurd to question the existence of the gods. They were an obvious part of the world."

ENTER PHILOSOPHY

"Under the gaze of philosophy this level of belief eroded rather dramatically along three major lines: some people started discussing how the universe actually worked, some people started questioning the reasonableness of the gods' biographies, and some posited a whole other world of meaning that did not rely on gods in any important way."

One of the most amazing things that Hecht's book reveals is that outstanding individuals from thousands of years ago were more advanced than many of our powerful and learned individuals today. In other words, we still don't grasp the realizations that came to life millennia ago.

Hecht says of the pre-Socratic philosophers and their ideas: "What sets this new type of thought apart is that it is an attempt to explain the universe by thinking it through rather then relying on tradition. Thus the birth of philosophy is, in itself, one of the origins of doubt ..." Here are some important thinkers from the past and their contributions to the history of doubt. All the following philosophers lived between 585 BCE and the death of Socrates in 399 BCE.

THALES: The first philosopher of the West. Predicted an eclipse of the sun in 585 BCE. Said that, "all things are full of gods," which said more about forces than deities. Thought that soul was diffused throughout the whole universe.

ANAXIMANDROS: A student of Thales. Explained the world without reference to the gods. Saw constancy behind the flux of existence.

HERACLITUS: Said you can't step into the same river twice. He thought fire was the most basic component of the universe. "This world order, the same for all, no one of gods or men has made, but it always was and is and shall be: an ever-living fire, kindling in measures, going out in measures." Showing himself to be a profound psychologist, he said, "character for man is his daemon."

"Right at the beginning of philosophy then," Hecht writes, "the original Greek pantheon was put into deep doubt in favor of an essentially empirical world. ... As the Greeks had once marveled at the deeds of the gods, now they would marvel at the well-ordered cosmos. ... There was no longer a reason for a god to have a personality ... "religion survived the philosophers, but not intact."

PARMENIDES: He argued the opposite of Heraclitus, saying that all change is just a matter of perception, that constancy is the rule. He believed however that humanity probably needed some kind of theistic religion to explain the universe in the context of human experience. Perhaps one of the first to realize the mass of humanity was not up to the challenges of nontheistic living, even though he believed in it for himself.

PROTAGORAS: All that survives of his book "Concerning the Gods" is the first sentence, but as Hecht says, "it packs a punch." He wrote: "About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is much which prevents knowledge, the unclarity of the subject and the shortness of life." He was indicted for blasphemy on account of his book but drowned before he came to trial. "Protagoras' claim suggests that nothing available to humanity could serve as trustworthy or sufficient proof of the gods' existence: not tradition, nor experience, nor contemplation."

XENOPHANES: A poet who began to criticize the actions of the Olympians, "not as a scold, but because he thought that these gods couldn't really exist." It was an early case of cosmopolitan doubt. "In the light of knowledge of other cultures, Xenophanes began to feel that the idea of these gods was sort of silly, not just because they acted childishly, but because they acted very Greek. ... With this critique, Xenophanes began the great tradition of trying to imagine where the idea of gods came from ..." He thought that if there is a deity, there must be simply one god, "not gendered and not subject to desires and needs." It has been argued, "that with these ideas Xenophanes produced the first theology — rational thinking about what God must be like."

PRODICUS: He wondered how people ever learned the names of the gods. He concluded that early people so highly valued nature and objects that they began to worship them. He also believed that great teachers were remembered and ultimately worshiped. He didn't say this meant all the gods were fictions, yet he was classified by many later doubters as among the most famous of "atheoseis."

DEMOCRITUS: Believed along the same lines as Prodicus. Said that, "people must have invented the gods because they were frightened and excited by what they saw in the sky." Yet they also were in awe of the order of the cosmos, and such fear and admiration lead to "anthropomorphized worship." He was also the founder of atomism, the belief that all objects are made of "some smallest thing," and that "solid objects flow," as when fruit comes and then falls only to come again next season. "Democritus essentially guessed how the universe works, in a manner of speaking, because it made sense. It was a stunning insight." He went on to point out that things fall into orderly patterns and that this allows us to make predictions about the way things will behave and interact.

DIAGORAS: Perhaps the most famous atheist of the fifth century BCE. He revealed the secrets of the Eleusinian mystery religion to everyone and "thus made them ordinary," that is, "he purposefully demystified a cherished secret rite, apparently to provoke his contemporaries into thought." He was indicted for profaning the mysteries but escaped trial by fleeing the country.

ANAXAGORAS: The earliest figure to have been indicted precisely for atheism. In 467 BCE a meteorite had fallen "and it convinced Anaxagoras that heavenly bodies, including Helios, the sun, were just glowing lumps of metal. ... This was the origin of a conflict between religion and science. Here, new information, new empirical data, led to a direct challenge to the way in which the gods were envisioned. This new kind of doubt encouraged a new kind of punishment for doubt. Set up about 438 BCE the law against Anaxagoras' atheism held that society must 'denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky.'"

THUCYDIDES: In writing his history of the Peloponnesian War the gods did not intervene in the drama. "By now, [around 400 BCE] educated people commonly held that traditional belief in the Olympic gods had been fully discredited, and that the most compelling understanding of God was the universe-mind idea of some philosophers."