Affirming the power of doubt

The week that I read “Doubt,” I sat at an old friend’s deathbed. The wonderful octogenarian was considered by all to be a pillar of the faith. As she lay dying, her friends rubbed her hand and whispered to her about soon being with Jesus and her departed husband. Maybe I was just projecting my own incredulity, but the glint in her soft blue eyes and the troubled set of her jaw hinted that she had her doubts. After this deathbed visit, the idea of banquets and judgments beyond the sky suddenly loomed as absurd -- all of which is only to say that I approached Jennifer Michael Hecht’s marvelous book in fear and trembling for my faith.

There was good reason for such trepidation. The book’s presentation of thousands of years of cogent arguments against God’s existence is discomfiting to read. Hecht always allows doubt to have the first and last word. And when she descants upon the blood baths of religion, there is little mention of the slaughterhouses of such atheists as Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot. This silence is neither surprising nor unwarranted, however, as this book is a history of doubt, not of faith.

But what does it mean to say that doubt has a history? Throughout the centuries, Hecht says, nonbelievers, no less than believers, have drawn upon the reflections of earlier intellectual brethren. Just as Martin Luther’s work echoes with tones from Augustine, and Augustine’s from Plato, Montaigne’s essays reverberate with the doubts of Diogenes, Epicurus and others. Moreover, contrary to what some people believe, the founding fathers were not fundamentalists. For Hecht, both Jefferson and Franklin were squarely on the doubt side. Indeed, the strict separation of church and state in the U.S. owes no small debt to the religious misgivings of these men.

The seeds of public doubt were sown in Asia Minor in the 6th century BC by the pre-Socratics. These early masters of suspicion plucked all the major chords of unbelief. They criticized the religious views of their day on moral grounds, claiming that the gods could not be as treacherous as depicted in Greek myth. They also insisted that natural events could be explained in natural terms. On rainbows, Xenophanes proclaimed, “She whom men call ‘Iris’ too is in reality a cloud, purple, red, and green to the sight.” Finally, like Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud, Xenophanes insisted that we make God in our own image. “If oxen and horses and lions had hands,” he wrote, “ ... horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen.”

The theory of doubt driving Hecht’s history holds that faith and doubt developed in conversation with each other. “There was belief before there was doubt,” the author observes, “but only after there was a culture of doubt could there be the kind of active believing that is at the center of modern faiths.” In ancient times, God was believed to live right down the block, on Mt. Olympus. But pressed by the skeptics, the conception of God evolved into a more ghostly and abstract figure. By the time Aristotle described him (or it), God was no longer envisioned as a graybeard tossing thunderbolts but as a disembodied mind whose sole activity was thinking about thinking.

One of Hecht’s most compelling chapters is about the Jews and Greeks of the Hellenistic period in Alexandria. On Hecht’s reckoning, the Jews, some of whom were influenced by Aristotle’s argument that the world could not have been created, were having their doubts about the old stories of faith. They did not want their children to be shackled by antiquated laws and customs that would prevent them from taking instruction with gentiles at the gymnasiums. One of the Jewish leaders suggested to the king that the old Jewish customs be outlawed. The king agreed and took it one step further: He insisted that the Jews sacrifice to the local god. As Maccabees I tells us, Mattathias Hasmon and his followers refused. And when Mattathias espied a Jew stepping forward to offer sacrifice, he killed the man. That man, Hecht says, might have had his doubts about the Jewish faith or he might simply have wanted to partake in the wider culture -- Hecht calls him the first martyr of doubt.

We usually associate the idea of martyrdom with religious conviction. Hecht, however, reminds us that a multitude of people have died as martyrs for their disbelief. Into the Middle Ages and later, thousands upon thousands of people were burned at the stake for not having their beliefs in the accepted order. The execution bonfires and the machinery behind them are perhaps the most troubling arguments against faith. An apostle of doubt, Freud felt that the moral effects of religion were less than salutary. Therefore, for those who are able to whistle in the dark, it might be better to put religion to bed, or so Freud seemed to conclude. At the least, the moral record of religious belief indirectly posited by Hecht should give pause to anyone preaching that religious faith is the only path to righteousness.

“Doubt” loses some steam when it pulls into the present age -- relatively short shrift is given to such virtuosi of doubt as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Nevertheless, Hecht is an award-winning poet, and her narrative sails along through abstract issues that would have run lesser writers aground. She also traces the dialectic between faith and doubt in Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, and she analyzes the enormous impact of Western science and skepticism on non-Western belief systems. Highly informative and potentially transformative, Hecht’s meditations on misgivings might cause you never to read your own doubts in quite the same naive way again. *