Doubt

Jennifer Michael Hecht, “Doubt A History (The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson), Harper SanFrancisco, 2003, 494 Pages

This book chronicles the lives and reflections of great doubters from 600 BCE to the present day. It certainly provides volumes of evidence that serious doubt of religion has been with us through all of recorded history. The author provides extensive citations, notes, and bibliography supporting her assertions. Some books are not an easy read but are necessary to enhance your personal understanding and education—this is one of them. (Note: In all my postings, I always list how many pages actually read, excluding notes, bibliography, etc. Otherwise, this book is 551 pages, not 494).

The authors’ history of doubt is mostly confined to the Greeks, beginning in 600 BCE, and then Judaism and Christianity. However, the Moslems are also lightly included as are the eastern religions. It is just as well as the book is long enough without pursuing an even more thorough global study of the issue.

Garrison Keillor states that this book “is the world religions course you wish you’d had in college, a history of faith told from the outside. Jennifer Michael Hecht is a strong swimmer in deep water against treacherous currents.”

Pg. 4: At the birth of philosophy in the second half of the sixth century BCE, they were attempting to explain the universe by thinking it through rather than relying on handed-down tradition. Thus the birth of philosophy is, in itself, one of the origins of doubt—when empirical, rational thinking becomes a goal unto itself, that means people have developed a system for checking whether an idea has a foundation outside plain faith. This sort of checking keeps valuing those ideas that have a demonstrable foundation and scuttling the rest. The very behavior gets one into the habit of devaluing beliefs that have no describable, rational foundation.

Pg. 10: The philosopher Anaxagoras is the earliest historical figure to have been indicted for atheism—in fact, it seems they wrote the law just for him. A meteorite had fallen in 467 BCE and it convinced Anaxagoras that the heavenly bodies 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 doubt encouraged a new kind of punishment for doubt. Set up about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras’s atheism held that society must “denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky.”

Pg. 14: The idea of humanity as being possessed of immortal souls was in the Greek culture by the fifth century BCE.

Pg. 15: Plato took things to be real and true if they were intelligible. The world, then, which is constantly changing, was thus fundamentally unknowable, and could not possibly be real. Rather, it was a flowing variety that only seemed real in human time. The buildings around us feel real enough, but they come down. What is real is the Form that every building shares to some degree. If something is real it is not material, not changeable, and it is intelligible. Plato though everyone should study geometry because it was the most developed example of how Forms work.

Pg. 34: The Greek philosopher Epicurus stated that the three chief obstacles to being happy are fear of death, fear of pain, and fear of the gods. Two of these are unnecessary and the other is generally over-estimated. For many, and for Plato and Epicurus certainly, brave thinking about truth is the secret to happiness: concerted and regular contemplation will transform us and let us taste what there is to taste of transcendence.

Pg. 47: The Jews were the first to proclaim a moral, all-powerful God, responsive to the behavior of human beings. Ideas of a just God in a rough world would henceforth be central to the history of doubt. Both the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel witnessed the destruction of the Temple, and the response both came to was to shore up the traditional claims that ours is a just universe. The idea of an afterlife was still absent from Jewish thinking; the doctrine held that the good and the guilty will be recompensed while they yet live. It’s a brutal theory for a people to embrace during a disaster, because it suggests that suffering implies guilt, but it also soothes by giving meaning to suffering. The Book of Job seems to have been written in this period, between 600 BCE and 400 BCE and this strict relationship between suffering and guilt was very much on the author’s mind.

Pg. 62: The Greek belief of a life after death and the Jews idea of a caring ethical God were joined together in Christianity and in this form took over much of the world for a period of two millennia and counting. However, both cultures have traditions of secularism that also grew. The Jewish-Greek secular mix has been a fruitful as the religious.

Pg. 74: The author of Ecclesiastes was Koheleth; Ecclesiastes is the Greek translation of that name. The book was written in the third century BCE (250-225). It is surprising that this book remains in the bible; probably because of its’ extraordinary beauty. Koheleth doubted every aspect of religion, from the very ideal of righteousness, to the by now traditional idea of divine justice for individuals: “Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?” Koheleth saw the relationship between merit and recompense as chaotic. One of the greatest doubting lines ever written was his, and it has flashed a glint of light in myriad lives, for millennia: “Under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favor to the skillful: but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Train, excel, and rejoice in your labors, but don’t assume the battle goes to the strong, or the riches to the learned, or favor to the skillful. It just doesn’t. Time and chance happens to them all.

Pg. 86: The subject of this book is the history of those who have doubted the existence of God. Asia does not have a history of much discussion of this subject, because for the East the existence of God was rarely the central question. Nonetheless, it is central to our story that a world of individuals, across half the earth and several millennia, did not live under the gaze and regulation of God or gods. We need to find out how they managed that. We do know that many of them believed in karma and many doubted that.

Karma: According to the idea of karma, when people die they are reborn into an embryo and start again—and everything about the new infant’s life, from its caste to its daily luck, is appropriate to how the reincarnated soul had behaved in past lives.

Pg. 169: In the early Middle Ages, something curious happened to the ideas of faith and philosophy. For the first time, belief itself became the central religious duty. Whereas before there was not much reason to try to believe (it was more a question of what to say in public), now the religion is set up around the idea that belief is difficult and that we must work toward it. Doubt will never be the same.

Pg. 276: What Luther rejected in the Reformation was not just Church corruption. It was the primacy of Aristotelian logic that had dominated education and intellectual culture. He states: “We should not even want rational proofs to believe, let alone speculative doubting. If a syllogistic form of reasoning hold in divine matters, then the doctrine of the Trinity is demonstrable and not the object of faith.”

Pg. 336: Newton saw that force is not a thing outside matter that pushes on it, but rather that pieces of matter exert forces on each other. Today we think less of forces at all, and instead think of the pieces of matter having a field of interaction. Aristotle had been tricked by friction and gravity into thinking that things needed outside force in order to move. The Prime Mover was unnecessary after all.

Pg. 354: Edward Gibbon’s (1737 – 1794) Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire inbagurated the development of a new, careful, secular history. Before it, the accepted understanding was that Christianity took over the Roman Empire because it was ordained by God, that the horrible Roman emperors martyred the early Christians in droves, and that Christians prevailed through the power of God. In this model, Rome was the best humanity could do until we had further revelation, then God stepped in, fixed the world, and Rome sank away. Not only did Gibbon tell the story without any intervention from God, he also told he story of Rome’s decline as due to the disease of Christianity’ spreading through the Roman Empire and rotting it. This was powerful stuff.

Pg. 360: Thomas Jefferson’s devotion to Epicurus helps explain “the pursuit of happiness” line in the Declaration of Independence. It was Jefferson who put together the bill for establishing religious freedom in the U.S. grounded in the belief that a person’s opinions cannot be coerced. John Adams was less a doubter than Jefferson after he found the Unitarians. As the second president of the U.S. Adams signed into law the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), which declares that “the government of the U.S. is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” and is in no way an enemy to Muslims. Further “The U.S. is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.” It was carried unanimously by the Senate.

Pg. 402: In France and England, before Darwin, there were lively groups of political radicals, deists or atheists, who believed in me kind of evolution: “natural transformism” in France, “animal transumation” in England.

Pg. 446: Einstein’s theory of relativity appeared in 1905, and whatever people understood of it, they could tell the universe was becoming stranger. Energy and mass were now somehow the same; translated versions of one another, convertible back and forth. Time, the great certainty, was shown to slow down in relation to speed. Quantum mechanics and Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle seemed to make a fact of ancient Skepticism. The Skeptics had said our senses and our minds could not know the world because it was not knowable to our senses and minds.

Pg. 466: In Cold War America, atheist meant communist. In 1954 a law was passed changing the national motto of the U.S. from “E Pluribus Unum” to “In God We Trust.” In 1955 another law required the new motto to be on all U.S. currency (it had been there occasionally since 1863), and in 1956 yet another law added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pg. 478: Popular modern Muslim doubt tends to be ethical; it critiques the behavior of Muammad as the ancient Greeks critiqued the behavior of the pantheon. One central issue is Muhammad’s preteen wife; it is often introduced as a reason a former Muslim has left the faith. The treatment of Islamic women in general is also very important, followed by the treatment of non-Muslims, even, sometimes, Muslim non-Arabs. There is also the issue of democracy, Ibn Warraq cites the founders of the U.S on the relationship between religion and politics and concludes that Islam cannot be reconciled to that vision.