by Jennifer Michael Hecht

 

I just finished a great book called Doubt.  It’s quite a tome - almost 600 pages of history about atheism and agnosticism and so forth.  It’s very well researched and covers doubters in a variety of cultures (though Western doubters certainly get the majority of coverage).  I think it’s really fascinating reading, but it is fairly scholarly and dense, so it’s not for everyone.  Still, I started the book slowly, but it’s well-written and gripping, such that I found myself accelerating through it and reluctant to put the book down all through the second half.

 

 

Back to the book.  I was glad to hear the very ancient origins of doubt, not just among the Greeks, but also, for example, embedded in ancient Indian history in a very thoughtful and, well, relatively modern way.  I have a friend who once claimed to me that pre-modern people all had religions of one sort or another, and though I won’t argue the weaker claim that they all had some superstitions that haven’t survived to the modern era, I think this book, Doubt, contains volumes of evidence that serious doubt of religion has been with us through all of recorded history.

 

One major theme of the book that I enjoyed was the constant stress that in all eras in all places, there were some doubters.  Somebody was doubting, and passing on the ideas and traditions of doubt, skepticism, and/or atheism to the following generations.  In fact, in many times, it appears that the majority of people were doubters of the religious traditions around them.  In Roman times, for example, Hecht’s characterization is of a Roman empire that took the Roman gods as merely a cultural tradition and political device, almost as if people were giving the gods the credibility of Santa Claus.

 

Hecht mentions references to non-believers throughout the Bible, and I’m suddenly struck with the fact that the Bible is a story less about a religious tradition than about a few priests surrounded most of the time by non-believers and people defying sacred laws.  When viewed from that perspective, you suddenly realize the ancient Jews weren’t very good at keeping the people focused on their faith.  Moses had trouble even keeping God’s chosen people focused on Yahweh, even after he’d performed a dozen “miracles”.

 

The other key theme I enjoyed was the sense of a long continuing evolution of thinking about doubt.  While some of the ancient ideas of doubt got lost, they eventually were rediscovered, and meanwhile, many of the best ideas about atheism were passed down and elaborated and clarified in later generations.  You really can, as you read the book, feel through the ages that nuances were being worked out and old theories debunked, so that we have available to us in modern times a very rich tradition of atheist thinking that can be drawn upon, that offers meaningful arguments and alternative life philosophies that are rich and fulfilling.

 

As you might gather from my enjoying the book, I consider myself a practical atheist.  Theoretically, I’m an agnostic, but since I view the chances of the existence of any god I’ve ever heard of as extraordinarily implausible, I feel more intellectually honest to characterize my views as, for all practical purposes, atheist.  Actually, I prefer to call myself a “realist”, by which I mean, someone who believes in reality (as opposed to fantasy, superstition, and magical leprechauns in the sky who listen to our prayers).  I like the term “realist” because it’s a positive perspective that confirms the central value of rationally confronting reality.  For clarity, I still sometimes use the term “atheism”, but I don’t like how it defines itself in contrast to “theism”, thus feeding into the common fallacy that “atheism is just another religion”, which is misleading spin.  As I practice it, there’s no commitment to a belief system, but an open mind to the world’s possibilities, with a perspective of evaluating competing claims and spending time on those possible models of the world that accord with the evidence in a useful way.  I consider this to be what we call scientific thinking, or just plain rational thinking.

 

In any case, hopefully I’ll have time for future blogs about scientific thinking and atheism.

 

Meanwhile, if you enjoy history and philosophy, I recommend Doubt.