Doubt: A History

Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation. If the former seems far-fetched, consider the latter: even if someone is listening to your story, and really hearing, that person will disappear from existence in the blink of a cosmic eye, so why bother to tell this perhaps illusory and possibly un-listening person something he or she is unlikely to truly understand, just before the two of you blip back out of existence? We like to talk to people who answer us, intelligently if possible, but we do talk without needing response or expecting comprehension. Sometimes, the event is the word, the act of speaking. Once we pull that apart a bit, the action of talking becomes more important than the question of whether the talking is working-because we know, going in, that the talking is not working. That said, one might as well pray.

Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture’s basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains’ basic formation.

Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don’t know it. So long as you can possibly worry about it, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

The sacrificial part of the Greek religion had to do with submitting to the wild chaotic world beyond one’s own will; getting used to the idea that your rational plans will be knocked around by larger forces. The ecstatic-ritual part of ancient Greek religion was a kind of throwing oneself into the chaos, not pitting your rationality against the tempestuous world, but rather leaving your rationality on the shore, letting the waves toss you about, and coming to identify with the waves, with the storm, with the weather.

[Based upon the message of "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes,] If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan.

Lucian [of Samosata; 120-190 CE] was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution

Expect change. Accept death. Enjoy life. As Marcus Aurelius explained, the brains that got you through the troubles you have had so far will get you through any troubles yet to come.

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.

For Epicurus, living prudently, in deep appreciation of modest pleasures, was not just the route to happiness, it was happiness.

Jack Miles's wonderful literary reading of the Hebrew Bible as a biography of God offers the insight that after the Book of Job, God never speaks again. God may seem to silence Job, but Job silences God. It is lovely that Job silencing God is part of the text (though likely an accidental order of the books), because it reflects a real change in the real world after the Book of Job came into it.

Without the outside context of a political war between faith and reason, Epicurus does not fear that any single point he might award to the religious will be used against him. Nor is he eager to have his followers shunning prayer or ritual in order to demonstrate publicly their disbelief. Outside the context of a political war between faith and reason, more nuanced arrangements may be safely undertaken.

Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous—simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is standing still. If they had been aware that the Earth spins, they would have understood that, by and large, we are making our own light show in the night sky. As it was, the precision of the movements of all the stars seemed astonishing. If we knew how we lined up among the planets, their motion would not seem so strange and willful. Also, had the philosophers been able to leave planet Earth for a jaunt in outer space, they could have seen that, at a distance from gravity and atmosphere, moving things tend to keep moving, without any need for an impelling force. From out there, the motion of the planets would seem natural as well.

Here one does not use logic to conquer chaos. Rather, one uses logic because the logic itself is beauty, is truth. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that—he questioned their every faith, their every way of life—so they called it atheism.

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.

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.

Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth.

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 that we are constantly trying to wrangle our needs out of a universe that does not tend in such directions.

Plato’s sense that this was the only religion that would hold up nowadays was thoroughgoing. The only religion that could be really believed by anyone in his time, he said, is based on belief that the stars have intelligence, and that we and they have immortal souls of some sort.18 The more we learn—and mathematics is the queen of the soul’s subjects—the more we will ascend toward self-knowledge and universal truth. This ascension is the drama of Plato’s religion.

Job moans that it is wanton cruelty that suffering people, brutalized or in mourning, should have to relive their horrors in dreams. In fact, why should any of us, in seeking rest, be met with nightmares?