The philosopher Xenophanes questioned the Greek pantheon by noting that Ethiopians drew their gods as long necked and dark skinned while the red haired Thracians described their gods as being red-haired. Xenophanes wondered if horses could draw gods would they be horse gods as well? It’s a fair question as gods tend to fall into Emile Durkheim’s idea of cultural necessity, and it’s one of the various questions undertaken in Jennifer Hecht’s book Doubt: A History.
Doubt compiles a history of religious skepticism throughout the history of world civilization. Not one group is left out as Hecht jumps from the origins of the Jewish culture to Western Greek civilizations to the Eastern Chinese and Indian traditions which predate them both. The book is impressive in both it’s scale and execution but with that comes a sacrifice that the author makes and it leads to other mistakes that take away what is otherwise an excellent book for people interested in the history of religious thought and philosophy in general.
The problem is that the book reads at parts like an encyclopedia, with entries on various people that are often too short in one aspect and too long in others. For instance William of Okham, the formulator of “Okham’s Razor” gets a mention and that’s it. Which is unfortunate because his idea, “that one should not multiply pluralities beyond necessity” or more succinctly put “between two options the simpler explanation is the one that should be adopted,” is so important in not only religious skepticism but also skepticism in general. Yet this gets only a slight mention to which we then move on.
The book does this repeatedly, the more it happens the less invested I am in reading the narrative instead wishing it to just be an encyclopedia or reference book. The French Enlightenment gets a greater deal of attention than I would have liked which comes at the expense of the American Revolutionaries whom founded the novus seclorum. The ideas of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine are mentioned as being important but most of the content in Paine’s Age of Reason is glossed over. The same occurs in the ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Why skip over the contributions of these philosophers where it instead concentrates on the Galilean and Copernican discoveries? At almost 500 pages the book has room for both, and while the Astronomers’ discoveries do prove that scientific inquiry trumped cultural inherited knowledge the writings at the time would better illustrate whether the new science had popular support or not.
Detractors of the book will view it as anti-religious depending on the scale of their respective religious beliefs. I won’t pretend the book is completely unbiased as it deals with religious figures as being regular people. Hecht takes the remarkable stance that Jesus himself was a religious skeptic overthrowing the religious orthodoxy of the Jewish society at the time. An interesting take that I have never considered before. Coming to this book from Hitchens this is a much more toned down writing that is more pro-agnosticism than it is anti-religion.
There are questions of choice as well. Why concentrate on Freud’s ridiculous theory of religion when it is almost completely rejected by everyone?
What is nice is that it tends to go through the “martyrs” of religious skepticism without passing the overly snide judgment that is usually reserved for the “don’t-say-god-bless-you-to-me” crowd. It lists them in every period never failing to accompany the tragedy with the lesson that it would have been better for the powers that be to have just ignored them.
Some might say that the book tends to omit the skepticism that permeated Islam from the between the late medieval period to the modern age. There seems to be almost a millenia that goes by in the book without the word “Islam” or “Muslim” directly referred to, and this becomes the point of the book’s final chapter. That Islam, hasn’t had the skepticism that Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. has thus allowing the fundamentalists to become more and more fundamentalist and dangerous. Ibn Ali-L-Awja was executed in 772 AD for doubting the truth of the Koran and then aside from mentioning the great Aristotelian commentator Averroes, Muslim recedes until the modern age.
If the book has a final message it is that skepticism and questions are healthy and normal for a society’s development. I would say that this applies not only to religious issues but to any issue. The inherited beliefs that any culture bestows upon its younger generations can all become dogmatic orthodoxy whether it has to do with god or not. Suffrage and Abolition are two of the more recent examples. Doubt can’t be a bad thing unless a person is so afraid of the answers that they cannot abide even the questions. Doubt is a very interesting book, and while the writing and editing choices can be odd at times it still makes for an education.
No comments:
Post a Comment