A Proud Tradition of Doubting

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

2/15/04

Whether you are a nonbelieiver, or you belong to a religion without God, or you are a believer troubled by dark nights of the soul, we are all part of the same discussion. This is because, whatever our position may be, we all have the same contradictory information to work with. Sometimes it feels like there is a God or ultimate certainty, and it would be a great comfort if such a thing existed and we knew the answers to life’s ultimate mysteries: who or what created the universe and why; what is human life for; what happens when I die? But there is no universally compelling, empirical, or philosophical evidence for the existence of God, a purposeful universe, or life after death.

Some people may be tone-deaf to the idea of evidence, some may be tone-deaf to the feeling that there is a higher power – we must forgive them each their failing. But there is also a tradition by which both sides refuse to engage the interesting questions: believers refuse to consider the reasonableness of doubt, and nonbelievers refuse to consider the feeling of faith. Believers value the sense of mystery human beings can feel when they look inward or beyond; nonbelievers value the ability to map out the world by rational proofs. Yet there is a kind of mutual blindness, as if personal affiliation with one camp or another means more than does interest in the truth. . . .

Great believers and great doubters seem like opposites, but they are more similar to each other than to the mass of relatively disinterested or acquiescent men and women. This is because they are both awake to the fact that we live between two divergent realities: On one side, there is a world in our heads – and in our lives, so long as we are not contradicted by death and disaster – and that is a world of reason and plans, love and purpose. On the other side, there is the world beyond our human life – an equally real world in which there is no sign of caring or value, planning or judgement, love or joy. We live in a meaning-rupture because we are human and the universe is not.

Great doubters, like great believers, have been people occupied with this problem, trying to figure out whether the universe actually has a hidden version of humanness, or whether humanness is the error, and people would be better off weaning themselves from their sense of narrative, justice, and love, thereby solving the schism by becoming more like the universe in which they are stuck.

“Eureka!” Archimedes is reported to have exclaimed when he discovered while bathing the means of measuring the mass of an irregular object by the displacement of water.

“Eureka!” I exclaimed when I discovered the answer to a question asked me over the decades by people who had just discovered Unitarian Universalism. Just last week, in our Fireside session, one of the inquirers asked me what books I would suggest as a way of better understanding Unitarian Universalism. I have never had what I considered a fully satisfactory answer to that question – until now.

In November, at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, I discovered and purchased Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book, Doubt: a history. At Christmas, my daughter Lisa gave me a gift of what she thought was the perfect book for me, Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: a history.

While she mentions Unitarianism 7 times, there is no evidence that Hecht really understands that she has provided us with the quintessential introduction to what our religious movement is about. Hers is not an institutional history. It is a book about the history of ideas – dissenting ideas. Howard Zinn, the radical historian, in a squib on the book refers to Hecht’s 500 page tome as a “romp – light-hearted but serious – [that] brings to life an awesome array of figures in philosophy, science, and literature, in a way that is wonderfully engaging.” A “romp” is probably the last term I would use, and it is interesting that Zinn neglects to mention the word “religion” [“philosophy, science and literature.”] Garrison Keillor is quoted as judging it “A bold and brilliant work and (lucky us) highly readable, thanks to the elegant and witty author . . . Jennifer Michael Hecht is a strong swimmer in deep water against treacherous currents.” One more: Leigh Schmidt, a professor of religion at Princeton is quoted as saying that “Hecht combines sweeping vision with sparkling prose to produce a work as thoughtful as it is engaging.”

The theme of Hecht’s book is that we who are doubters have a long, substantial, and rich tradition of which we are a part, and of which we are too often ignorant. We tend to shy away from claiming our legitimacy – we frequently seem apologetic about our doubts, like it’s somehow our inadequacy that separates us from the believers. She, on the other hand, goes right to the root of the issue with her suggestion that there is an obvious gap between the world as we perceive it in our heads, and the world that we experience “out there.” It is her contention that both great believers and great doubters are engaged in reconciling that conflict, sharing more with each other than with “the mass of relatively disinterested or acquiescent men and women.” The “acquiescent” can include both believers and doubters who shut themselves off from the great questions and are satisfied with what they know. The great believers and doubters are those who remain open to the conflict.

Hecht begins by posing 13 questions which she labels “The Scale of Doubt Quiz.” Count your yeses:

1. Do you believe that a particular religious tradition holds accurate knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality and the purpose of human life?

3. Is there an identifiable force coursing through the universe holding it together, or uniting all life-forms?

4. Could prayer be in any way effective, that is, do you believe that such a being or force (as posited above) could ever be responsive to your thoughts or words?

8. Do you believe that the thinking part or animating force of a human being continues to exist after the body has died?

9. Do you believe that any part of a human being survives death elsewhere or here on earth?

10. Do you believe that feelings about things should be admitted as evidence in establishing reality?

11. Do you believe that love and inner feelings of morality suggest that there is a world beyond that of biology, social patterns, and accident – i.e., a realm of higher meaning?

13. If someone were to say, “The universe is nothing but an accidental pile of stuff, jostling around with no rhyme nor reason, and all life on earth is but a tiny, utterly inconsequential speck of nothing, n a corner of space, existing in the blink of an eye never to be judged, noticed, or remembered,” would you say, “Now that’s going a bit far, that’s a bit wrongheaded?”

If you answered NO to all these questions, you’re a hard-core atheist and of a certain variety: a rationalist materialist. If you said No to the first seven but then had a few Yes answers, you’re still an atheist, but you may have what I will call a pious relationship to the universe. If your answers to the first seven questions contained at least two Not Sure answers, you’re an agnostic. If you answered Yes to some of the questions, you still might be an atheist or an agnostic, though not of the materialist variety. If you answered Yes to nine or more, you are a believer.

When one considers the history of human thought, there is a kind of alternation between belief and doubt. History, as it is usually recounted, centers on the eras of certainty and kind of skips over the doubts. Hecht maintains that we need to look more carefully at the eras of doubt that make some believers uncomfortable.

The Prairie Group of UU ministers, the study group in which I participate each Fall, ends each year’s meeting by brainstorming topics for the following year. We have a tradition of including the “pre-Socratic philosophers” on our list, in honor to the memory of one of our members who always tried to get us to take them on as a subject.

Hecht’s first chapter, “Whatever Happened to Zeus and Hera?” has convinced me that I need to do some more study of that group. We know about the Pantheon of Greek Gods recounted by Homer and Hesiod. We, of course, consider them mythological, but that is from our perspective, not the perspective of the early Greeks. They were worshiped and adored, and very much believed in.

The pre-Socratic philosophers, like Thales and his Anaximandros, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Protagoras, Xenophanes, Prodicus, Democritus, Diagoras, and Anaxagoras all sought to understand the world empirically, and that to them precluded belief in the ancient pantheon.

All we have of Protagoras’ Concerning the Gods, is the first sentence, “Concerning the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is much which prevents knowledge, the unclarity of the subject and the shortness of life.” Anaxagoras became the stimulus of the first law against atheism when, in response to the falling of a meteorite in 467 BCE, he suggested that all the heavenly bodies were just glowing lumps of metal. That was heresy and was so defined by law in 438.

Socrates, of course, was indicted and executed for atheism. It is dubious whether he really was an atheist, but he was a committed doubter, an eternal questioner, and that made people uneasy.

Some have seen Socrates student Plato as a believer in God because of his focus on “the Good.” The historian Etienne Gilson insisted, “It should be permitted, however, to suggest that if Plato has never said that the Idea of Good is a god, the reason for it might be that he never thought of it as a god.”

Hecht continues to trace the Greek doubters through Aristotle and into the Hellenistic period which included the Cynics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. She says:

Doubt in the ancient Greek world is rationalism, naturalism, and secularism applied to the Olympic pantheon. The result of that was a world suffused by doubt, within which there were pockets of belief and pockets of real disbelief.

As the philosophers put the gods or God into doubt . . they sought a philosophical replacement. They were not fighting against the religious impulse; they just reconciled the sacred so that it seemed true.

She spends some time in a consideration of the meaning of the Hanukkah story. As I suggested back in December, it is the story of a fundamentalist reaction against doubters. There were Jews who were taken with Hellenistic ideas and were rebelling against strict Judaism. The Maccabean revolt was a successful attempt to turn the clock back and get rid of the doubters, for a time.

Hecht points also to the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes as evidence within scripture of those who raised questions about conventional belief. Job was an attempt to reconcile that gap we referred to earlier between the world as we would like it to be and the world as it is – the belief in justice when we know full well that the evil do sometimes prosper and the good sometimes suffer.

The author of the Book of Ecclesiastes asserts also “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.” The author insists that there is no point in expecting to be remembered or rewarded, but that you should do what you do for the sake of doing it.

Hecht proclaims Job and Ecclesiastes “canonical texts in the history of doubt.”

Her encyclopedic survey moved into Eastern philosophy and the doubters in Hinduism like the Carvaca (of whom I have never heard before), Mahavira (The founder of Jainism), and of course Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, none of whom were believers in a god. And then there were the Confucianists and Taoists, who also rejected beliefs in deities.

On she goes through the centuries, addressing the doubters in Rome, and Jesus as a doubter within Judaism, and the doubters among his followers like Augustine, and then the Muslim and Jewish skeptics in the Middle Ages. And there were the Renaissance and the Reformation with all the doubt they represented.

I jump way ahead to the founders of this nation and the doubt that was manifested in the thought of Franklin, Paine, Jefferson and John Adams – all of whom are included in the Unitarian Universalist pantheon, although only the last two claimed the Unitarian label. She traces doubt through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, often centering on a number of feminist doubters of whom I’ve never heard before, like Anna Newport Royall, who wrote in her Black Book in 1828 about the missionaries swarming “like locusts” across America and the threat of the adoption of a national religion. And Harriet Taylor, whom I now know was the coauthor of many of the works we attribute to John Stuart Mill. There was Harriet Martineau, of whom I did know, who was a Unitarian who wrote in 1846, “There is no theory of a God, of an author of nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties; which is not (to my feelings) so irrelevant as to make me blush. “

And there was Fanny Wright, whose writings reportedly filled seven pages of Jefferson’s journal. She wrote:

To fear a being on account of his power is degrading; to fear him if he is good, ridiculous . . . I see no sufficient evidence of his existence; and to reason of its possibility I hold to be an idle speculation.

According to Hecht, Wright [like Jefferson] saw Unitarianism as “so rapidly taking over that it could outstrip Calvinism.” And there is just no time to go into Hecht’s account of 20^th century doubting.

The history of doubt exists, has galloped across some twenty-six centuries, and has been very conscious of itself for much of that time. From Cicero to Schopenhauer, from Fanny Wright to Hubert Harrison, from Socrates to Wittgenstein, the long strange story of the history of doubt has loved its heroes. It seems crucial that this history be known, if only so that its theorists, poets, comedians, and martyrs may be understood in their proper context. People should be able to speak to each other about doubt without having to establish all the old arguments every time the conversation begins again.

Theistic religions all have in them an amazing human ability: belief. Belief is one of the best human muscles. It can be very good. The religions are all beautiful and horrible, filled with feasts, sacrifices, miracles, wars, songs, lamentations, stained glass, onion matzos, and intense communal joy: everyone kneeling, everyone rocking, everyone silent, everyone nose to the floor. The religions have also been the energy behind much generosity, compassion and bravery. The story of doubt, however, has all this too. It also has a relationship to the truth that is rigorous, sober, and, when necessary, resigned – and it prizes this approach to truth above the delights of belief. Doubt has its own version of comforts and challenges. From doubt’s beginnings, it has advised that if you create your own desires and model them after what you actually experience, you can be happy. Accept that we are animals, but ones with special problems, and that the world is natural, but that natural is just an idea that we animals have in our heads. Devote yourself to wisdom, self-knowledge, friends, family, and give some attention to community, money, politics, and pleasure. Know that none of it brings happiness all that consistently. It’s best to stay agile, to keep an open mind. Anyway, if you live long enough, you will likely find yourself believing something that you’d never believe today. Or disbelieving. In a funny way, the one thing you can really count on is doubt. 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.

I said earlier, I would never tell you that Hecht’s book is anything like a romp, but it is fascinating. It is, indeed, an orientation to the kind of thinking that resulted in the creation of Unitarian Universalist churches, of which it used to be said that the question mark replaced the cross.

As many of you know, I am troubled by what I see as the trend in Unitarian Universalist churches today to look for reassurance more than challenge, to back away from doubt in search of security. While Hecht mentions it, I believe she does not stress adequately the reality of the tension between doubt and belief. While the Buddha was not theistic and explicitly instructed his followers not to make a deity of him, many did. While the early Unitarians in this country stood bravely against the Calvinists who insisted in reliance on the creeds, they too became threatened when Emerson challenged belief in the miracles and in the divinity of Jesus. And today, the Unitarian Universalist Association has as its President, a leader who believes that we would be better off if we had at hand words of assurance that could guarantee safety in times of personal turmoil. Many of our ministers in the new generation express distress over the presence of so many doubters in their congregations. The pendulum seems to have swung once again in the direction of security and certainty.

But, you see, we can never be sure where we are going. There is always a desire to make the doubt of one generation into a certainty - to cast an attitude in stone and to say, “We should go no farther.” Doubt has no final destination: it requires a commitment to a truth that is ever unfolding, always open to challenge. We cannot rest on our laurels.

Let no one fear for the truth, that doubt may consume it; for doubt is a testing of belief. The truth stands boldly and unafraid; it is not shaken by the testing. For truth, if it be truth, arises from each testing stronger, more secure. Those that would silence doubt are filled with fear; their houses are built on shifting sands. But those who fear not doubt, and know its use, are founded on rock. They shall walk in the light of growing knowledge; the work of their hands shall endure. Therefore let us not fear doubt, but let us rejoice in its help: it is to the wise as a staff to the blind; doubt is the attendant of truth.