“There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Apart from Holloway, who deals with some of the profound questions of humanity with ease, modesty and sincerity, there are other formidable contributors to the debate such as Karen Armstrong, Prof. Richard Dawkins, Prof. Chris Janaway, Sir Anthony Kenny and Sir Andrew Motion.
It is doubt - not certainty - that has made humanity what it is. In the hands of great poets and writers (e.g. Tennyson, Keats, Dostoyevsky), thinkers (Voltaire, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein) and scientists (Copernicus, Newton, Darwin), doubt is elevated to the summit of human thought. The ‘golden calves ‘of certainty have had paralysing effect not just on religion but also on science with an air of awe-inspiring 'evidence'. Rigid certainty is a hallmark of delusion, a state of mind typical of earlier stages of humanity. It temporarily calms down the anguish of the unknown, but it also closes the door to yet not known and the unknowable. Richard Holloway explains in the Preface: “Trouble only happens when we think words are nets to capture the mystery of the great absence that haunts universe. We hate a vacuum and uncertainty it provokes. We want something solid to hold on to and if it’s not there we’ll manufacture one we fancy and call it truth.”
It is very tempting to rush to judgment about unknowable mysteries; such judgment then turns into certainty, a thought becomes solidified and a holy dogma is born. The riddle of existence no longer excites and no longer unsettles us. The thought has reached a dead end and so have we. Holloway recalls prayers of his youth when he was asking God to give him a sign that he was there. Being alone in the universe was a disturbing thought. Like a traveler in Walter de La Mare’s poem he was knocking on the moonlit door with words: “Is there anybody there?” The traveler got no answer and rode away unsatisfied from the silent house; he had to continue his journey in loneliness, not knowing. We are such travellers.
Doubt has often operated as a way of purifying faith and Richard Holloway stresses that "doubt is coactive with faith - they are two sides of the same coin". Gods seem to have been dying almost as soon as they emerged at the twilight of humanity's consciousness; yet their creation was a pivotal event in recognising the Other (as Feuerbach cogently argued). Perhaps an honest doubt is that indispensable Other of faith? As God remained silent we could only guess his requirements and intentions. We thought that he wanted child sacrifice and that human suffering was punishment for our sins. Holloway puts it poetically: doubt was the cloth we used to wipe out dirt off the window of faith through which we looked at God.” And the thought gradually dawned on man that perhaps there wasn’t anything on the other side of the window pane. The realisation thereof produced a horrendous crisis among the most thoughtful and spiritual people of XIX century and as God died on them they became mourners at his funeral. We meet some of these audacious thinkers in episode 14 ‘God’s Funeral’. In the poem of the same title Thomas Hardy laments the loss of ‘what we had imagined’ whilst Fyodor Dostoyevsky captures the anguish of our existential loneliness in his last and greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov with his plangent cry, ‘God, if you do not exist, everything is permitted’. Friedrich Nietzsche, a son of a Lutheran pastor, once a fervent believer despairs about humanity “straying over an infinite nothing”. The question arises whether we can sustain morality without God. And can we sustain love without God?
Richard Holloway and his collaborators have impressed me greatly not only with their humility towards the mystery of existence but also with their sincere respect towards a reader/listener. They communicate thoughts in a clear yet poetic language, without a shade of patronising or hubris. In their hands, doubt is not only honest, it is also modest and beautiful.
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A download of the BBC Audiobook of Honest Doubt: The History of an Epic Struggle is available here and the transcript is available here.