Doubt, as an intellectual tool, lies at the heart of much positive enquiry and advancement in so many domains of human experience. From doubts about the glib-speaking doorstep salesman whose products most likely will not transform your life, to the physician who knows that illness results from much deeper causes than might appear on the surface, and that he or she needs to probe deeper in making a diagnosis. And doubt runs through the history of philosophy, beginning from masters of argument such as Socrates, who could always (if his disciple Plato is to be believed) detect and pounce on the weaknesses of his opponent’s seemingly flawless case, and turn it upside down – just like a good cross-examining barrister, in fact.
And while sixteenth-century writers such as Michel de Montaigne expressed scepticism about ever knowing the inner truth of things, it was René Descartes who brought philosophical doubt to centre stage in his enduringly influential Discourse on Method (1637). Yet what modern-day sceptics often forget is that what Descartes was trying to do in Discourse was progress beyond doubt, to find certainty. And what the Jesuit-educated, Catholic layman Descartes tells us is that the solution came to him one winter’s day in 1619 when he was cogitating in a stove-heated room while serving with the army. He realized that there was one thing he could not possibly doubt – namely, that he was thinking and doubting. And this led him to formulate one of the most famous maxims in the whole history of philosophy: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” A conclusion, in fact, very similar to that which St Augustine had arrived at 1,200 years before.
From doubt, Descartes had progressed to certainty, and from this firm foundation he went on to build a whole system of logically grounded ideas, such as the ontological argument for the existence of God (a perfect and eternal being like God could not have been made up by an imperfect and fleeting thing like man, so God must exist) and all manner of things in nature. A mathematician at heart, Descartes sought for mathematical and logical certainty that, just like Greek geometry, could not be falsified. A disciple of Copernicus’s sun-centred cosmology, and an admirer of Galileo and of the English physiologist Dr William Harvey (who demonstrated that the heart circulated the blood around the body), Descartes developed a whole philosophy of science based on logic, mechanism, mathematics, and proofs. And Cartesianism still influences major aspects of scientific thinking today.
Yet one should note that Descartes, while a philosophical sceptic, and careful not to be led astray by delusion or false thinking, passionately believed that “truth” really existed, and was accessible to the human mind. In no way was he a relativist or a sceptic in the sense that the word is often used today, to describe someone who seems to believe in nothing. He also had no doubt about the existence of the immaterial human soul, and in what later writers styled “Cartesian dualism” he tried to work out how our souls related to our machinelike bodies. And the problem is still with us, and cannot be explained away by simply asserting that the soul is a mere superstition.
When we use doubt and scepticism as forensic tools to get at the truth, as Descartes and his followers did, we see them at their most noble. But let us never forget that doubt and scepticism are merely tools of enquiry: they are not “truths” in their own right. They are methods to assist us in seeing the greater whole. They are the mental equivalent of hammers, test tubes, and X-ray machines: devices to better equip us for the task in hand; and they should no more be put upon pedestals as ends in themselves than should any other tools.
I would be the first to admit, however, that it is perfectly legitimate to apply sceptical forensic techniques to religious beliefs, no less than to philosophical propositions or theories of matter. Truth will out, and false gods need to be overturned in the same way that the Greeks of 500 BC overturned belief in a flat earth. And let us not forget that perhaps the most famous doubter in history, Doubting Thomas in St John’s Gospel, was naturally sceptical about Jesus’ resurrection until the risen Christ appeared to him and invited him to personally examine his wounds.
Where we must exercise caution in doubting, however, is when we consider the categories of knowledge in which we apply it. Proving or disproving beyond further doubt the actions of bacteria or malignant cells within the human body, for example, is a fundamentally different kind of enterprise from investigating the existence or attributes of a supreme being. One is plainly experimental, and the other is “philosophical” and experiential. One type of doubting will not fit both, and one of the myths perpetrated by atheists is that one size must fit all, and if God cannot be elucidated by science, then God must be removed from the picture.
Indeed, it is when we deal with what might be called “belief” and “personal experience” issues that doubting as an investigative technique hits problems. For as all seriously religious people would – like Descartes – see God as bigger than themselves, and occupying a transcendent dimension alongside which laboratory-style techniques look laughably feeble, we have to rethink the very nature of doubting and what it might hope to achieve. A point that Descartes himself fully understood.
Nowhere do we need to cast a more sceptical eye on the very business of doubting than when materialist thinkers make “blind faith” leaps into scientific darkness. And one of the best examples of this at the present time is when ideological materialists posit physical brain-centred models of mind and consciousness, such as finding “God spot” structures in the brain that seem to be related to religious experience. But more of this in the next chapter.
In the context of the present discussion, we must always be on our guard not to let dogmatic doubting run away with itself any more than any other private fantasy or delusion should be allowed to rampage unchecked. If we are going to be true and honest sceptics, we must put doubt and scepticism themselves under the microscope of impartial forensic investigation. For if, indeed, we allow scepticism and doubt to have a free rein to do whatsoever their possessors desire, then we are generating what the great philosopher of science, Sir Francis Bacon, styled “Idols of the Mind”, or false and foolish intellectual superstitions – idols set up on pedestals and worshipped in blind faith by their creators. And such an act of blind superstition cannot generate good philosophy, theology, or science.
So to avoid secularist myth-making, be sceptical before you doubt everything!