Why should that be? Well, they were scared, and hurt, and had to confront death. It’s a staple of talk shows that somebody has a near-death experience-survived cancer, whatever-and says that life afterwards has been much more wonderful than life before. You know, when you face that, it can hurt a lot, but it can also allow you to marvel at the wonder of life. And deeply suspecting that it’s a real, final death. You have to find a way to have meaning, and be able to love, and think, and work, and breathe knowing that death comes. When you remove that one answer, you have to find another.
And that religion is itself a beautiful, artistic, long answer to that pain. Hecht: I think the answer is … that life is painful. What is it about doubt that makes it such fertile ground for spiritual discovery-and acts of great art? There is something human about the universe-even if it’s only in our human mind.Ĭonduit: In the story of Job doubt transforms itself into not only belief, but an intense poetry. But it’s also a vision that refuses to say that the world is just dirt and chance. Now, yeah, that’s an atheistic position! And a lot of people have seen it that way. Look at us thinking right now! So the world is all the attributes of God. And if you want to call that thinking, well, then the world is thinking itself! But it’s majestic and it’s glorious and it’s infinitesimal and it’s everywhere-and the world created thinking. But where’s God if the whole world is God? He doesn’t take out some part that’s somehow separate and “thinking the world.” The world is itself. Spinoza says the whole world is God and then proceeds to worship. Some doubters see the very fact of life as what we mean by “spiritual.” So there’s no getting rid of the spiritual. They’re all trying to understand the world. When you look at serious thinkers, that’s just not what’s going on.
That they just hate each other and there’s nothing in common. That they’re people who believe in totally different types of worlds. Jennifer michael hecht: I think what people most responded to in the book was the removal of the sense of constant polemic. She spoke to us from New York City, where she is an assistant professor of history at Nassau Community College.ĭobby gibson: The overlap between doubt and belief was one of your book’s true surprises.
in the history of science from Columbia University. Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of Doubt: A History, and a collection of poems The Next Ancient World, which won the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize.
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