Where Did All the Skeptics Go?

In an age defined by skepticism this may appear to be an odd question. It seems to me that what is commonly called ‘skepticism’ today is really nothing of the sort. A true skeptic is suspicious; suspicious of all claims to truth, not just the overtly religious. A skeptic is one who instinctively or habitually doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions. Under this definition I wonder if any ‘real’ skeptics still exist. To doubt Christianity is easy, in fact, required before one can properly dismiss the faith or even come into the faith. Doubting the claims of Christ prior to conversion makes for the most potent and steadfast Christians I have ever met; and actually, I am skeptical of any so-called Christian who has never doubted his or her faith.

Leaving Christianity aside for a moment, where are those who have truly carried the skeptic’s suspicion from its conception to its end? It seems that most so-called skeptics abort their suspicions before suspicion’s ‘end-game’ can be realized. Novice skeptics tend to start down the skeptic trail and then, curiously, stop somewhere midway and build a sort of halfway house of thought where their ideas can relax without being subjected to the kind of rigorous doubt that they employ against the religious.

Soren Kierkegaard (19th century Christian philosopher) claimed that to be a true skeptic one must first learn to doubt his doubt. What did he mean by this? At first glance he appears to have posited a paradox: one must first doubt doubt, prior to doubting. If one must first doubt doubt, how could he/she ever get along with the deal of doubting anything (including doubt itself)? But Kierkegaard was only repeating a very ancient adage which says that nothing should be more susceptible to criticism, nothing more in doubt, than man’s ability to give thorough commentary on matters of ultimate seriousness. This is not a haphazard conclusion. It is a connective theme found in most of the respected philosophers from ancient times to the present, and, incidentally, is also a basic starting point in orthodox Christian theology.

One’s doubt must first of all take the stand and give testimony as to why it is a reliable witness in matters of true and false, particularly when dealing with existential questions of meaning, life after death, God, the soul, good and evil, etc. When most would consider doubt to be the only true and supreme judge in the court of human reasoning, they predictably balk at the idea of this ‘judge’ being asked to become, instead, a defendant in his own court. But he must become this; he must become a defendant first if we are to ever trust him as a judge in matters so important.
But you may still be asking: “why is this important, can’t we just subject abstract notions of God and immortality, and such, to the same sort of doubt that we employ against Tooth Fairies and Unicorns? After all, everything beyond empirical observation is rightly doubted, whether or not we have a solid ground for our faculty of doubt, for the simple reason that they cannot be scientifically verified.”

This sort of reasoning does indeed seem reasonable on the surface but fails at a very fundamental level – the human level.

For humans, or as Kierkegaard would phrase it – for existing individuals – such dismissals are wholly insufficient. The issues that vex us most as living beings are precisely those of an existential nature: how are we to live, what is justice, what is good, do I have a purpose or am I a blip on evolution’s radar, does life have ultimate meaning, if so what is it? In essence, the questions that we simply cannot ignore, those that are most pressing, are the very questions that have nothing at all to do with empirical observation; they are religious questions through and through. It is here that our ability to rightly doubt comes into sharp focus, for if our ‘doubter’ is broken all is lost.

What I am suggesting is this: that in these matters all of us are subject to the same conditions. We simply cannot know by way of our reason whether or not our chosen life philosophy or creed is true or false. Scientific study cannot help, religious texts cannot bail us out, and deep meditations under a waterfall cannot ease the difficulty. It is here that faith is a requirement of all people who would venture to tackle life’s most important questions. The atheist, the Buddhist, the agnostic, and the Christian alike must relent to a leap into the unknown, ‘if’ one is to follow skepticism to the very end and not settle for thought’s little halfway houses.

Let me end with one note of clarification dealing with Christian faith. In this discussion the issue of doubt and faith should be kept in their proper context – that of mental functions. When the discussion turns to Christian faith, the context is completely altered. For the Christian, faith, salvation-type-faith (if you will), is not understood as the end product of mental deliberation. Faith that relates to salvation is a gift from God. It cannot be attained in a library or in a blog forum. It is as Christ said: “No man can come to the Father unless the Father draws him” (Jn 6:44), and a like passage where Jesus tells Peter that the revelation given to him, that Jesus is “the Son of the Living God,” was not revealed to him by man, but by the Father (Matt 16:17). Christians are not compelled to worship Christ due to empirical proof of his deity, but precisely because such “proof” is evasive. If our God was merely a creature of nature he would not be God.