The age of doubt : tracing the roots of our religious uncertainty

216 Pages·2011·2.42 MB·English

by  Lane

The Age of Doubt
The Age of Doubt
Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty
CHRISTOPHER LANE
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin
Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College.
Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Lane. All rights reserved. This book may not
be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
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Designed by Mary Valencia.
Set in Minion type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lane, Christopher, 1966–
The age of doubt : tracing the roots of our religious uncertainty / Christopher
Lane.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-30014192-4 (clothbound : alk. paper) 1. Faith. 2. Theology,
Doctrinal—England—History—19th century. 3. Faith—History of
doctrines—19th century. 4. Belief and doubt. I. Title.
BT771.3.L36 2011
234’.23094209034—dc22
2010037921
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Doubt is uncertain belief.
—JAMES H. SNOWDEN, “The Place of Doubt in Religious Belief” (1916)
How much faith is involved in the workings of reason and how much reason lies
in the assertions of faith?
—EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, “Reason and Faith, Eternally Bound” (2003)
CONTENTS
Introduction: Putting Faith in Doubt
CHAPTER 1 Miracles and Skeptics
CHAPTER 2 Stunned Victorians Look Backward and Inward
CHAPTER 3 Feeling Doubt, Then Drinking It
CHAPTER 4 Natural History Sparks Honest Doubt
CHAPTER 5 Uncertainty Becomes a Way of Life
CHAPTER 6 Faith-Based Certainty Meets the Gospel of Doubt
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
The Age of Doubt
INTRODUCTION
Putting Faith in Doubt
“Why is it thought so very wicked to be an unbeliever?”1 In Britain today, a
question like this would probably generate surprise, even some confusion. With
religious leaders debating whether Anglicanism should remain the country’s
state religion and church attendance falling to record lows (at 15 percent), doubt
and unbelief are no longer exceptional qualities in the country. They have
become national hallmarks. Far from conveying wickedness or sin, they suggest
that one is open to debate, leery of dogma, and focused on change.
It wasn’t always so. The novel containing the above question, The Nemesis of
Faith, was burned as heretical at Oxford University in 1849. It sparked a furious
row over whether the work was fiction or thinly veiled autobiography. Lawyers
wrote lengthy briefs on whether its author, James Anthony Froude, had perjured
himself by denouncing the Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles, so breaking a contract
both religious and legal. Forced to resign his fellowship at Oxford, Froude—who
would go on to become one of the nation’s best-known historians—found
himself disinherited by his father. Friends also disowned him, either appalled by
his stated doubts or wary of associating with an “infidel,” a word still used at the
time in the country’s newspapers.
In nineteenth-century Britain, religious doubt became a serious, widespread
concern. It also galvanized cultural debate and scientific inquiry. And it did so,
significantly, just as the nation’s empire was reaching political and
administrative control of almost one quarter of the world. While Cecil Rhodes
wrote in his “Confession of Faith” that he “would annex the planets if [he]
could,” Britain’s leading intellectuals, battling the Church, struggled to absorb
radical scientific discoveries in botany, biology, and geology.2 Those upended
almost everything the Bible had taught them about the world. Each discovery,
more terrifying than the last, threw into crisis a book that for centuries had
anchored their values and meaning. “It was the epoch of belief,” Charles
Dickens famously declared in A Tale of Two Cities, “it was the epoch of
incredulity, … we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”3
Reeling in shock and often horrified by what they unearthed, many well-
known intellectuals suffered a profound crisis over what they did and did not
believe. John Henry Newman explained in his Parochial and Plain Sermons,
“We are in a world of mystery, with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our
proceeding forward through all difficulties. Take away this Light, and we are
utterly wretched—we know not where we are, how we are sustained, what will
become of us, and of all that is dear to us, what we are to believe, and why we
are in being.”4
While Newman himself recognized and briefly experienced “a perilous
substratum of doubt,” his beliefs endured, leading to his conversion to Roman
Catholicism. For many others harboring similar doubts, however, the movement
went in the other direction, away from Christianity, often due to nagging
questions that, Newman explained, “rob … Certitude of its normal
peacefulness.”5 Dejection was widespread. Some Victorians wrote books that
asked frankly, Is Life Worth Living? Their despair grew so intense that it helped
to define the era.6
That perspective has become something of a truism about nineteenth century
Britain. Yet not all Victorians thought that religious doubt was inherently sinful
or tragic. In insisting that God was unknowable and unprovable, large numbers
of others found a release from faith and dogma. They came to welcome the
change, seeing doubt as less a matter to fear than a condition to prize. The
results, not just their volume, are impressive. As one scholar notes, “Never has
an age in history produced such a detailed literature of lost faith, or so many
great men and women of religious temperament standing outside organized
religion.”7
One may not think that the Victorians have much to teach us about religious
doubt and uncertainty. But they lived through tumultuous times, when their deity
seemed to abandon them, traditions appeared to be losing their grip, and
fundamental questions loomed about the well-being of the country and the future
of the world. The stakes were high. Religious doubt ultimately involved
questioning the fabric of British social and cultural life. As the country struggled
to establish exactly what it believed and why, the very doctrines and beliefs that
it had used to define itself imploded, under immense duress and opposition,
leaving something approaching the secular culture we inhabit today.
It was, in hindsight, an extraordinary time when the nation came as close as it
ever would to publicly debating its religious beliefs. Extraordinary, too, because
the conversation eventually included whether belief in God was necessary, even
possible, after scientists, philosophers, and a host of writers had argued
otherwise. In short, though the Victorians are often perceived today as self-