On May 3, 2007, Krista Tippett had doubt expert Jennifer Michael Hecht on her NPR radio program Speaking of Faith to discuss the benefits of doubt. Hecht begins the discussion by stating that "most of us overlook doubt's benefits" and gos on to say that doubt is actually "nourishing."
Hecht begins her history of doubt by noting the four schools of philosophy in ancient Greece: cynicism, skepticism, epicureanism, and stoicism. Hecht analyzes all of these schools except for stoicism in her discussion.
Cynicism is actually means "dog"; its core teaching is to live the same way that a dog lives, i.e. going with the flow and not caring about dignity. Cynicism was created by Diogenes. In a conversation with Alexander the Great, Diogenes asked what the Macedonian king wanted to accomplish in his life. Alexander responded by saying that he hopes to conquer the world. Diogenes then asked what he would after that, and Alexander said that after he had conquered the world he would lay back and relax. In his response to this, Diodenes summed up cynic ideology: why not save yourself a lot of time and effort and just relax now?
The illustrious Greek philosopher Socrates founded the school of skepticism. The idea of skepticism is that human beings cannot know everything and the human mind is not designed to know everything.
Epicurus founded epicureanism, which states that we should learn to love what we have. Epicurus said that fear is the main worry in our lives and that if we could just get over our fears then we will have happiness. According to epicurean phliosophy, the only fears that we have are the fear of pain, the gods, and death. We can overcome fear of pain by realizing that the fear of pain is worse than acual pain. We can overcome fear of the gods by realizing that there are not any gods. And, finally, we have to learn to accept our fear of death, after all, we will not even be present at our death to mourn.
Hecht goes on to describe the doubt present in the story of Job. In the story, God afflicts the virtuous Job with a plethora of horrible hardships. Eventually, Job's friends tell him that since God is fair and just Job must have deserved his terrible punishment. It was at this point when Job began to doubt God's all-fairness, knowing that he has always been a virtuous and faithful man.
Even Jesus Christ Himself showed signs of doubt. In most of His teachings and actions Jesus has been certain in his Faith, but the one blaring out-of-character statement Jesus made was when he cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This singular statement adds a tinge of doubt to the entire Christian Faith, which is actually a positive thing because it makes the religion unproveable. This unproveability is what is so wonderful about faith and belief.
By looking at history, it is easy to see that periods of doubt are also the periods of the greatest philosophical and intellectual activity. After the Christians of the Byzantine Empire kicked out the doubters, they all fled to Islamic areas.A short while after the arrival of these doubters, the Islamic Golden Age began. Soon, however, Islam shut down the study of all philosophy because it was judged as being too dangerous. Immediately after this, the Golden Age was over and the Islamic nation went back to intellectual stagnation.
In the 17th century Rene Descartes attempted to discard any truth in his life that could at all be doubted. However, after this, Descartes only knew one thing as a truth: that he existed, everything else could be doubted.
Zen Buddhism is as firmly based on doubt as any religion can be. It's doctrine's actual state that doubt is the endpoint that all human's strive for.
So it is pretty obvious that doubt is not a challenge to Faith. In fact, it is the opposite. Through doubt we become better thinkers and philosophers and can actually learn more about our Faith and make it a much more personal thing. Epicurus, who denied the existence of any god, stated, "If it feels good to pray, then pray." Faith and doubt are not in a war.