Doubt: A History runs to 494 pages of text, although "lumbers" might be a better term than "runs" for a tome that covers some 2,600 years of what the author calls the history of doubt. She covers doubt in every age since and in Asia as well as Europe and the West. Her catalogue of doubters includes many who might obviously be included but just as many, including Jesus, that one would not normally expect to find in such a history. Hecht generally tells her story clearly and logically, maintaining a clear chronology of doubting. Still, it is a "dense" read made more difficult by the fact that she seldom recalls for the reader the purport of doubters and schools of doubt previously introduced. For those of us who read the book over a period of weeks, this means either a lot of going back to refresh our memories or just skipping over references to the various Greek philosophies and the myriad of figures discussed many pages back.
Doubt: A History is one of those books that you have to want to read, but given that motivation it is well worth the effort. In a sentence, Hecht successfully opens the reader's eyes to the breadth and depth of doubt in its many different forms and, in fact, a great deal more than just doubt itself. If you are interested in doubt, this is a book for you.
That being said, there is one aspect of the book that requires special review and reflection. The author never defines doubt, not in a sharp, crisp, and precise way that would set limits to her investigation of doubt—which is why the book is so long and dense. Hecht throws in whatever might even vaguely have something just possibly to do with doubt, and there are many times when she confuses doubt with other things, which sometimes have little to do with actual doubt. The book thus is not just or even primarily a history of doubt. It is, rather, a history of contrarian thinking, especially thinking that cuts against the grain of religious orthodoxies. Depending on one's point of view, the lack of a clear definition of doubt is either the greatest defect or one of the most important contributions of Doubt: A History, which is a point that I would like to explore further here.
It is a serious weakness of Doubt: A History that it does not describe historically the process of belief turning into doubt then moving on to a new belief. That would be a fascinating story, although it would admittedly be a difficult one to write. It is very difficult to study the mental processes of historical figures because historians are dependent on documents and sources, and usually all that is left historically is the finished product of one's thinking—not the process by which the figure arrives at his or her position. Still, it would have been helpful for Hecht to examine more rigorously the ways in which doubt contributes to unseating orthodoxy.
Instead of focusing on doubt, the author actually writes about a much larger complex of historical phenomena associated with unorthodox thinking. These phenomena include disbelief and unbelief, secularity, naturalism, "evidentiary rationalism," irreverence, heresy, sensuality, "cosmopolitan relativism," unconventional ways of thinking about God e.g. (p. 231), and almost any other thinking that stands over against orthodox religion. At the very end of the book (p. 486-487), she lists "seven key doubting projects," which include (1) science, materialism, and rationalism; (2) nontheistic transcendence programs; (3) cosmopolitan relativism; (4) graceful-philosophies; (5) the moral rejection of injustice; (6) philosophical skepticism; and (7) the doubt of the believer. These seven "projects" provide a rough guide to the contents of the book and of them only the last one clearly is about doubt. One could argue that the scientific method is based on doubt, but I'm not sure that it is correct to do so. The scientific method requires the scientist to suspend judgment until there is sufficient evidence to make a judgment. Maybe that is a form of doubt, but if so it has nothing inherently to do with unorthodox thinking, which is Hecht's focus and, in fact, is entirely orthodox according to the scientific method. That doesn't seem like doubt so much as simply waiting to decide. The problem is that Hecht gives us no guidance on how decide whether the scientific method utilizes doubt or not.
Granting that the author's approach has provided us with a useful description of unorthodox thinking through the centuries, does her failure to define doubt matter? If the reader is interested in the larger complex described in the book, then the answer is, "No." If, on the other hand, one really does want to look at doubt historically, then it does matter. One reason, at least, that it matters is because Hecht tends to conflate doubt with unbelief, and they are very different things. In the Christian tradition, doubt is always an element of faith. The "true believers" are not people of faith. They know. They're sure. They have it in the can or in the bag. They don't live by faith but rather by a set of rigid doctrines, which all too easily become idols of their own cognitive creation. We are, instead, called to faith, which means we don't have all the answers but we trust God. We understand the human limitations of the Bible, but we trust that God is present in it speaking to us. There is an element of uncertainty, a healthy dose of continuing doubt, which we accept with quiet equanimity trusting in the faith we hold. Doubt and unbelief are hugely different things.
Indeed, "unbelief" isn't even a useful category unless a person truly doesn't believe anything—and the rejection of all beliefs is itself a belief leading us back to the basic fact of the human condition: we all believe in something. It's the way we're built. By "unbelievers," what Hecht really means is people who don't believe the things taught by orthodox religions. They are contrarians, as already mentioned above. Sometimes, however, contrarians can be as much "true believers" as orthodox folks can be, just not in orthodoxy. By confusing unbelief with doubt, Hecht implies that doubt falls into the province of contrarian thinking, and even though she does make the point that doubt is related to religious faith the impression left is the opposite. She leaves the impression that doubt leads away from religion when in fact it frequently takes one in the opposite direction, toward faith.
Because Doubt: A History is a tome in search of a unifying theme, in the end it is more of a history of philosophy sprinkled heavily with dashes of the history of theology, which emphasizes discontinuities and departures from the accepted norms of philosophical and theological thinking in each age. It is hardly surprising, then, that Hecht discovers continuities in doubt because they are actually the continuities of philosophical reflection that keep reappearing in each generation. And that is one of the things Hecht contributes to the study of philosophical and theological reflection, the fact that contrarian thinking plays an important role in both types of reflection. Contrarian thinking generates a great deal of creativity, some of which is born out of doubt and some of which is driven by contrarian thinkers being as sure of their views as their opponents are of theirs.
I must confess that I expected a book that told the history of uncertainty rather than one that described the story of conflicting certainties. So, I was disappointed. It's not a bad book. In fact, it's a decent one. It's just not really about what it advertises itself to be about. That's all.
