This is not really a review of the original book; rather, it is a review of a Blinkist summary of the book...and therefore, maybe a little unfair to the author. For example, I note that the cover note on the book mentions that it deals with Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickenson but the Blinkist summary makes no mentions of these individuals. It purports to demonstrate how doubt is an unknown, potent force in history and throughout history, doubt and doubters have played a crucial role in the development of what we now know as the modern world. This doubt has been the spark for scientific innovation, a challenge to entrenched authorities, and the foundation for new religions. It’s been the source of despair and reassuring thought alike.. [I have no issues with these sentiments].
Doubt, an influential force throughout time: often been omitted from history books....The arguments and even the existence of doubters have often been wiped from the slates of history by states and religions, probably because doubters have tended to be fringe critics of just those institutions. Naturally, a state or religion wouldn’t want to give much credence to these naysayers and would avoid acknowledging them whenever possible.
Take Judaism. In 200 BCE many Jewish communities replaced their traditions with customs from Greek culture, including its language, communal exercise, and even aspects of Greek religion. The result? Some Jewish authorities viewed these communities as a threat and destroyed them. Now they’re barely referred to in Judaism’s official religious texts.
Doubt is an ancient and universal practice.
Since the dawn of time there have been doubters. In fact, the history of doubt can be traced from Ancient Greece through the Roman empire to the Middle Ages, the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and right up to our own modern era.
Such brilliant minds as the Greek philosophers Socrates and Aristotle, Cicero and Emperor Marcus Aurelius of Rome, the French philosopher Descartes, the Jewish Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn and scientists like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
You can find them all over the world.
Take Confucius, who lived in China around 500 BCE. He doubted a variety of things, among them the custom of making sacrifices to dead ancestors.
For a long time female doubters had a much rougher time than their male counterparts. Luckily for them, and us, many of them prevailed to be known today.
Marie Curie, a famous scientist and doubter, studied atoms, a concept first introduced by Greek philosophers.....The research she conducted was instrumental to science’s current understanding of atomic theory and won her a Nobel Prize in 1903.
Doubters have often been persecuted and oppressed. [I'm not so sure that Marie Curie was really a great doubter ......yes she isolated radium as an element by din't of painstaking and hard work but in this she was merely reflecting the knowledge of Chemistry of the time. I get the impression that because Marie curie is a famous woman scientist she has just been recruited by the author to support his cause. Maybe the full book has more supporting evidence for her doubts...though I doubt it].
Their different perspectives often caused trouble......Throughout history there are examples of these groups responding with violence and oppression to doubters who threatened their hold on power......The Inquisition is a particularly upsetting example. The Inquisition were the ideological police of the Catholic Church The victims of the Inquisition included astronomers who doubted that the Earth was at the center of the solar system. One Italian priest and astronomer named Giordano Bruno was found guilty of atheism for just this reason in 1600, and burned alive........it was commonplace for political and religious leaders to ban and even destroy texts written by doubters.......In seventh century BCE India, the Carvaka philosophical movement threw official doctrines, including belief in the afterlife, into doubt. Their only surviving texts exist as citations in official responses or disapprovals by their enemies. All the rest has been destroyed. [I must say, that I found this snippet fascinating....I've never heard of this sect and must try and find out a bit more about it....Wikipedia says that "Charvaka holds direct perception, empiricism, and conditional inference as proper sources of knowledge, Embraces philosophical skepticism and rejects ritualism. It was a well attested belief system in ancient India. Well this sounds pretty much like the scientific approach widely accepted today....and contrary to what the author says, it appears that a Charvaka text by Ajita Kesakabali has survived.]
Many of the attacks on religion came from great doubters.
All religions believe in something, whether it’s the existence of a higher power or an afterlife, verifiable or not. For this reason, religions make a natural _target for doubters......But just like doubt, belief is an age-old concept........there are plenty of accounts of doubters standing up to the authority of religion and the church. [This seems to be a slightly strange assertion that "like doubt, belief is an age-old concept" Well yes, that's the way our mind works. We see a river and believe that it will be wet: we see the sun and believe that it will be warm etc.]
How did doubters stand up to the religious authorities? Usually by uncovering logical fallacies in the arguments of priests or proposing alternative explanations for the occurrence of natural phenomena like thunder.
Some religious doubters only resisted because of their deep involvement in religion.....Martin Luther threw into question the teachings of the Catholic Church–most famously in 1517 when he nailed a list of his 95 theses to the door of a church. However, Luther’s criticism was not an attempt to bring down the church but rather to help it overcome what he saw as its flaws. As a result, many of his intentions came to fruition with the founding of protestantism.
Religions have sometimes incorporated doubt in order to address it.
So religions and doubters have often been at odds with each other. But how did religious institutions handle this fierce opposition?.....Religions accomplished this by incorporating doubt, a universally held emotion, into their teachings......Thomas questioned whether or not Jesus had truly risen. He said he would only believe it when he could stand before Jesus and feel his wounds........It’s not until Job loses his family and everything he owns that he stands up to God and asks whether he is truly just and merciful. So God appears and answers Job’s doubtful question. {These examples seem slightly dodgy to me ....that religions accepted doubt by giving "Doubting Thomas and Job as examples". In fact Jesus is quoted as saying that "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed....in other words..."we don't need doubters, thanks. And Job is really held up as a case study of those who put up with a terrible life because "God works in mysterious ways"...not because he eventually questioned his treatment.
In rare cases, doubt has even been the basis of entirely new religions....... Some doubters have pointed out the flaws of a religion and used it as a springboard to form a new one they preferred. Take Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, who challenged Hinduism and in the process formed a completely new faith......Doubt can actually serve as a foundation for religious belief. That’s because doubt and religion are not entirely at odds, and some doubters can examine religions with a critical eye while still maintaining their faith.
Many Greek philosophical texts, like those of the doubter Aristotle, [Was Aristotle a doubter? or just an investigator?....I guess he did doubt the teachings of Plato and the accepted common lore about the gods ...or some of it]....only survived because of Muslim thinkers like Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, who used them in religious arguments in 800 AD. A fact that required him to have them translated and copied.
Doubt and science have always gone hand in hand........Doubt is, in some respects, the origin of science.....For instance, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales, known as the first Western philosopher, began by doubting traditional explanations and went on to develop his own scientific methods. As a result, he successfully predicted a solar eclipse as early as 585 BCE.
Darwin was extremely doubtful and readily discarded any theory he failed to find convincing.{OK though I find Darwin a bit more like Aristotle...as a scientist/investigator who looked for empirical evidence for phenomena]. He began to see that the observations he recorded during his travels contradicted traditional theories of inheritance. From there he used precise scientific observation to develop his theory of evolution. {I understand it was some third party who actually pointed out to Darwin the fact that the finches on the Galapagos Islands had beaks adapted fr different seeds ...which was important inn developing his evolutionary theory].
Doubt can make people desperate.....by leaving a doubter unsure and depressed......Doubters challenged early explanations for natural phenomena, like debunking the idea that thunder and lightning are caused by angry gods. While this strategy is effective at producing more accurate knowledge in the long term, its short-term effect is to throw everything into question, meaning people don’t know what to believe or how to make sense of things. This is why many Greek philosophers supported religious rituals and feasts while doubting the existence and nature of the gods. These rituals served the essential function of comforting people and giving them a common identity.
René Descartes in his Meditation on First Philosophy begins by doubting everything from the reality of physical objects, to the reliability of his own sense perception, to the existence of God. He concludes that everything he thought he knew could just as easily be a trick concocted by an evil spirit who constantly deceives him. Descartes himself confessed that it was impossible for him to let go of his doubts, leaving him feeling like he was lost in deep water...... Descartes realized that his doubt at least confirmed one thing: he existed. Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to doubt all the things he did.
Doubt has plenty of potential to positively influence your life.
Doubters have a positive influence on each other. Many of them have claimed that the teachings of other like-minded individuals helped them lead happy, productive lives. Take the work of Greek philosophers like Socrates, which profoundly influenced the thinking of Descartes.
Sometimes we can just accept the fact that there’s nothing we can do about certain things. For example, there have been many doubters who thought about the implications and importance of death. Many decided that death was not something to worry about because it’s impossible to know what comes after it. By accepting uncertainty in this way, Socrates met his own death calmly.
Final summary
The ancient and universal emotion of doubt has been by and large cut from history’s pages. But this hidden history, formed by chains of doubters throughout time, has many positive effects for humanity.
Actionable advice: Don’t take every fact at face value–instead maintain an impulse for doubt.
The book is ok but not great. I don't think I learned much that was new (except about the Carvaka religion in India). And some of it I found slightly dodgy inn claiming people were doubters rather than maybe astute observers. But three stars from me. ( )

Hecht's examination of how doubt has always lived alongside faith since the earliest times is a fascinating work of scholarship. She takes us from the beginnings of philosophy which grew alongside the earliest recorded organised religions, where the act of questioning and doubting was fundamental to the process of philosophy. This unfaith runs like a bright silver thread through history, although many times religion has sought to obscure the fact and expunge it from the records, or recast the proponents of doubt in a way that portrays them as faithful.


She takes us forward from the Greeks and through Rome, taking in the Jewish tradition - both ancient and medieval - to Gnosticism and throughout the growth of Christianity, branching on the way to bring in the beliefs of Asia and how they had approaches that differed but often embraced doubt far ore strongly than the tradition in the West.


She shows us how the explosion of unbelief that was the Enlightenment was built partly on this questioning, and the gradual acceptance that a lack of faith was not only correct and acceptable amongst the intellectual elite but also held no dangers for the masses. Finally, she shows how the meeting of Western Enlightenment and Eastern enlightenment in the 19th and 20th centuries brought yet more strength to those who doubt, and recaps how the great thinkers and writers who have pushed against or broken outside of the bounds of religion have built upon each other, and managed to find the kernels of wisdom in earlier thinkers time and again, despite the best efforts to obscure or marginalise those dangerous thought.


A wonderful book which has given me far too many new threads to chase down and consume. ( )

As long as gods have existed there have been people that doubt their existence. This is true for all cultures in which gods have thrived. Most of the reasons for the existence of a god or godlike being boil down to the fact that people didn’t know a lot about the natural world. Lightning and thunderclaps, tornadoes and hurricanes, earthquakes and solar eclipses; many of the natural phenomena that we understand or take for granted were feared by the ancients. Of course, since gods are argued to be human creations, they took on human shapes and human emotions.

Take the Greek Pantheon for instance. All of the gods and goddesses are frivolous and capricious, changing their support of whomever they please on a whim. Zeus sleeps around, Hera is noted for being terribly jealous, none of the gods in that pantheon take any interests in human affairs. They are childish and indolent, sitting around being immortal. Why should we worship such gods? This is what a lot of doubters argued. This point is the same for many of the texts that survived.

Through this wide swath of history, we are treated to some philosophy and how they dealt with the doubt that lives in men’s hearts. Thus, this book is a history of both belief and doubt, focusing mainly on the doubt. Jennifer Michael Hecht spares no tenet or creed to get to the bottom of the opposite point of view. The Greeks are where we start, followed by the Ancient Jews, the peoples of Asia, Rome, and so on until the first century. Then we start to get heated up with the Martyrs of Doubt, victims of the Inquisition and so on.

The really interesting part comes along with the innovations of Jesus. How did he innovate belief and doubt? Well, he turned religion into something that lacked reason I guess you could say. All you needed was to believe, even if it made no sense or had any basis in reality. Faith became everything. Remember the story of “Doubting Thomas?” I mean, I would probably want some kind of evidence that someone rose from the dead as well. Even those weren’t just the thoughts and teachings of Jesus though. Early Christianity was influenced really heavily by Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo and several other historical figures.

So anyway, this book is really captivating and a joy to read. Reading about historical atheists and the arguments they gave demonstrate that there is really nothing new under the sun. In the same vein, all of the arguments for the existence of God are the same as well. It mostly points to the complexity of ‘creation’ and how it couldn’t possibly have come about by chance. I still say you need proof for that sort of thing. Hearsay and gossip aren’t enough. ( )

A marvelous, dense, but readable history of religious doubt, from the earliest writings to the 21st century. I've been working on this for about 10 months, carrying it around on my Kindle and inching along, giving me plenty of time to digest between readings of other books. It's well worth the effort and has a large bibliography I plan to use frequently. Covers Greek, Roman, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim doubt, among others, with Buddhism, of course, beginning as a religion of non-theists. There's lengthy discussion of the various schools of doubt, as well as analysis of our America's Founding Fathers, many of whom, especially Jefferson, were doubters or downright non-believers and specifically worded the Bill of Rights to ensure that religion would never again intrude on our politics. If only.....

Given the current international situation, with fundamentalism as a core issue, I was delighted to find mention of the modern author Ibn Warraq (a pseudonym), an ex-Muslim who wrote "Why I Am Not a Muslim" and who castigates Western society for not subjecting Islam to the critical method, as Christianity and other religions have been, and instead being afraid to criticize it. Something to think about. ( )

Every year on my visit to Taipei I buy a book of philosophy at the Eslite bookstore - as a kind of homage to how wonderful their selection of philosophy titles is (even if they no longer stock French and German originals along with Chinese and English translations). I was considering Habermas' latest collection of pieces from Verso, as well as a Isaiah Berlin on Romanticism, but then decided on this - just because I thought it would look good on my bookshelf. I have to say I am utterly charmed by the introduction and first chapter. Big ideas, lightly put across. Superb writing.Have to say I hate the subtitle though. Bad addition by agent or published. Doubt: a History would have been just fine.