The Skeptic, Friend of Religion

The Skeptic, Friend of Religion

While the ancient skeptics advocated learned ignorance as the first step in honest inquiries toward truth, later medieval skeptics, both Moslems and Christians, used skepticism as a tool to avoid accepting what today we call science. Belief in the importance of the Black Swan problem, worries about induction, and skepticism can make some religious arguments more appealing, though in stripped-down, anticlerical, theistic form. This idea of relying on faith, not reason, was known as fideism. So there is a tradition of Black Swan skeptics who found solace in religion, best represented by Pierre Bayle, a French-speaking Protestant erudite, philosopher, and theologian, who, exiled in Holland, built an extensive philosophical architecture related to the Pyrrhonian skeptics. Bayle’s writings exerted some considerable influence on Hume, introducing him to ancient skepticism—to the point where Hume took ideas wholesale from Bayle. Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique was the most read piece of scholarship of the eighteenth century, but like many of my French heroes (such as Frédéric Bastiat), Bayle does not seem to be part of the French curriculum and is nearly impossible to find in the original French language. Nor is the fourteenth-century Algazelist Nicolas of Autrecourt.

Indeed, it is not a well-known fact that the most complete exposition of the ideas of skepticism, until recently, remains the work of a powerful Catholic bishop who was an august member of the French Academy. Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote his Philosophical Treatise on the Weaknesses of the Human Mind in 1690, a remarkable book that tears through dogmas and questions human perception. Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent—he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.

Both Huet and Bayle were erudites and spent their lives reading. Huet, who lived into his nineties, had a servant follow him with a book to read aloud to him during meals and breaks and thus avoid lost time. He was deemed the most read person in his day. Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.