“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-confident, even smug, they were given to vibrant disagreement about the fundamentals of religious belief. We still have much to learn from their debates.
The Age of Doubt shows how integral religious doubt became to large swaths of Victorian culture, from its most tightly scripted traditions to its most revolutionary arguments and discoveries, chief among them evolutionary theory. It also traces how Victorian literature and science affected each other, including through their shared use of doubt. While scientists reached for metaphors to make sense of vast conundrums, poets and novelists struggled to make sense of the most provocative scientific discoveries: the descent of man, the evolution of species by natural selection, and the dating and formation of the Earth as billions of years old.
The debates about religion and science that flared in nineteenth-century Britain predate by almost two centuries the “new” atheism that has evolved today, undermining many of its claims for originality. Indeed, the Victorians’ crisis of faith generated a far more serious engagement with all facets of religious belief and doubt. More profoundly than any generation before them, the Victorians came to view doubt as inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, as well as a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and unbridled certainty.
That theirs was a century of religious doubt makes it a subject ripe for reinvestigation. Many of the questions that they encountered continue to recur—in the United States more intensively than in Britain—as fierce cultural battles over the status of faith and reason. In the States today, as Edward Rothstein noted recently, two of the most urgent questions driving cultural debate are “How much faith is involved in the workings of reason and how much reason lies in the assertions of faith?”8 In using the Victorians to answer those searching questions, and transitioning accordingly from Victorian Britain to contemporary North America, I hope to demonstrate that we, too, cannot clarify our beliefs, religious and otherwise, until we have reckoned with religious uncertainty and the myriad questions that it poses.
This book tells the story of Victorian doubt by describing what it felt like to lose one’s religious faith—as an individual and, more broadly, as a people and society. Armed with a rich variety of sources, including a large archive of neglected historical material that captures how the Victorians’ thoughts about religious belief and doubt changed over the course of the century, we’ll see the scope of their doubt massively expand, from the Creation story, the Flood, and the existence of miracles to the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, and, ultimately, the very existence of God. That expansion also makes clear why “doubt” sometimes surpassed the religious context of Victorian Britain, acquiring a strongly psychological inflection and joining forces more broadly with skepticism, a philosophical stance against credulity.
The Victorians’ preoccupation with doubt makes our perception of them as pious, reserved, and self-confident look one-sided, even faulty. A large number of prominent Victorians challenged the zeal and dogma that, in several quarters, had hastened their loss of religious faith. After countless writers and worshippers found it impossible to uphold biblical explanations of creation, many tried to house their beliefs in society and culture, to make both agents of redemption.9 “The replacement of serve God by serve society was,” Owen Chadwick asserts, “intelligible to everyone.”10 Others looked for ways to harmonize their beliefs with new discoveries and responsibilities, including by developing an ethic of doubt—a philosophy of persistent uncertainty, where skepticism becomes welcome and creative, rather than obtrusive and disabling.
Like those questioning Victorians, this book advances an argument on behalf of doubt itself. It dwells on the advantages of religious and philosophic uncertainty as a creative stimulant and assesses the benefits of skepticism in a world that still tries to rid us of that quality.11 Like Thomas Cooper, a colorful but little-known Victorian poet whose religious beliefs wavered, it takes not-knowing (including about the existence of God) as a valuable, necessary stance: “I say not that there is no God: but that / I know not. Dost thou know, or dost thou guess?”12
The Victorians’ preoccupation with religious doubt is all the more striking because they lived through a religious revival “unmatched since the days of the Puritans.”13 In the first decades of the nineteenth century, religion was everywhere, and the Established Church was a commanding institution that, with Britain’s Parliament, governed the population. The same bishop of Oxford who would vigorously challenge Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1860 told worshippers, “Irreverence and doubt are the object of your greatest fear.”14
Sermon after sermon warned congregations that doubt was not just sinful and immoral but a condition marred by emptiness and despair. “Consider the miseries of wives and mothers losing their faith in Scripture,” urged Cardinal John Henry Newman, as some doubters tried to cling to their faith by focusing on the sorry plight of those who had lost theirs.15
Like that of so many other men of the cloth, Protestant and Catholic, Newman’s strategy backfired and sent the Church into defensive retreat. As the scholar Joseph Altholz asked appropriately, “Could the rising generation, self-consciously devoted to truth but increasingly aware of disturbing facts, be expected indefinitely to contain their doubts and profess an assurance which was decreasingly real?”16 Given the tension voiced at the time between reason and faith, the fervor that inspired the Victorians’ Evangelical revival ironically hastened its decline and collapse. The Church was ill equipped to engage with scientific naturalism, rationalism, free thought, and growing interest in liberalism; it confronted internal rifts over the very nature of belief and found that evidence was not on its side. Having failed to reach the large number of workers who had migrated to Britain’s industrializing cities in search of work, the Church splintered into factions. Many of the factions were peopled by nonconformists (chiefly dissenting Methodists and Evangelical Calvinists) who, in doubting and rejecting Anglicanism, claimed a more immediate relationship to God and a starker, more literal relation to scripture. Unlike their liberal, Broad Church counterparts, who were more open to science and to the “Higher Criticism” reshaping biblical scholarship, the Evangelicals put a premium on conversion—the experience of being “born again”—and stressed the importance of practical piety, including through social activism at home and missionary zeal abroad.
Religious doubt can look quite different to each of these groups, as I hope to convey, but overall it joined philosophical skepticism in asking what were felt to be increasingly urgent questions: Was the planet really created in one day, as Genesis stipulated, or over eons? Were the miracles described in the Bible credible or meant to be seen more as apocryphal? When the history of Christianity was fully examined, did its monotheistic arguments blend imperceptibly with the “pagan” beliefs that had preceded it? And, a critical issue for many Victorian believers and scholars, by no means easy to settle: What was the precise ratio of God to man in Jesus of Nazareth?
Realizing that an increasingly literate and probing public wanted answers to these difficult questions, traditionalists and conservatives tried to fend off an onslaught of historical and philosophical studies that appeared in the 1840s and 1850s, including from liberal Anglicans trying to respond more constructively to the crisis, as we’ll see in chapters 4 and 5.17 But the conservative rejoinders were more flat-footed than convincing; and to growing numbers of worshippers, the dogmatism of many bishops, priests, and ministers lost its appeal. The erosion—indeed, rejection—of belief that followed was as fierce and passionate in the second half of the century as the embrace of it had been in the first. Indeed, by the century’s end, doubt generally had acquired the merit of putting things in “balance,” with legal scholars characterizing its legal doctrine as “reasonable.”18 Prominent theologians were calling doubt “highly useful” and a necessary “borderland between knowledge and ignorance.”19 The word “agnosticism” had become a much-discussed principle, and the saying that people should be given “the benefit of the doubt” was held up as an ideal, if not quite a universal practice.20
To some readers, this may sound like a relatively straightforward account of a country transitioning to secularism. But the consequences of religious uncertainty and eroding belief were, for many Victorians, complex and unsettling, a point with added significance given Britain’s preeminence as a world power. Narrative portraits of Thomas Carlyle, Sir Charles Lyell, Anne and Branwell Brontë, Robert Chambers, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and Leslie Stephen—key figures in this book—help to convey why. Drawing also on accounts of several of their important forebears—David Hume, William Nicholson, James Hutton, and Percy Bysshe Shelley—I show that for these writers, doubt was integral to the possibility of free thought and the culture they built around it.
For many of these writers and thinkers, it must also be said, their initial shock over religious disbelief was immense and far-reaching. As late as 1878, the author William Hurrell Mallock, trying to speak for his generation, wrote that their “hearts are aching for the God that they no longer can believe in.” He continued, “One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying…. The causes of this decay have been maturing for three hundred years, and their effects prophesied for fifty.”21
Is Life Worth Living? was the question Mallock asked earnestly in another of his books. His answer—that life is its own reward—came only after he described the impact that religious doubt was having on many around him: “Modern thought has not created a new doubt,” he insisted; “it has [instead] made perfect an old one” about the validity of belief.22
Confronting a similar “cureless affliction” over religious uncertainty, Matthew Arnold for some years saw the universe as offering neither “certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”23 Indeed, because of that predicament, he and other intellectuals sought alternatives and partial remedies, including that culture itself could become a redemptive force. That revised perspective helped to change the course of philosophy, sociology, and political theory, as well as what was taught in schools. Its impact, contested then as now, was also felt across other, vastly different creative endeavors, from the novel to the canvas and the political stage. Shortly after Arnold declared, “The thing is, to recast religion,” John Morley insisted, in his treatise On Compromise, “Both dogma and church must be slowly replaced by higher forms of faith.”24 As Bernard Lightman underscores, “many vestiges of traditional religious thought [are] embedded in Victorian agnosticism.”25
The value of those secular “forms of faith” is worth revisiting, especially in light of the challenges they face around the world today. Although some of them—Utilitarianism and Marxism, to name just two—have since been challenged and found wanting, others, such as Herbert Spencer’s concept of “the Unknowable” and George Eliot’s model of secular fellowship, laid out profound ideas that are still with us, including ethical guidelines that blend freedom with responsibility.
Although today our understanding of doubt includes much besides religion, doubt’s vexed relationship to faith can still fixate us. Consider the number of discussions generated by John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt: A Parable, the vast amount of press covering revelations of Mother Teresa’s pervasive religious doubt, and even Antony Flew’s apparent conversion to religion after a career spent as “the world’s most notorious atheist.”26
Books on religious faith and the “new” atheism now battle it out on the best-seller lists. Ready for a showdown, they routinely accuse each other of being dogmatic and of failing to heed each other’s arguments. (A witty and intelligent novel, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God, captures the flavor of their furious dissent.)27 Meanwhile, less than half of Britons believe in a God and two-thirds of the country (66 percent) have no connection to any religion or church.28 In the United States, those percentages are much lower but trending upward, with 15-16 percent of the population now claiming “no religious affiliation” (up from 8 percent in 1990) and nearly a quarter of Americans in their twenties professing no organized religion. Yet the Victorians’ battle over evolution still flares on both sides of the Atlantic, with more Americans (43 percent) believing in creationism than evolution, and “just under half of Britons accept[ing] the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life.”29
In other respects, our modern challenges are surprisingly comparable to those facing nineteenth-century Britons, a further reason to focus on that century of doubt. The Victorians were greatly concerned about the effects of their industrial revolution; today we are still trying to gauge the benefits and price of globalization. The Victorians witnessed—without always welcoming—breathtaking developments in geology, archaeology, and evolutionary theory. Today, we enjoy—and often fear—remarkable breakthroughs in biomedicine, neurochemistry, and genetics. The Victorians pondered the many gains and drawbacks of mechanization; we ask what technology is doing to our lifestyles, communities, and relationships. And the Victorians debated intensively whether the Bible should be taken literally. Today, science and religion are still widely perceived as antagonists, and large percentages of people, disbelieving science, insist that the Earth is relatively young (in the region of thousands—rather than billions—of years old). Looked at in this light, the dramatic, far-reaching effects of the human genome project can seem comparable in impact to Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).
One sign that the Victorians still preoccupy us, nearly two centuries later, is that we’re still arguing over the second of these books, as many of the issues that it raises are not limited to the field of education. While Lyell struggled to “free the science [of geology] from Moses” as he explained why the earth could not have been created in a single day, Darwin argued that the fittest species adapt and evolve by means of natural selection.30 That process trumps “the old argument of design in nature,” Darwin concluded, and thus argues against not only the infallible word of scripture, but also the necessity of viewing God as the divine creator. Yet Lyell remained deeply religious throughout his life and suffered intense private anguish about the possibility of evolution, a theory he tried for decades to ignore, then refute. And Darwin, having weighed a life in the Church and married a deeply devout woman, wrote candidly that his hard-fought agnosticism left vast issues unexplained: “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation,” he recalled, years later, “but I was very unwilling to give up my belief.” The solution, for him, was to remain in a state of open, authentic doubt: “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.”31
Like many of their peers, Darwin and Lyell remind us that doubt offers a productive, even hopeful way of “being in two minds”—a way of ultimately reaching hard-won conviction that permits dissent, sharpens insight, and inspires creativity in the place of dogma and rote learning. Among its other qualities, doubt tends to be progressive, forward-looking, and nonproselytizing, allowing the coexistence of contraries that the adamant reject in the search for quick fixes and yes-or-no answers. As Robert Baird explains, “Creative doubt stimulates the evaluation of beliefs.” It encourages us to discard “beliefs found wanting” and reaffirm “those found adequate … with new vigor and life.”32
Sadly, our own age has begun to repolarize over these concerns and to press for such black-and-white thinking that countless shades of gray are lost. The more strident our culture becomes—whether in response to the extremism of others or, ironically, as a partial cause of it—the more belief itself, in its connection to religion, becomes a word capable of evoking elation and dread. We might prefer thinking that our religious beliefs, to the extent that we have them, foster only guidance and comfort. But when moderates scatter under duress and fundamentalists assert a monopoly on truth—even an endless war against “infidels and nonbelievers”—the differences among faiths, like those among believers and nonbelievers, can seem hopelessly unbridgeable.
After a trio of prominent best-sellers on atheism appeared between 2004 and 2007, drawing huge audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, it became commonplace for reviewers into split into two camps. One group cheered Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great as a long-awaited debunking of religious mysticism as well as a much-needed corrective to dogmatism, sanctimony, and—in the case of the United States—the Christianizing of a secular state.33 (Harris, in particular, made the terrorist attacks on 9/11 central to his polemic against all forms of religion.) On the other side, with titles just as adamant—God Is No Delusion, The Reason for God, and Answering the New Atheism—devout critics in Britain and America not only vigorously defended their faith but roundly accused all three writers of a different kind of dogmatism, along with arrogance, theological ignorance, and an uncompromising rationalism that left no room for doubt, flexibility, or error.34
Each side hunkered down and flung barbs without really engaging, much less conceding, the arguments of the other side. As Dawkins opined in the London Times, what was the point of parsing the finer theological subtleties of Aquinas or Duns Scotus (Terry Eagleton’s prompt in the London Review of Books) when they amounted to a “celestial comfort blanket”?35 When Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins asserted that religion can foster division and extremism, an essential point that few today can afford to ignore, many devout reviewers insisted that moderates and fanatics have little in common than their beliefs and that it is insulting to lump them together.
Because Dawkins and Harris, in particular, likened faith to false consciousness (calling faith, respectively, a “delusion” and an “impostor”), their approach and guiding assumptions were more likely to harden resistance among the devout than pave the way for flexibility, much less secular enlightenment.36 To that extent, Victorian unbelief and doubt achieved a far-more intensive engagement with theology, and Dawkins may have much less to teach us about certainty than he imagines. By contrast, Froude, Robert Chambers, and Thomas Huxley have a lot more to tell us than we currently give them credit for. Yet, oddly, Dawkins reserved particular scorn for skeptics such as Huxley (justly dubbed “Darwin’s bulldog”), who coined the word agnosticism in 1869 but for complex personal and scientific reasons would not commit to full-blown atheism.
Dawkins insists that scientists cannot hedge on facts and absolutes: there are simply right answers and wrongheaded assumptions, even when the issues are generally considered metaphysical: “Either [God] exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question.”37 But science is full of uncertainty, as Victorians such as Arthur James Balfour made clear in A Defence of Philosophic Doubt.38 And scientists and secularists have made their fair share of mistakes. Besides, matters of faith do not always involve or require absolutes, and it would be naive to imagine otherwise.
In upholding philosophical and religious uncertainty as an ethical position, then, I hope to bring historical depth and perspective to today’s contradictions, to let the Victorians pose questions to believers and nonbelievers that they might prefer to leave unasked. Their reasons for avoidance are not difficult to fathom. When faith or its absence is absolute, doubt of any kind can seem anathema. Whether as heresy or unwelcome prying, it can resemble a threat that the devout would prefer to banish, and the nonbeliever to eliminate completely. When the stakes are so high, no one wants a skeptic around questioning whether an assumption is plausible or a conviction untenable. Believers and nonbelievers alike want enough certainty to ensure that doubt is not an option. As this book shows, these responses are not unique to the twenty-first century.
While thus chiefly a study of the power and vast range of the Victorians’ loss of religious faith, my book tries to gauge the consequences for us of failing to heed their most difficult lessons. In our own overheated climate, we give less credence to uncertainty; yet the crises that preoccupy us—including religious extremism—demand that we tolerate increasing amounts of it. The Victorians have more answers for us than we have realized.