In Praise of Reason

3. “Nothing but Dreams and Smoke”

1 Skepticism from the Tower It is one of the little ironies of history that skepticism is rarely more popular than with true believers. The theological disputes at the heart of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation are a case in point. People were killing each other over who had the best method to access religious truth. Protestants claimed the best method was personal meditation on scripture; Catholics retorted that it was obedience to clergy and tradition. During the course of this dispute, the rediscovered writings of an obscure ancient Roman writer, Sextus Empiricus, dropped like a bomb.1 Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism hardly has “literary fame” written all over it. It is dense and difficult to read, and doesn’t even purport to be all that original—Sextus claims, rather, to give a sort of CliffsNotes for the (now-lost) writings of Greek skeptics. But it contained something of real interest to Protestant and Catholic theologians trying to defend their own standard of religious truth: an intellectual weapon. The weapon in question is a very simple argument—due originally, perhaps, to the Greek philosopher Agrippa. It is 3 “Nothing but Dreams and Smoke” 42 Chapter 3 sometimes called Agrippa’s “tri-lemma,” and it goes like this: Every belief is produced by some method or source, be it humble (like memory) or complex (like technologically assisted science). But why think those methods are trustworthy or reliable? If I challenge one of your methods, you can’t just appeal to the same method to show that it is reliable. That would be circular. And appealing to another method won’t help either—for unless that method can be shown to be reliable, using it to determine the reliability of the first method answers nothing. So you end up either continuing on in the same vein—pointlessly citing reasons for methods and methods for reasons forever—or arguing in circles, or granting that your method is groundless. Any way you go, it seems you must admit you can give no reason for trusting your methods, and hence can give no reason to believe. To the theologians on both sides of the Reformation’s wars, this argument was like a gift from heaven. Here at last was a way of demolishing the enemy’s principles! The Protestant theologian could ask: How do you know that consulting Church authorities is a guide to truth? If the Catholics replied that they knew because the Church said so then they were arguing in a circle; but if they cited the Bible, they were abandoning their method for another. Unfortunately for Protestant theologians, the Catholics could and did use the same argument. They asked: How do you know that personal reflection on scripture is a guide to truth? If the Protestant replied that meditating on scripture had revealed it to be, then he was guilty of circular reasoning; but if he appealed to some other authority, then he had admitted that his scriptural method was not the final word.2 As always happens with so-called miracle weapons, this one settled nothing. The upshot was that neither side seemed “Nothing but Dreams and Smoke” 43 capable of defending its standard of religious truth without assuming it—which, of course, had been Sextus’s point. According to Sextus, what his argument showed was that we should just stop believing anything—never claim anything is true, religious or otherwise. Needless to say, this was not a popular conclusion among theologians on either side of the Reformation . Not-believing is not an option for the militant believer. So many of them just kept Sextus’s arguments but rejected his conclusion. If reason can’t show that your method of belief is the right one, then don’t give up on the method, give up on reason. Religious debates were by no means the only symptom of the sweeping intellectual changes happening around this time. Already by the sixteenth century, Copernican ideas, though not yet verified by Galileo, were seeding a revolution in cosmology , and some had already begun to doubt that the earth was, as the Church had long taught, the center of the universe. Moreover, it was clear that Europeans had even been wrong about geography—new lands were being discovered, inhabited by new peoples (think: “Intelligent Life Discovered on the Moon!”). In each case, debates over the facts led quickly into debates over how to...