The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty [Hardcover]

Christopher Lane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2011

The Victorian era was the first great "Age of Doubt" and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world. In The Age of Doubt, distinguished scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed abruptly.

In deft portraits of scientific, literary, and intellectual icons who challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy, from Robert Chambers and Anne Brontë to Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, Lane demonstrates how they and other Victorians succeeded in turning doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity.

The dramatic adjustment of Victorian society has echoes today as technology, science, and religion grapple with moral issues that seemed unimaginable even a decade ago. Yet the Victorians' crisis of faith generated a far more searching engagement with religious belief than the "new atheism" that has evolved today. 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. By contrast, a look at today's extremes--from the biblical literalists behind the Creation Museum to the rigidity of Richard Dawkins's atheism--highlights our modern-day inability to embrace doubt.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Lane asks the right questions of the doubting pundits, past and present. Easy to read and render[ing] complicated ideas accessible, [his book] is an altogether admirable study—and ends with an amusing tour of the intellectual trivialities at American Creationist 'museums.''—Edward Norman, Literary Review

(Edward Norman Literary Review (UK) )

“Lane has hit upon something interesting. While many people believe that human history is the story of 2,000 years of blanket Christianity followed by a recent emergence of atheism, the book stresses the very important fact that theological and philosophical squabbles over these subjects are nothing new (and indeed, far more fierce than some of our debates today)... The Age of Doubt is a call for others to examine this material.”—Christopher Holden, PopMatters

(Christopher Holden PopMatters )

"The charm of The Age of Doubt is that it returns us to Victorian England, when the absence of God was a new idea—a new idea, at any rate, to a number of intelligent people raised in the Anglican Church who would happily have continued subscribing to their realm's official faith if science hadn't lately posed so many inconvenient contradictions."—Michael Miner, The Chicago Reader

(Michael Miner The Chicago Reader )

"The story of Victorian doubt is both fascinating and important for understanding why we continue to be mired in fierce cultural battles over the status of evolution and the value of religious faith. This provocative book is well worth the read."—Bernard Lightman, York University

(Bernard Lightman 20100916)

"A fresh and nuanced examination of how the major scientific assumptions of the nineteenth century informed and were shaped by doubt."—Jude V. Nixon, Professor of English & Dean of Arts & Sciences, Salem State University, and Editor of Victorian Religious Discourse

(Jude V. Nixon 20100916)

“[This] is a well-written work, stylistically speaking: very clear and honest. The argument is well structured and, more to the point, he never loses his theme for a moment. The hardcover is beautifully published, tied into a neat cover, . . . providing a feast for the eye and the mind. Highly recommended, without hesitation.”—Karel D’huyvetters, Kroniek

(Karel D'huyvetters Kroniek )

"A welcome and timely entry into the discussion . . . The Age of Doubt is important reading for all who want to better understand the way our culture has unfolded while uncovering the roots of our religious skepticism. Lane creates a very readable volume in which these struggles of faith and doubt come to life . . . compelling reading."—Bryan Berghoef, Englewood Review of Books

(Bryan Berghoef Englewood Review of Books )

“Lane’s stimulating analysis asks whether acknowledging how science, religion, and society have produced a growing chasm between faith and doubt, and even destroyed belief, can offer a way forward.”—Keith Thomson, author of Before Darwin and The Young Charles Darwin

(Keith Thomson )

In this elegantly written book, Christopher Lane tells the story of Victorian doubt by exploring the public and private writing of figures such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Lyell, Robert Chambers, J. A. Froude, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Leslie Stephen. While some of their personal stories are better known than others, in each case Lane finds something insightful to say about the nature of belief and “what it felt like to lose one’s religious faith—as an individual and, more broadly, as a people and society”—Mark Knight, University of Toronto

(Mark Knight Victorian Studies )

About the Author

Christopher Lane is professor of English at Northwestern University and a recent Guggenheim fellow. He is also the author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, published by Yale University Press.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (March 29, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300141920
• ISBN-13: 978-0300141924
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 6.6 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,081,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Lane teaches literature and intellectual history at Northwestern University and is a recent Guggenheim fellow. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, New Statesman, and many other newspapers and journals. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2012). His other books include Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing (France), translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean, with translations in Danish and Turkish forthcoming.

He writes a blog for Psychology Today called "Side Effects." He also writes for the Huffington Post.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Page Turner February 25, 2011

By Carrie J.

Format:Hardcover

I'm about two-thirds through Lane's book, having read it so far in two sittings, and it's a compelling book about doubt and faith. Much of the history was new to me, but it's presented in a dynamic way that brings the conflict alive. I love what he has to say about Richard Dawkins and "The God Delusion." Hard to put down. Five stars.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good reminder that this is not a "black and white" debate March 7, 2011

By bookclubber

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Lane has given today's public conversation a much needed intellectual history of theology. Recently, for some reason, the most publicized and influential American thinkers have felt the need (unnecessarily) to polarize this debate. Believers, atheists and agnostics will all learn from this well-researched and stylistically engaging book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes, 3 Cheers for Victorian Doubters! May 9, 2012

By Peter Jenkel

Format:Hardcover

I came across this book after reading Lane's articles on agnosticism at the Huffington Post and found this book equally lively, smart, and engrossing.

The articles and book make a strong case for the many things that Victorian doubters accomplished, including --

1. Actively debating the Anglican Church on its 39 Articles of Faith, a source of considerable controversy at the time.
2. Challenging powerful laws such as the 1781 "Act for Preventing Certain Abuses and Profanations on the Lord's Day, Called Sunday," which, for more than a century, was responsible for closing each Sunday Britain's museums, zoos, and concert halls, as well as restricting public discussion of the Bible.
3. Publishing articles, pamphlets, and books devoted to raising the importance of secularism, humanism, and freethought in a social and religious climate strongly opposed to all three and favoring Anglicanism and Evangelicalism.
4. Translating and promoting major works of historical criticism on the Bible and on Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure.
5. Tackling anti-science prejudice (especially over geology and botany) at universities such as Oxford that didn't want the subjects taught because they undermined the opening verses of Genesis.
6. Publicly debating a derisive Bishop of Oxford over the exact claims of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.
7. Making it possible to publish personal statements about loss of faith--even if one risked being called "an infidel" in newspapers as a result.
8. Developing an argument about the role of metaphor in biblical analysis that allowed religious moderates to accept parts of the Bible as poetry and myth.
9. Demonstrating to devout thinkers that Darwinism and Christianity were not inevitably opposed....

The above list is really just scratching the surface of Lane's book, but it counters suggestions that the doubters in question spent their days hand-wringing and in personal torment. If there's one thing you could expect about the Victorians, it's that they'd put their doubts to work--to form discussion groups, print pamphlets and journals, and even create organizations designed to raise the matter publicly, all generating something like a national debate about the grounds for belief, uncertainty, and unbelief. I found the material discussed and the figures involved inspiring. If you've ever wondered how modern democracies took on ecclesiastical power while respecting the principles of freedom of and from religion, take a look at The Age of Doubt. Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Age of Doubt June 13, 2012

By Mark

Format:Hardcover

Lane's engrossing book reveals his vast erudition about an extremely complex topic. His description of 19th century intellectual and religious battles makes the arguments seem fresh and relevant to today's religious struggles, and indeed they are. I particularly enjoyed learning the roles played by Tennyson, Bronte, and other prominent writers in this important drama. The illustrations are exceptionally good, as pertinent and beautiful as those in any of Braudel's great works of history. I highly recommend this book.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Hurrah for doubting Victorians! (What exactly did they do?) July 15, 2011

By tspencer

Format:Hardcover

The idea behind this book is that doubt--good, true, Victorian doubt--cuts two ways. It does not allow us to believe in the Watchmaker-Caretaker God, but it also does not allow us to be a Dawkinsian Christian-Hater (or as Dawkins, weirdly, would have it: a Bright). Doubt may even make some other sort of faith possible.

The problem I had with this book is that Lane's portrait of the Victorian doubters never really became the indictment of today's scientistic church militant that Lane meant it to be. I heard him say it (and rightly so), but I never really saw it. The religious figures in Lane's Victorian narrative were always the "bad" guys with the exception of Newman, although he never actually makes a case for Newman's Catholicism as respectable. Indeed, the picture I saw displayed today's Bright British Atheism as a fairly natural consequence of yesterday's Hard-nosed British Agnosticism.

This brings me to the one very useful thing I learned from this book: Dawkins and his movement (including its American wanna-bes) is very British. His way of talking about God comes straight out of a Victorian script. His God is the God isolated by Victorians struggling to deal with geological time and evolution. The similarity of language is striking. At bottom, the God of Dawkins--like that of Lyell, Chambers, Darwin, Huxley and others--is the God who drew up a blueprint of the earth and its fixed species, assembled it the way your or I would assemble a garden, and frequently prunes and waters it for the pleasure of his darlings. This is all Victorian British stuff. It is as if the essence of religion were actually Bad Natural History with a dash of Kindly Uncle. Clinging too tightly to this one view of religion betrays, in my opinion, a lack of imagination, literacy, or experience.... Worst of all, it equates religion--a dynamic, living, historical thing--with one particular religious image, which is like arguing for fixed species because you haven't personally seen one change. (It may also show, as Schleiermacher passionately argued at the beginning of the 19th century, the deleterious effects of a nationalized, bureaucratized church.)

The most interesting thing about the book was trying to make sense of the author. He seems (as far as I could tell) to basically agree with Dawkins on all key theoretical points; "doubt" does not open any religious or metaphysical doors for him personally. What is "doubt" then really? Instead of an openness to, or a feeling for ontological possibilities (i.e an honest: "Do I follow Huxley or James?"), it seems to be an excuse for peaceableness. And this is fantastic. For Lane, the thing is not to declare war on anybody, not to be an ideologue. He doesn't see any reasonableness in the religion of his American audience--he seems to suggest in his final chapter that the Creationist museum is a passable representation of most American faith--but he doesn't think that "evisceration" is the proper response. (I was delighted that Lane also noticed this singularly peaceable, civilized lexical choice in Dawkins. Clearly no place for primal aggression in science, with all its "bayonets"!) In the end, I thought that Lane was just a very decent, humane version of Dawkins, a Dawkinsian alter-ego, one that speaks up but never, never shouts. He's a perfect guest (and he is, in fact, a British transplant to America).

Finally, the book filled in my sketchy knowledge of Lyell, Chambers, Huxley, Eliot, and a few others, and strung the whole lot of these "doubters" into a coherent narrative, which was quite valuable. Read more ›

5.0 out of 5 stars I never had a doubt June 27, 2012

By J. Mackrell

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I never had a doubt that this book by C Lane would not be full of interesting and thoughtful information. I was overwhelmed with the scope of this book and thrilled to be able to pinpoint the source of many of my long held myth's and their origin . I heartily recommend this book for the doubters in us all.