Doubt: A History

Doubt: A History PDF

Author: Jennifer Hecht

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages: 1681

ISBN-13: 0062031392

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In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning, This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.

Faith After Doubt

Faith After Doubt PDF

Author: Brian D. McLaren

Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 125026278X

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From the author of A New Kind of Christianity comes a bold proposal: only doubt can save the world and your faith. ONE of the Best Spiritual Books of 2021—Spirituality & Practice "Will help you live fuller and breathe easier..” —Glennon Doyle Sixty-five million adults in the U.S. have dropped out of active church attendance and about 2.7 million more are leaving every year. Faith After Doubt is for the millions of people around the world who feel that their faith is falling apart. Using his own story and the stories of a diverse group of struggling believers, Brian D. McLaren, a former pastor and now an author, speaker, and activist shows how old assumptions are being challenged in nearly every area of human life, not just theology and spirituality. He proposes a four-stage model of faith development in which questions and doubt are not the enemy of faith, but rather a portal to a more mature and fruitful kind of faith. The four stages—Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony—offer a path forward that can help sincere and thoughtful people leave behind unnecessary baggage and intensify their commitment to what matters most.

Know Doubt

Know Doubt PDF

Author: John Ortberg

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2009-12-21

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 031032503X

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Ortberg demonstrates how doubt is very much a part of faith and how uncertainty can lead to trust. "The beliefs that really matter," he writes, "are the ones that guide our behavior. We cannot hope without faith, and so we must not hope for something but someone--Jesus Christ.

After Doubt

After Doubt PDF

Author: A. J. Swoboda

Publisher: Brazos Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1493429590

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Is there a way to walk faithfully through doubt and come out the other side with a deeper love for Jesus, the church, and its tradition? Can we question our faith without losing it? Award-winning author, pastor, and professor A. J. Swoboda has witnessed many young people wrestle with their core Christian beliefs. Too often, what begins as a set of critical and important questions turns to resentment and faith abandonment. Unfortunately, the church has largely ignored its task of serving people along their journey of questioning. The local church must walk alongside those who are deconstructing their faith and show them how to reconstruct it. Drawing on his own experience of deconstruction, Swoboda offers tools to help emerging adults navigate their faith in a hostile landscape. Doubt is a part of our natural spiritual journey, says Swoboda, and deconstruction is a legitimate space to encounter the living God. After Doubt offers a hopeful, practical vision of spiritual formation for those in the process of faith deconstruction and those who serve them. Foreword by pastor and author John Mark Comer.

The Book of Doubt

The Book of Doubt PDF

Author: Tessa de Loo

Publisher: Haus Publishing

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 1907822879

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Even though he is the son of a Dutch mother, Saeed has a Moroccan first name in memory of the virtuoso oud player his mother fell in love with twenty years ago. When she found out she was pregnant, he ran off and returned to Morocco. Saeed decides to look for his father, in the hope of finding a new identity in a new world. His childhood friend Hassan accompanies him. Back then they shared an imaginary land which they both ruled. Now they only have one starting point: a grocery shop in Fez. From there they follow the trail of the oud player, who leads them from the cedar woods of Ifrane to the red dunes of the desert to the high Atlas, where Kasbahs are locked in a losing battle with decay. Saeed's search sends him deeper into disillusionment and into the arms of Islam, where he tries to find something to hold on to. But there is a disturbing presence. A seemingly fictitious character from their imaginary past infiltrates Saeed's quest. While Saeed desperately tries to get rid of him, different aspects of his life, more and more beyond his control, reach an apotheosis resulting in one final deed affecting man and beast alike.

I Never Learned to Doubt

I Never Learned to Doubt PDF

Author: Jesse Duplantis

Publisher:

Published: 2021-02-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9781634167352

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Doubt is a habit. You aren't born a doubter. You learn to doubt over time, after being hit with the injustices and instability of this world. In this book, I'm going to try to help you go back in time?and regain what you lost. The wonder of faith is a pure thing-a childlike thing-and it's the only thing that works to access God and draw in what you really want. He doesn't respond to need. He doesn't respond to begging or pleading or wishing. God responds to faith. Doubt has roots. From the beginning of my walk with God in 1974, I decided that if I was going to be a "believer," then I was going to believe. I had a lifetime of doubting people behind me-but I learned in the Bible that God is not a man that He should lie. I also learned that the roots of doubt must be pulled up in order to make way to receive from God. I began a new way of thinking all those years ago that I am still using today. It's brought me joy. It's brought me success over the many challenges I've had. And it's brought me great favor and full peace in a world filled with trouble. Doubt isn't what you think. It's not a passing thought. It's not pondering the Word of God or reasoning with God, or even with others. Doubt is an inner-lifestyle choice-a bad habit of taking your own word over God's, your thoughts over God's, and putting more stock in the words of others over God's, too. That's not what living a successful life as a believer is all about! In this book, I hope to help you shut doubt down and develop a mindset that sees God's truth as bigger than the doubts of the mind?or anything else. Develop a habit of never learning to doubt!

Descartes's Method of Doubt

Descartes's Method of Doubt PDF

Author: Janet Broughton

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781400825042

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Descartes thought that we could achieve absolute certainty by starting with radical doubt. He adopts this strategy in the Meditations on First Philosophy, where he raises sweeping doubts with the famous dream argument and the hypothesis of an evil demon. But why did Descartes think we should take these exaggerated doubts seriously? And if we do take them seriously, how did he think any of our beliefs could ever escape them? Janet Broughton undertakes a close study of Descartes's first three meditations to answer these questions and to present a fresh way of understanding precisely what Descartes was up to. Broughton first contrasts Descartes's doubts with those of the ancient skeptics, arguing that Cartesian doubt has a novel structure and a distinctive relation to the commonsense outlook of everyday life. She then argues that Descartes pursues absolute certainty by uncovering the conditions that make his radical doubt possible. She gives a unified account of how Descartes uses this strategy, first to find certainty about his own existence and then to argue that God exists. Drawing on this analysis, Broughton provides a new way to understand Descartes's insistence that he hasn't argued in a circle, and she measures his ambitions against those of contemporary philosophers who use transcendental arguments in their efforts to defeat skepticism. The book is a powerful contribution both to the history of philosophy and to current debates in epistemology.

Merchants of Doubt

Merchants of Doubt PDF

Author: Naomi Oreskes

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-10-03

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1408828774

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The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

The Origins of Reasonable Doubt

The Origins of Reasonable Doubt PDF

Author: James Q. Whitman

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0300116004

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To be convicted of a crime in the United States, a person must be proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of “reasonable doubt.” It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one. The rule as we understand it today is intended to protect the accused. But Whitman traces its history back through centuries of Christian theology and common-law history to reveal that the original concern was to protect the souls of jurors. In Christian tradition, a person who experienced doubt yet convicted an innocent defendant was guilty of a mortal sin. Jurors fearful for their own souls were reassured that they were safe, as long as their doubts were not “reasonable.” Today, the old rule of reasonable doubt survives, but it has been turned to different purposes. The result is confusion for jurors, and a serious moral challenge for our system of justice.

Benefit of the Doubt

Benefit of the Doubt PDF

Author: Gregory A. Boyd

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2013-09-15

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1441244549

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In Benefit of the Doubt, influential theologian, pastor, and bestselling author Gregory Boyd invites readers to embrace a faith that doesn't strive for certainty, but rather for commitment in the midst of uncertainty. Boyd rejects the idea that a person's faith is as strong as it is certain. In fact, he makes the case that doubt can enhance faith and that seeking certainty is harming many in today's church. Readers who wrestle with their faith will welcome Boyd's message that experiencing a life-transforming relationship with Christ is possible, even with unresolved questions about the Bible, theology, and ethics. Boyd shares stories of his own painful journey, and stories of those to whom he has ministered, with a poignant honesty that will resonate with readers of all ages.