In Praise of Doubt
How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic
Chapter One
The Many Gods of Modernity
Just before the dawn of the twentieth century, in tones
of passionate conviction, Nietzsche proclaimed the death
of God. Today, a little over a hundred years later, this
prophecy hardly seems plausible. Whether God does or
does not exist in cosmic reality is another question.
And this question cannot be answered by the empirical
sciences: God cannot be the object of an experiment. But
in the empirically accessible reality of human life
today, there is a veritable plenitude of gods competing
for the attention and allegiance of people. Nietzsche
thought that he stood at the beginning of an age of
atheism. Right now it seems that the twenty-first
century is marked instead by polytheism. It looks as if
the many gods of antiquity have returned with a
vengeance.
The more radical thinkers of the Enlightenment,
particularly in France, anticipated the demise of
religion in a spirit of gleeful anticipation. Religion
was perceived as a grand illusion, one that had given
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