The Simultaneous Genesis of Monotheism and Scepticism in the Jewish Religion

Abstract

In this paper, I will argue that the conceptual dichotomy between religion and scepticism cannot adequately capture what biblical monotheism inaugurated in the world. In a number of key respects that I will attempt to analytically plot, I will aim to show that Jewish scepticism and its cultural correlative of secularism are co-extensive with Jewish monotheism. I will try to plot the general outlines of an argument that will support the claim that both Western monotheism and Western scepticism have their roots in negative theology. What I will attempt to show is that the logical impediments that block a fully coherent statement of the tenets of both negative theology and scepticism point to a common origin and a common destiny for both doctrines. The traditional narrative of Western religion and its relationship to Western scepticism needs to be radically revised. The traditional story is both structured around and invoked to lend support to the idea of irreconcilable conflict between religion and sceptical modes of thought. The conflicts between religion and scepticism are taken to apply both to the substantive doctrines and to the methodologies of argument of religious and sceptical discourse. With negative theology (the idea that we can only say what God is not, but not what He is) as our organising perspective, we can argue that the areas of continuity and overlap between religion and scepticism are much more prominent and decisive than the areas of tension and discontinuity. The practice of religion is in no way threatened or undermined by this realisation. If anything, it is strengthened and reinforced by it. Where the vista of distance between the human community and God is as steadily maintained as it is by negative theology, the prospect of our succumbing to idolatry and worshipping our own handiwork is considerably diminished. My argument is formulated as a kind of thought experiment. Working with the Maimonidean assumptions in Sefer Ha-Madaʿ and The Guide of the Perplexed (including the annexation of God as a necessary First Cause in the genealogy of monotheism and the historical assumption that the patriarch Abraham was the discoverer of the monotheistic principle), what relationship emerges between monotheism and scepticism? The implicit conception of the relationship between religion and scepticism derivable from negative theology is a function of the central place that Platonic and Neoplatonic arguments occupy in its arsenal. Throughout this paper, I am using the term “scepticism” to refer to the philosophical doctrine that states that words are underdetermined by things; that no item in the “furniture” of the world or the human psyche can be framed in only one way, but that openness and flexibility always prevail with regard to designating the identity of things.