Epistle to Ansgar: Letter 17 (Radical Skepticism)
25 May 2025 AD
Feast Day of Venerable Bede
Dear Godson,
Today is the feast of the Venerable Bede, a scholar and historian and most celebrated man of letters of his day. He wrote treatises on scripture, science, history, biography, and it the first to use the dating system from the Birth of Christ, Anno Domini, A.D. He is also the first to mention King Arthur, whose historical reality many skeptics doubt.
Let us call on his spirit to aid us as we turn to another of the great doubts likely to afflict the modern Christian, which are doubts issuing from a particular philosophy, or, rather, mental disorder, to which only scholars seem prone, namely, that of refusing to admit what one knows to be the self evident.
Radical skepticism is the besetting sin of the modern day.
Radical skepticism is not doubt about this thing or that, but rather is skepticism about the faculty of the human mind itself. It is doubt about the instrument used to discriminate between reasonable and unreasonable doubt.
Skepticism is doubt about matters where there is a reasonable argument on both sides. Radical skepticism is doubt about matters no one is honestly able to doubt.
But there are things we cannot not know.
Such things are not open to reasonable doubt. They are open to unreasonable doubt, for all things are.
No matter how ferociously we pretend to be unconvinced of the obvious, some doubts are simply self-refuting. Some truths are so foundational that to doubt them is to arrest thought altogether, and call a halt to the act of being a rational being.
Once such foundational doubt is the pretense of thinking one does not think, cannot trust one’s own thought process, or the pretense that there is no truth. If there is no truth, reason is unreasonable, laws and customs are systematic instruments of oppression, justice is the will of the stronger, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, sodomy is love, and non-women are women.
These are, of course, the foundational assumptions of the postmodern West, and the core dogmas of the heresy of Modernism.
A word of historical explanation might be in order to explain how this insolent madness became mainstream.
Nearly everything a modern schoolboy is taught about the Middle Ages, and they way it is portrayed in stories, is wildly inaccurate, half-truth, or the exact opposite of truth.
The so-called Enlightenment was a time of darkness, political, ethical and spiritual, whose slow-working venom of blindness still bedevils and sickens the shattered shipwreck of Christendom.
The so-called Dark Age was the true time of unparalleled enlightenment, ending all the ancient cruelties of slavery, gladiatorial games, polygamy, sodomy, human sacrifice and the practice of exposing unwanted infants to the elements. Women and children, the poor and weak and downtrodden, were regarded as equals in the eyes of heaven, and chivalry was upheld as an ideal to follow, and often was. The savagery of war was curtailed; literacy was spread to its widest extent. The scientific method was invented and perfected in these years, and the seeds of all the advancements later generations would laud as progress were planted then, existing in miniature.
That later ages would achieve what these forebears made possible was ungratefully made into an excuse by Voltaire and Rosseau and Marx to demean the achievements of this age: as if men standing on the shoulders of giants mocked the giants for their lack of height. As if the crown of a tree were to urge the roots which nourish it to be put to the axe, or the stone at a tower top should cry out for the foundations to break.
The Middle Ages were a time of precision and logic, when scholars busied themselves with exact and orderly forms of reasoning. The result of these centuries of intellectual effort was remarkable and unparalleled. The medieval mind reconciled theology, philosophy, jurisprudence, aesthetics, ethics, astronomy, mathematics and the natural world into a single architecture as grand in scope and as minute in detail as a cathedral. These schoolmen were justly famed for the precision of their speculations and conclusions.
The Age of Faith was in fact the Age of Reason, for it was an age when both sides of every question was examined in debate, and answers were found to all the great questions of the faith. Even in debates over the canonization of saints, a devil’s advocate was appointed to allow the opposition his say.
The learning of Aristotle and Augustine was seamlessly integrated in the work of the Thomists, and philosophy reached its highest pinnacle more penetrating depth, widest breath, and most intimate daily relevance. Not merely the motions of stars and planets, but observations of nature, and legal and moral precepts were integrated into a view of the world and a view of society to which all classes concurred, and the bewilderment and nihilistic horror modern men take to be the invariable lot of mankind was unknown. The learned men of the elite and the unlettered peasant agreed to the same worldview. The agitation of continual civil war and culture war was unknown.
First with nominalism, the notion that words have no essential meanings, then with Cartesian philosophy, the notion that nothing can be true unless absolutely immune to even the most unreasonable doubt, then with the absurdities of Hume, the prolix paradoxes of Kant, and the hermetical mysticism of Hegel, skepticism was inflated beyond its proper sphere.
The inflation ended finally the shipwreck of reason, and the naked irrationalism of Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, in what can only be called the suicide of thought.
Descartes, for example, thinks it necessary to prove one’s own existence, as if the question could be raised or answered by a being unaware that it must necessarily exist to raise or answer the question.
Likewise, the conceit of solipsism is based on a doubt no sane man can entertain, namely, that the existence of other minds is open to doubt, on the grounds that one has no direct and immediate awareness of any thoughts but one’s own.
But this degree of doubt is absurd. If one were somehow to develop a sense-impression able to read the thoughts of other men, and so could sense their inward self-awareness as readily as one sees their outward faces by daylight, this new sense impression is necessarily as open to doubt as all other senses. In another meditation, Descartes demands we entertain the notion that a diabolical deceiver has created an utterly false world around us, and complete as the world-illusion of which the Buddha speaks. So the information conveyed to Lensmen or Vulcans by mind-lens or mind-meld is as unreliable as the eyesight of Neo trapped in the Matrix.
The inevitable yet insane conclusion of this insane axiom is drawn out in in Hume then in Kant. Hume asserts no conclusion can be confirmed as true except empirically, apparently without noticing that this assertion is itself statement not open to empirical test nor confirmation.
Kant asserts that any sense impression representing an object provides knowledge of the sense impression only, and no knowledge of the object represented, which means, in effect, that no knowledge of any kind is possible.
Hume disproves Hume. Universal statements are true under all times and places and conditions, whereas empirical statements are only true within the limited range and duration of one’s observation. Empirically speaking, twice two is four is not known as true for objects over the horizon, lost in the forgotten past, or behind one’s head, because one cannot know two bubbles counted with two bubbles is four unless one sees the bubbles or hold them in hand. By the rules of empiricism, no universal statement can be affirmed empirically, except by an omniscient and ever-present being. So a universal statement claiming only empirically confirmable statements are known to be true is not open to empirical confirmation, except by a being aware of all statements spoken to thought by all rational beings throughout all time and space.
Kant disproves Kant. We know of the nature and limitations of sense impressions only through the use of sense impressions. If these sense impressions convey no knowledge to our minds of the things represented, nothing about the things can be known. And if one of those things are the nature, quality and limits of the sense impressions, then Kant can have no knowledge of them, nor can anyone.
One might object that there are times and places when dreams or mirrors or some trick of refraction or acoustics deceives the eye or ear, so therefore we know senses are not perfectly reliable. But Kant concludes that no sense impression is reliable because and only because it is a sense impression, and not the object observed. We never see a sunrise, we only see that we see a sunrise. This does not prove light exists, only that our perception of light exists. If no sense impression whatsoever conveys knowledge of any object observed, this includes all objects involved in any dream or deception. If one knows nothing, on cannot know dreams are really dreams, or deceptions are really deceptions. If the light might be delusion, so could our perception that we see. Logically, if we have no knowledge of any perceived thing, including perceived perceptions, we cannot know that perceptions are or are not real, nor can we know we do not know this.
Such is the fruit of the so called Age of Reason: it should be called the Age of Unreason, because reason was no longer held to be reliable. It should be called the Dark Age, because the light of reason was extinguished. Human learning retreated and withered in all fields except technical and medical knowledge, only because empiricists held philosophy in contempt, and the nihilism into which philosophy invariably descends under the influence of dogmatic hyper-skepticism was, for a time, held at bay.
Unfortunately, the philosophical nihilism popular among intellectuals in the final decade of the Victorian Age crept into physics with the publication of papers on Quantum Mechanics, which introduced metaphysical and ontological axioms unwittingly into their otherwise sound speculations of physical sciences. Philosophy by that time had deteriorated to such an absurd clownshow that the simple paradoxes proposed, which any schoolboy much less schoolman with a passing knowledge of Aristotle or Aquinas could be refuted in a syllogism of three steps, became accept on the dogmatism of ignorant experts: it was held to be true ad ignorantiam, only because it was inexplicable.
During this same period Darwin proposed that all animals, including the rational animal called man, was created without any deliberate creator or deliberate process, merely by the blind and accidental accumulation of beneficial traits, including, in the case of our species, a faculty for self-awareness, abstract reasoning, artistic creativity, tool-making, rule by laws and customs over instinct, moral scruples, and awareness of mortality.
But if these faculties arose unintentionally, they by definition they are not tools. The definition of a tool is that it is devoted, directed, or ordered toward a give use or end-goal. A tool is meant for a purpose. A tool is rightly used when it fulfils its intended purpose, and wrongly used when not. But if the tool of reason arose not for any purpose, it cannot fulfil its intended purpose. This means the faculty of reason cannot be used correctly when reasonable nor incorrectly when unreasonable.
The faculty of reason may, as a matter of fact, in a given case, aid in the Darwinian competition for fecundity and longevity, but if it does so, this is an accident. In another case where it does not aid in the Darwinian competition, as when intelligent people adopt contraceptive practices unintelligent avoid, then intelligence is selected against, and will be bred out of the bloodline. So if unreason can and will outbreed reason, the accident which granted reason to our race cannot be trusted to have granted honest reason. We have no warrant to assert that reason is reasonable. If Darwin is true, human reason is not trustworthy. Reason is known to have been (briefly, under certain circumstances) effective in competitive fecundity, but is not known to be reasonable.
But if the faculty of reason is what we use to affirm the theory of Darwin is true, if it is not trustworthy, the theory of Darwin is not trustworthy. Darwin disproves Darwin.
During this same period Nietzsche proposed that human reasoning was unreliable for entirely different reasons, since it was unsuitable to the amoral supermen a cosmic process of evolution must and would one day produce; Freud described human reason was the thrall and by-product of unknown and irrational forces from the subconscious mind; Hegel and Marx alike held that human reason was the thrall and by-product of unknown and irrational economic and historical forces operating through a cosmic process of social evolution. Like the idiot gardener sitting on the tree branch he is busily sawing off, each man disproves himself. No more witnesses need be called to the witness box, once the prisoner proves himself guilty.
If it seems strange that all these learned men, highly educated, great thinkers, would make a simple schoolboy mistake, not once, but repeated through the generations, keep in mind that the conclusion of any line of reasoning is planted as a seed in the axioms and assumptions of its beginning. All these great men began from the same false start, followed their logic to its conclusion, which, inevitably, was a false conclusion.
Thomas Aquinas began with common sense, that is, he began by knowing what all men and of all realms and generations know. We know what we know. When questioned, we can give a reason for knowing it. But all knowledge is based ultimately on faith, even as all chains of reasoning begin with an assumption or axiom.
If one cannot take on faith that one exists and that one is not a non-existent being who falsely thinks he exists but does not, one cannot reason. Reason presupposes existence.
Likewise, if one cannot take on faith that one’s sense of self-awareness is not the illusion of a non-self-aware being who falsely thinks he is self-aware, one cannot reason. Reason presupposes self-awareness.
Likewise, if one cannot take on faith that there are unseen minds and inaudible thoughts behind the faces producing the expressions and words of the people we see, one cannot listen to reason or speak reasonably to another. Reasoning presupposes the existence and self-awareness of other rational beings.
To look at the order and beauty of the cosmos, or contemplate the long, dark drama of history, or see moments of grace touching human lives during our pilgrimage in this valley of tears, and to conclude these things have a mind behind them in the same way and for the same reason that we assume there are minds behind the faces we see and speeches we hear is not only a perfectly reasonable supposition, but one which all men of all lands and ages have done.
There is no tribe so primitive or so remote that it does not adopt rituals to appease and adore spirits and ghosts and gods. It is the default of man’s nature, and it would not be part of man’s nature if man’s nature were not, in part, supernatural and aware of the supernatural.
Indeed, even those nations who adopt atheism as their national creed, upon skeptical inspection, are found tacitly to assume human life to be controlled by immaterial superhuman or supernatural powers, even if these powers are called by secular-sounding names: material dialectic, social constructs, systemic racism, genetic determinism, Pavlovian conditioning, the mass-subconsciousness of the human race, the life-force, fate, fortune, the Absolute, the Inner Light. All these are names for some spiritual or demonic force, Norn or Fate or Force of Evolution leading to a proposed reunion with God, or the apotheosis of man into a godlike state.
There are atheists who assert that all attributing of design or order in the cosmos is due to anthropomorphism, as when small children cannot distinguish toys from pets, or imaginary playmates from real.
To attribute all the glory and genius of the religion impulses of mankind, and all the horrors of devil worship, to a mere anthropomorphic mental lapse, as when a man sees suggestive shapes of human faces in clouds or inkblots, is to misunderstand both the religious impulse and the nature of human perception.
A man who glimpses a face in a cloud is using a neurological tool or habit or instinct of facial recognition, a mental shortcut making it easier to recognize faces against confusing visual backgrounds. To see a face where there is no face is a momentary error of this recognition instinct, mistakenly attributing a pattern to chaos, or seeing a cause where there is merely coincidence.
Such things do not persist beyond an eyeblink of time except in men with severe mental illness.
To assert that all men of all times suffer from such mental illness, and that only oneself and the small cadre of fellow crackpots have freed themselves from this illness, and have penetrated to the truth that we live in an empty universe where truth and reason is impossible because God is dead is as unreasonable as believing all men save oneself are cleverly disguised waxwork automatons run by clockworks, and that these automatons sprang of their own accord out of nothing, with no designer and no purpose, exactly mimicking self aware beings merely by happenstance.
Seeing men as waxwork masks with no minds beyond is exactly as irrational as seeing the cosmos as an uncreated happenstance with no creator who created it. It is not a sound philosophical position.
It is, in fact, an unsound philosophical position based on the selfsame error mentioned above. A reason able doubt is one where there is a reason, a suspicion grounded in probable cause, to justify entertaining the suspicion.
If one sees a human figure standing stock-still in the display window of a tailor’s shop, and one entertain a doubt as to whether he is waxwork or alive, one’s doubt has a reasonable cause: experience says most living men to do stand stock-still in the display window of a tailor’s shop except as an prank. Experience says waxworks mannikins are much more likely to be found in this environment.
If, on the other hand, a philosopher tells one that only what sense impressions relate can be known and trusted, but the thoughts and self-awareness of other men can never be inspected by the sense impression, therefore cannot be known and trusted; and if and this leads one to believe all human beings in history, including friends, family, loved ones, are waxwork mannikins, including the philosopher, no reason can be articulated to justify entertaining this doubt. It is an unreasonable doubt.
A man of sound mind, reasoning from assumption to conclusion, if he finds the conclusion absurd, rejects the assumption as absurd. Indeed, the absurdity of the conclusion proves the absurdity of the assumption and ends the argument. Only a man of unsound mind, pretending for the sake of argument that he does not know the self-evident, reaches an absurd conclusion and clings to it, and calls reality absurd.
Once reality is accepted as absurd, other absurdities abound: the absurd man calls life absurd, says truth is untrue, reason is unreasonable, moral standards are subjective, words are meaningless, philosophy is self-deception, and religion is opium. This is the thought that stops thought. A man can follow this unreasonable reasoning and live by this anti-philosophical philosophy only by ignoring it, and retreating into mysticism, pragmatism, and nihilism.
The choice is stark and simple: Truth or untruth.. Reason or unreason. Reality or unreality. Virtue or vice. Life or death. Heaven or hell. Endless bliss or burning forever in the lake of fire.
So when an atheist spreads doubt about a matter well established by multiple proofs and witnesses, and offers instead an worldview tantamount to worshipping some falsehood of man or fallen angel, a worldview tantamount to a void without form, please be ready to answer any reasonable doubt with a reasonable answer, but to dismiss any unreasonable doubt as unreasonable.
If a hermit lived his life as a determinist, nihilist or solipsist, convinced life without meaning, and that all men are waxwork automatons, we would pity, and perhaps hospitalize, such a person, but would not bother debating him. If he showed any willingness to entertain a debate, he contradicts his solipsism, by acting as if other men exist, and he contradict his nihilism, by acting as if there is matter to discuss.
If an atheist demands proof for the existence of God, or any matter of Christian dogma, have him first say what proof would be sufficient to convince him. You will find none can answer, no, not one.
If he says he wants empirical proof for a non-empirical matter, ask him first to prove that true love is real, or the ratio pi, or that man have natural rights. Ask him to prove the Theorem of Pythagoras, or of Darwin, the Golden Rule, or the Law of Non-Contradiction merely be reference to measured magnitudes of mass, length, duration, current, candlepower, temperature, moles of substance: for all empirical magnitudes can be reduced to these seven measures.
Atheist disbelief is an act of blind faith. It is blind faith, not solid faith, for the atheist has faith in an unreasonable doubt. To doubt that creation is created, morality is objective, reason is reasonable, truth is true, beauty is beautiful, free will is free, is not a doubt based on any probable cause. But, absent God, neither creation, morality, reason nor truth can be explained, nor beauty, nor free will.
Atheist doubt is based perhaps on a sentiment, such as pride; perhaps on negligence of thought or inattention to intellectual matters; perhaps based on stupidity, and inability to grasp the obvious; or perhaps based on an urgent desire to justify his life of sin.
But if he cannot articulate a reasonable grounds for doubt, and offer a standard of what type of evidence, proper to the subject matter, can be used to settle the issue fairly, no answer is needed.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
