My Conversion to Skeptical Belief (Christopher Beha, 2/10/26, NY Times)
To many, this will sound like a bit of a paradox, since skepticism and belief are understood to be in serious tension, if not outright opposition. We are all skeptical at certain times about certain things, but when we refer to someone more generally as a “skeptic,” we tend to mean that this person bases beliefs about the world entirely on the rational examination of objective evidence. More pointedly, we almost always mean that this person does not believe in God. But this is not at all the term’s historical meaning.
The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis is often counted as the first philosophical skeptic. His complete doubt about the possibility of any human knowledge extended so far that, according to an ancient, possibly apocryphal account, he refused even to accept the evidence of his senses while walking down the street, “taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs or what not.” (His less skeptical friends followed behind to keep him out of trouble.)
Pyrrho’s first great modern disciple, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, would not even say that he knew nothing, which seemed to express too much certainty. He preferred to put the matter as a question: “What do I know?” Yet Montaigne’s essays contain countless expressions of Christian piety. Precisely because we can’t have knowledge about even the most basic points, he argued, we must inevitably take certain things on faith — at least, if we don’t have friends kind enough to spend their lives guiding us around dogs and carts.
It’s possible to understand the entire modern philosophical tradition as an effort to grapple with the extreme skepticism that Montaigne reintroduced to Western culture without falling, as Montaigne did, back on faith. Four hundred and fifty years later, that project has brought us to a strange point.
The strangeness resides in the fact that reason disproves the foundations of Reason and demonstrates that all is faith.