Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar—a rock opera loosely retelling the story of Jesus’s crucifixion—contains a curious scene not referenced in the Gospels. In this scene towards the end of the second act, the soul of Judas Iscariot returns from the dead to confront the dying Jesus, in one of the show’s most memorable songs.
In “Superstar,” the traumatized ghost vents his frustrations with his beloved teacher, shouting the questions that still plague him even in death, and begging for the answers he thinks will finally give him peace.
“Only wanna know,” he cries, again and again. Know what, exactly? Whatever will make sense of the whole mess: the loss of his friend; his own betrayal; the last few years of his short life, and its brutal ending. Did it all mean anything? What was the point? What do I do now?
Such a small request, really—a straight answer. A few words, that, when spoken, would cause everything to fall neatly into place. A parting gift of certainty. Surely, that wouldn’t be too much to ask of an omniscient God made flesh. If Jesus really is “what they say [he is],” then he must know how to answer his disciple’s questions in a way that will allow him, at long last, to rest.
But Jesus says nothing. He just stands there, watching, while Judas pours his heart out. He offers only silence.
Like Judas, we want certainty. Definitive answers to the questions raised by this story of a man who got nailed to a cross, and the tradition that sprang out of it. The questions raised by our own brokenness. But certainty is the one thing we can never have.
Geniuses and Vats
When we’re dealing with the Big Questions of life and death, it’s hard to find answers that satisfy our curiosities—or calm our fears. We have our doubts. We look for explanations. We collect some very nice ones.
Then, in at most a few years, we run up against the limits of human knowing. We find that our worldviews are mostly unprovable assumptions about the nature of God and the afterlife, the purpose of this current life, and so on. We’ve realize we’ve put together a mismatched jumble of cherry-picked Bible verses, empirical observations, and ideas from movies, and called it “reality.”
We realize that, for one reason or another, it is at least possible to question every single one of our beliefs, and that no particular text, idea, or feeling is beyond doubt.
René Descartes, in his “First Meditation,” illustrates the problem with a colorful thought experiment. He supposes that some malevolent, omnipotent being—an “evil genius”—might, at this very moment, be using Descartes’ very senses as his playthings: projecting sights, sounds, smells, etc. into the philosopher’s mind, thereby creating for him an entire illusory world. A more recent materialist update to this same thought experiment imagines the subject as a “brain in a vat,” being manipulated by an evil scientist through chemicals and electrical impulses rather than magic.
In either case, the end result is the same. By following the thought experiment through to its logical conclusion, we come to understand that there is reason to doubt all of the information that we feel we are gathering through our senses—that is, every piece of information we have ever gotten, ever.
Worse, there seems to be no surefire way to disprove the existence of something like Descartes’s evil genius once and for all. We haven’t found that one, satisfying thing that would establish the reality of what we perceive to be the external world—the one proof that would banish this kind of global doubt.
Seriously. People have tried.
The Missing Criterion
Radical skepticism—hardcore doubt about our very ability to “know” things with certainty—predates Descartes by at least a thousand years.
In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, likely composed around the second or third century CE, Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus lays out a way of thinking that, unlike Stoicism, Platonism, or Epicureanism, has never managed to sell many books.
This isn’t surprising. Unlike the other Greek and Roman schools of thought, Pyrrhonism—like radical skepticism in general—leaves its adherents without a clear path forward in life. Doubting everything, it makes no firm statements about anything, least of all what people ought to do with themselves. As a philosophy, it’s short on practical recommendations, and long on navel-gazing.
For this reason, British philosopher Bertrand Russell understandably described radical skepticism as “psychologically impossible,” a way of thinking characterized by a “frivolous insincerity.” At the same time, however, he admitted that the system was “logically impeccable.”
The logic he’s referring to, as presented by Sextus Empiricus in the Outlines, is a methodical, step by step cutting-away of any firm conviction or certainty that a reader might hold regarding everything from ethics to the very nature of reality. At the root of the skeptic argument is the fact that we lack what Sextus Empiricus calls a “criterion”—an ultimate principle or standard by which a given philosophical position may be judged as absolutely true or false.
Lacking this criterion, the responsible philosopher feels compelled to suspend judgment—to say, whenever presented with an assertion about the way things really are, “I determine nothing.”
This is not the same thing as completely denying the possibility of knowledge—that would be a dogmatic statement in and of itself. It is simply the expression of the skeptic’s inner state, which is a lack of final, complete confidence in any particular worldview (even the skeptic worldview, which could in theory be overturned at any time by the discovery of an infallible criterion).
Without a criterion that could nip our infinite chains of questions in the bud once and for all, the skeptic feels that we don’t have a very good reason to claim definitive knowledge about anything.
Judas the Skeptic: Religious Doubt
Like Judas, the questioning religious person can’t help but feel that we’re all walking around without our clothes on when it comes to questions of what is or is not, claiming to have answers about reality when what we really have are descriptions of experience. Craving knowledge, we turn to scripture, commentary, tradition—but more often than not, our digging winds up undermining the very worldviews we hoped to save.
The questioning Catholic, for instance, might start out by wondering what the authority claimed by the Church ultimately rests on. Unsatisfied by the answer that the Church is guided in its actions by the Spirit, she might set out to learn where the Church’s teachings originally came from, and trace her way back through a long history of debate, translation, and politics to the men who wrote the books of the New Testament and its various commentaries.
Here, she starts running into real obstacles. Jesus of Nazareth, the star of the show, seemingly never got around to writing his own book. All the evidence she has of this man’s life and words is an echo off a canyon wall—a wave on the surface of the water, rather than the breeze that caused it.
But even assuming that the apostles and church fathers captured his life and the meaning behind it perfectly, she finds herself wondering how she could know whether Jesus’s words were expressions of truth in the first place, assuming there’s a truth to be expressed. At the end of the day, she’s being asked to trust an experience of divine revelation allegedly undergone by a consciousness other than her own—an experience which she can only guess might be made up of the same sense impressions, ideas, and gut feelings that compose her own experience of the world. And that’s a problem, because by this point in her journey, the skeptic is having a hard time putting faith in her own senses.
Unlike Doubting Thomas, who was satisfied with bloody fingers, the skeptic can’t accept empirical evidence at face value—or deny it, for that matter. Elementary school science projects have shown her how easy it is to trick the senses. She is aware of how radically a person’s behavior, and perhaps their experience of reality, can be altered by physical changes in the brain.
Perhaps she herself has had subjectively profound spiritual and mystical experiences. On what grounds would she confirm or deny their truth—that is, their alignment with some ultimate reality—given that these experiences were composed of the fickle ingredients that seem to make up all her experiences, namely sights, sounds, feelings, scents, and tastes, along with the ideas that follow those sense impressions? How would she know whether these experiences actually point to what she thinks of as “reality”?
How would Jesus have known?
Reason, she discovers, leads her to suspend judgement—to say “I determine nothing”—rather than affirm a neo-scholastic theology and the teachings that follow from it. She is forced into an encounter with the numinous—with religious horror—and realizes that she can neither confirm nor deny the Church’s claims…about anything. If there is such a thing as “truth,” neither she nor the Church can seem to reach it through logic.
The skeptic is disturbed.
