Episode 22: What is the Role of Doubt in Faith (Part 2)?
July 18, 2011

Partial text of “The Creation of the World by Marduk.”

20. He formed mankind.

21. The goddess Aruru together with him…created the seed of mankind.

22. The beasts of the field and living creatures in the field he formed.

23. He created the Tigris and the Euphrates, and he set them in their place;

24. Their names he declared in goodly fashion.

25. The grass, the rush of the marsh, the reed, and the forest he created,

26. The green herb of the field he created,

27. The lands, the marshes, and the swamps;

28. The wild cow and her young, the wild calf; the ewe and her young, the lamb of the fold;

29. Plantations and forests;

30. The he-goat and the mountain-goat … him.

31. The Lord Marduk laid in a dam by the side of the sea,

32. [He …] a swamp, he made a marsh.

Paul Claudel’s quote from his play The Satin Slipper.”

“Just as we have already recognized that the believer does not live immune to doubt but is always threatened by the plunge into the void, so now we can discern the entangled nature of human destinies and say that the nonbeliever does not lead a sealed-off, self-sufficient life either. . . . Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole . . . [He too] remains threatened by the question of whether belief is not after all the reality it claims to be. . . . Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.”  (emphasis added)