Honest Doubt Part 12 - Believer's Doubt

Richard Holloway speaks of the "Victorian nervous breakdown" and looks at the lives of four people who were affected by this affliction: Cardinal Newman, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold.

I guess many students of literature will have studied the religious struggles of the poets - indeed I guess that anyone with some knowledge of the history of ideas will be familiar with problems that seemed to sink the ship of Christian orthodoxy in the 19th century: critical studies of the Bible as history, Darwin and evolution attacking the idea of God as a designer, the long history of the earth conflicting with the age of the earth in the Bible and so on.

In the previous program it seemed that some thinkers responded to the opportunity to think for themselves with the holding of a variety of religious views - Schopenhauer for example  was influenced by eastern religious thought, yet in this program it seems that other thinkers felt that if Christianity wasn't right, the only alternative was atheism - they never gave another thought to other religious ideas.

It seems strange that whilst a set of very specific religious views was being shown to be wrong, the response wasn't to look at what other religions had to say, or even to consider whether a new religion needed to be formed, or older religions revived, but instead to mourn the loss of religion as such.