In Ryrie's world, people do not believe because they are persuaded by arguments and reasons. They choose beliefs on an “emotional”—that is, arational—level and then adopt available arguments to supply their reasons. Intellectual historians seeking to solve the mystery of the death of God in our culture—as Ryrie's Nietzsche had understood the modern age—were operating from false epistemological and psychological premises. Metaphysicians, natural philosophers, heterodox theologians, freethinkers, and savants indeed provided the cognitive building blocks of religious unbelief, but saying that does not explain why anyone appropriated those arguments. The history of unbelief in early modern Europe was not a history of ideas, but a history of emotions. Early modern religious life led to anger at ecclesiastical corruption and anxiety over salvation, which led to a lived doubt. Unbelief in practice preceded unbelief in theory.
Ryrie's anxious and angry actors, however, beset by various and widely divergent sets of doubts,...
