Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

25

The ‘Atheist Scare’ and the Advent of Doubt

Copernicus died in 1543. According to tradition, he received the first printed copy of De revolutionibus, his famous book on the heavens, on his deathbed. It makes for a dramatic and moving story, but we should not make more of this episode than it deserves. In fact, the ‘revolution’ which De revolutionibus sparked took quite a while to come about. In the first place, the book is virtually unreadable except to erudite astronomers. Second, more important, reports of Copernicus’ research – including his new hypothesis, that the earth went round the sun, rather than vice versa – had been circulating in Europe, among scientists, since about 1515. For at least two decades Copernicus had been recognised as one of Europe’s leading astronomers and his book, which would set out the details of the new theory, was keenly awaited by colleagues.

When De revolutionibus did appear, most of these colleagues recognised immediately the book’s importance.¹ Indeed, many astronomers referred to Copernicus as a ‘second Ptolemy’ and, by the second half of the sixteenth century, his book had become a standard reference for nearly all professionals in the field. At the same time, and incredible as it may seem to us, the central argument of De revolutionibus was ignored. ‘Authors who applauded Copernicus’ erudition, borrowed his diagrams, or quoted his determination of the distance from the earth to the moon, usually either ignored the earth’s motion or dismissed it as absurd.’² An English elementary textbook on the heavens, published in 1594, more than half a century after Copernicus’ book appeared, took the earth’s stability for granted. This is even more surprising than it may seem in retrospect because, except for the Church, Copernicus was pushing at a door that was more open than one might think.

By the end of the sixteenth century, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited.³ Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in their thousands, and hundreds of martyrs had been put to death, often in spectacularly cruel ways, for holding opinions that no one could prove, one way or the other. As was mentioned above, if so many people were convinced their divine inspirations were right, and yet they disagreed so drastically, surely this must mean that divine inspiration was often illusory. Ironically enough, the Bible itself was instrumental in provoking some of these events. For it was now that vernacular translations of the scriptures brought the book before a mass audience. From the 1520s on, the Bible passed beyond the realm of the scholar and the divine and, as Brian Moynahan has pointed out, the implications of what was not in it became as important as what was. In particular, what could now be seen clearly were the many church practices and privileges ‘that were found to be blessed by custom but not directly by God’.⁴ Menno Simons was just one twenty-eight-year-old, in Pingjum, Holland, who had his doubts – in his case about the bread and wine at mass being the flesh and blood of Christ. He attributed these doubts to the devil, trying to prise him from his faith. He had confessed this often, he said, when he finally got the idea ‘to examine the New Testament diligently . . . I had not gone very far when I discovered that we were deceived . . .’⁵ He was in fact ‘quickly relieved’, he said, to find no evidence that the bread and wine were anything other than mere symbols of Christ’s passion. Relieved or not, it was still an overwhelming shock.

The access to the sacred book which the vernacular translations gave ordinary people was dangerous, and the Church knew it. For example, it allowed the laity to discover for themselves the inconsistencies and contradictions in the text, inconsistencies and contradictions which had been kept from them. A young Englishman, in Chelmsford, Essex, was forbidden to read William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible (hundreds of copies of which were being smuggled into Britain) and ordered by his father to consult only the Latin edition, which the young man could not read. He rebelled, obtained a copy of the English translation and hid it under his bedstraw, reading it when he could. This soon led him to mock the reverence which his elders displayed to the cross, kneeling before it in church, raising their hands to it when it passed by in procession. He told his mother one night, when his father was asleep, that such practices were mere idolatry and against the wishes of God, who had said ‘Thou shalt not make any graven image, nor bow down to it, nor worship it.’⁶

The practice of numbering biblical verses, introduced by the printer Robert Stephanus in Geneva in 1551, also played a part. Being able to find their way around the scriptures more easily for many people only pointed up the many glaring inconsistencies and conflicting truths. Anabaptists pointed out that Genesis supported polygamy. In Mark’s gospel, on the other hand, Jesus said ‘a man . . . shall cleave to his wife’ (10:6). Divorce is permitted in Deuteronomy but not in Matthew.⁷ The book of Kings encourages the non-payment of taxes, whereas Matthew’s gospel says they must be paid. Many other practices and traditions, sanctified by time, and which the laity assumed were in the scriptures, were actually nowhere to be found. These included papal authority, the celibacy of priests, transubstantiation, infant baptism, the canonisation of saints and the impossibility of salvation outside the Catholic Church.⁸

The fragmentation epitomised by the inter-faith violence, and accompanied by the discovery by the wider public of the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible, helped to produce a situation where, by the end of the sixteenth century, sects with more or less extreme views had proliferated to the point of bewilderment so that there was now, if anything, too much theological choice, making the discovery of the ‘true faith’ more difficult, more impossible, than ever. One result was that the word ‘atheist’ came to be much more widely used than ever before.⁹

Atheism is a Greek word. The first recorded atheist in history was Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (fl. 480–450 BC). Certainly he was the first to be accused of atheism, and was prosecuted and condemned for his free thought.¹⁰ Yet Socrates tells us that Anaxagoras’ books were widely available in Athens and that anyone could pick them up for a drachma – in other words, he wasn’t regarded as a crank.¹¹ The poet Diagoras of Melos was also accused of atheism, after he had concluded that there could be no god because so many acts of iniquity went unpunished.¹² (We are also told that Diagoras broke up a statue of Hercules and used it for firewood, impudently daring the god to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips.) More than one character in the plays of Euripides impeaches the gods, insisting there can be no truth in the ‘miserable tale of poets’.¹³ In ancient Rome, there was less freethought than in Athens. There are no references to religion in Cicero’s private letters and in Petronius’ Satyricon the characters take pleasure in ridiculing priests who officiate at mysteries they don’t really comprehend.¹⁴ But this too is scepticism rather than out-and-out atheism.

As was referred to in the Introduction, James Thrower has examined what he calls ‘The Alternative Tradition’, the rejection of religious explanations in the ancient world. He described, for instance, the Lokayata tradition in India, beginning in the sixth century BC, which was essentially a hedonistic approach to the world, based on a lost text, the Brhaspati Sutra. This system arose at much the same time as Buddhism and the Upanishads (it was also known as Carvaka) and its central beliefs were a rejection of tradition and magic, and that the body and the self were one and the same, meaning there was no life after death: one lived for pleasure in the here and now. Purana Kassapa, a wandering Indian ascetic, also attacked the fundamental Hindu doctrine of karma, held that there is no hereafter, and that morality is a natural phenomenon, whose only purpose is to help life on earth. He was followed by Ajita Kesakambali and Makkhali Gosala, the founder of the Ajivikas, a sect which survived at least into the thirteenth century AD, who had a naturalistic conception of man.¹⁵ The notion of ‘natural laws’, which explain change and evolution in the world, was not at all uncommon in ancient and medieval Indian thought.¹⁶

Thrower also notes that in China the Taoists discouraged speculation about the ultimate origin and end of nature, stressing the eternity and uncreatedness of the Tao, that all was silent and empty before Heaven and Earth were produced, that there was a fundamental unity to nature – i.e., a set of laws, which it was the job of philosophy to apprehend, rather than creation as such. In China supernatural forces were ruled out by Xun Zi (298–238 BC), who discounted the efficacy of prayer and divination, who recommended the study of nature rather than its worship and, like his later epigone Wang Chong (AD 27–97), argued that what happens in the world is the fruit of human ‘merit or demerit’, rather than supernatural forces.¹⁷ The naturalistic theories of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) were considered in Chapter 14.

Thrower’s argument is that when these Indian and Chinese ideas are put together with Greek and Roman thought – Ionian science, the sophists, the Epicureans, Roman notions of imperium, their very great practicality in turning successful emperors into gods – the approach to the natural world, omitting supernatural elements, amounts to an alterative chain of thought that has had insufficient attention from historians.

J. M. Robertson, in his history of freethought in the West, says there was a ‘startling display’ of freethinking at Paris University in 1376, by the philosophical students. Among a list of 219 theses that they proposed, they denied the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, and the immortality of the soul. They insisted that prayer was useless and that there are ‘fables and falsehoods’ in the gospels as in other books. They were sharply ‘scolded’ by the archbishop but nothing more serious seems to have resulted.¹⁸

The historian Jean Seznec has chronicled the survival of the pagan gods in Renaissance art, from Botticelli to Mantegna and from Correggio to Tintoretto. He shows how pagan antiquity had never really disappeared in the Middle Ages, not the gods anyway. The dukes of Burgundy had prided themselves on being descended from a demigod and the Trojans were very popular at their court.¹⁹ Jupiter and Hercules were included in the tapestries of Beauvais cathedral,²⁰ and four mythical divinities were represented in the fifteenth-century chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, among them Apollo, Mars and Jupiter.²¹ In the campanile in Florence Jupiter is dressed as a monk!²² Seznec’s point, insofar as it relates to this part of our narrative, is that the pagan gods and the Christian God had lived side-by-side until the Renaissance, with medieval people unwilling to discard the classical gods entirely.²³

While Copernicus was being (slowly) assimilated across Europe, Michel Eyquem, better known as Montaigne (1533–1592), was using his classical education and his mixed background (a devout Catholic father, and a Jewish mother who converted to Protestantism) to evolve away of looking at the world which repudiated the orthodox Christian position and prepared his fellow men for the shattering changes that were about to break over them.

Montaigne’s background made it next to impossible for him to accept that any one faith had a monopoly of divine revelation and this thinking he applied not just to beliefs but also to morality. Growing up amid the flood of discoveries from the New World had its effect too, producing in him a lively interest in the diversity of customs and beliefs found on the other side of the Atlantic, where people were ‘Achristian’, a label that would also come to be applied to early sceptics.²⁴ This gave Montaigne a great tolerance for others, and for different ways of thinking, and together these provided the basis for his complete rejection of one of the central tenets of Christianity. For Christians of the world in which Montaigne grew up, the chief purpose of someone’s intellectual life was to secure salvation in the world to come (he was especially critical of Luther).²⁵ Philosophy’s main function, in such a world, as the handmaiden of theology, was likewise ‘the preparation of man for a safe death’.²⁶ Montaigne thought this was nonsense and reversed the proposition, arguing that the purpose of knowledge is to teach men how to live more adequately, more productively, more happily, right here on earth. This revision had a major effect on the shape of intellectual life. Among other things, it meant that, for Montaigne, theology, ‘the queen of the sciences’, and philosophy were now much less important: they were replaced as the chief objects of interest by psychology, ethnology and aesthetics. This was in effect the birth of the human sciences.

In doing this, Montaigne gave a huge injection of intellectual muscle to the secular world, and to the purpose and value of diversity. In arguing against the ‘otherworldly’ obsession of Christianity, he also cast doubt on ideas about the immortality of the soul.²⁷ ‘If philosophy is to teach us how to live rather than how to die, we must gather the largest possible amount of information as to the ways in which men live and then analyse this mass of material in calm and judicious fashion.’²⁸ It was immediately obvious to Montaigne, looking around him at the newly gathered material from the New World and elsewhere, that men and women had devised many ways of adapting to their environment. It was therefore self-evident that God favoured diversity over uniformity.²⁹ In the same way, Montaigne’s concentration on this life rather than the next also downgraded in importance yet another basic ingredient of Christianity, the concept of the soul, and the related tendency to assume that anything to do with the soul was good and wholesome and anything to do with the body was base and bad. From this two things followed. One, it hit at the clergy, as intercessors for the fate of the soul. And two, it freed people from the medieval belief that sexual relations were bad in themselves. Instead Montaigne maintained that sex should be dignified but no guilt should be attached to its practice.

Montaigne’s conceptual innovations amounted to a major break with the traditional Jewish/Christian tribal idea of God as a jealous, arbitrary and, yes, occasionally cruel God. Instead, as more than one historian has remarked, Montaigne shares with Lord Shaftesbury in England the honour of discovering that ‘God is a Gentleman’. Montaigne never really doubted that there was a God, but he radically changed our idea of what God is.

One reason Montaigne never really doubted that there was a God was because to do so in his lifetime was next to impossible. In his classic book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, the French historian Lucien Febvre argues that ‘the conceptual difficulties in the way of a complete denial of God’s existence at this time were so great as to be insurmountable’. ‘Every activity of the day, which was punctuated with church bells summoning the faithful to prayer, was saturated with religious beliefs and institutions: they dominated professional and public life – even the guilds and universities were religious organisations.’ What people ate was surrounded by religious rituals and prohibitions.³⁰ In Montpellier at the beginning of Lent the old pots used for cooking meat were broken and new ones installed, for fish. Cooking a capon on Friday was punishable by beating or public humiliation at Mass. If insects or rats infested the countryside, the priest was called first to get rid of them.³¹ ‘People had simply not yet achieved the objectivity necessary to question the existence of God, nor would this exist until a body of coherent reasons had been established, each based on scientific discoveries which nobody could deny.’³²

And so, when people accused one another of ‘atheism’ they meant something different from what we mean today. Many equated atheism with libertinism.³³ The Frenchman Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), who was both a scientist and a friar, claimed that there were ‘about 50,000 atheists’ in Paris alone but the ones he named personally all believed in God. The fact is that Mersenne called people atheists when their views about God differed from his own and this was typical. At that time the word ‘atheist’ was used not as we would use it today but as an insult. People in the sixteenth century never dreamed of calling themselves atheists.³⁴

Nevertheless, views and opinions did begin to change. Montaigne led the way but it took nearly a century before Copernicus’ views were fully accepted, as people gradually grasped, and then got to grips with, the full implications of what he was saying. These events have been painstakingly set down by Thomas Kuhn.

Kuhn shows, as was mentioned earlier, that professional astronomers were for decades able to use most of the information provided by Copernicus without paying attention to his central thesis, that the earth went round the sun. The commotion was slow in starting and when it did start it was because its arguments had reached beyond astronomers. To begin with, Copernicus and those who agreed with him were ridiculed for the absurdity of their beliefs.³⁵ Jean Bodin (1529–1596), the French political philosopher, was particularly dismissive. ‘No one in his senses, or imbued with the slightest knowledge of physics,’ he wrote, ‘will ever think that the earth, heavy and unwieldy from its own weight and mass, staggers up and down around its own centre and that of the sun; for at the slightest jar of the earth, we would see cities and fortresses, towns and mountains thrown down.’³⁶

The most bitter objections, however, came from those who found that Copernicus’ theory conflicted with scripture. Even before Copernicus published his book, but when his ideas were beginning to circulate, Martin Luther, in one of his ‘Table Talks’, held in 1539, was quoted as saying: ‘People give ear to an upstart astrologer [sic] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon . . . This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.’³⁷ As biblical citation was increasingly used against the Copernicans, they were labelled either ‘infidels’ or ‘atheists’. Eventually, about 1610, when the Catholic Church officially joined the battle against the new astronomy, the charge became one of formal heresy.³⁸ In 1616 De revolutionibus and all other works that affirmed the earth’s motion were placed on the Index and Catholics were forbidden to teach or even to read Copernican doctrines.

By this time, as Kuhn shows, the full implications of Copernicanism had been assimilated, as people grasped that his results were potentially destructive of a whole system of thought. Kuhn’s description is worth quoting at length: ‘If, for example, the earth was merely one of six planets, how were the stories of the Fall and of the Salvation, with their immense bearing on Christian life, to be preserved? If there were other bodies essentially like the Earth, God’s goodness would surely necessitate that they, too, be inhabited. But if there were men on other planets, how could they be descendants of Adam and Eve, and how could they have inherited the original sin, which explains man’s otherwise incomprehensible travail on an earth made for him by a good and omnipotent deity? Again, how could men on other planets know of the Saviour who opened to them the possibility of eternal life? Or, if the earth is a planet and therefore a celestial body located away from the center of the universe, what becomes of man’s intermediate but focal position between the devils and the angels? . . . Worst of all, if the universe is infinite, as many of the later Copernicans thought, where can God’s Throne be located? In an infinite universe, how is man to find God or God man?’ These questions helped to alter the religious experience of man.³⁹

Both John Donne and John Milton thought that Copernicus might very well be right (Keith Thomas reminds us that Britain was more highly educated in Milton’s day than at any time until the First World War) but in spite of this neither liked the new system and, in Paradise Lost, Milton reverted to the traditional view for his drama.⁴⁰ The Protestant leaders, Calvin as well as Luther, were just as keen to suppress the expression of Copernican beliefs but they never had the police infrastructure that the Counter-Reformation Catholics did and so were much less effective. Even so, when in 1616, and more explicitly in 1633, the Church prohibited the teaching or believing that the sun was the centre of the universe, many Catholics were shocked, and shocked for two reasons. One, the more educated could see that by then the new theory was being supported by fresh evidence that was emerging all the time. And two, this was an important change of stance by the Church: hitherto it had always maintained a dignified silence on cosmological matters, which at least had the merit of preventing it from ever being in the wrong, and at the same time allowed the appearance of being open to new ideas. Now all that was thrown out.⁴¹

The traditional view became even harder to support in 1572 with the appearance in the night sky of a nova, or new star. Then there was a series of comets which appeared in 1577, 1580, 1585, 1590, 1593 and 1596. Each of these episodes showed that the heavens were mutable, again in contradiction of the scriptures.⁴² No parallax was observed with these bodies, forcing people to conclude that they were further away than the moon, which meant that they occupied the zone of the heavens which was supposed to be filled by crystalline spheres. Bit by bit, Copernicus became harder to dismiss.⁴³

Kepler, as we have already seen in an earlier chapter, discovered that the orbits of the planets were ellipses, not spherical, and this too destroyed the idea of crystalline spheres. Kepler, however, hesitated to face up to the full implications of his discoveries and it was Galileo, and his telescope, which provided ‘countless’ pieces of evidence which put Copernicanism beyond doubt.⁴⁴ First was his observation that the Milky Way, which to the naked eye had been just a pale glow in the sky, now turned out to be a vast collection of stars. Next, the moon was revealed to be covered by craters, mountains and valleys (from the size of the shadows cast Galileo was able to estimate their height). Thus the moon was shown to be not so very different from earth, further fuelling doubts about the difference between this world and the heavens.⁴⁵

But the very worst observation, and the one which had the biggest impact on the seventeenth-century imagination, was Galileo’s identification of the four ‘moons’ of Jupiter, orbiting the planet in roughly circular fashion. This not only confirmed exactly what Copernicus had argued, about the earth orbiting the sun, but – perhaps more important – it confirmed the more general notion that the earth was not the centre of the universe, that it was in fact just one body among thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, in an infinite universe. It was now that the greatest opposition to the Copernican system was shown and that is perhaps to be expected. Until Galileo, it was possible to have honest doubts about Copernican theories; but to doubt the Copernican system after Galileo required people to deliberately misunderstand the evidence.⁴⁶ Cardinal Bellarmino, the leader of the church officials who condemned Copernican views, nevertheless acknowledged the problem. In a letter written in 1615 he said: ‘If there were a real proof that the sun is the centre of the universe, that the earth is in the third heaven, and that the sun does not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true.’⁴⁷ Not until 1822 did the Church permit books to be printed which accepted that the earth’s motion was real, a delay which fatally damaged Catholic science and likewise church prestige.⁴⁸ And so, despite the evidence, it took two hundred years for Copernicus to be fully accepted. During these years, however, the attitude to God was being transformed.

The growth of doubt, what Richard Popkin has called ‘the third force in seventeenth-century thought’, occurred in four stages. These were what we may call rationalistic supernaturalism, deism, scepticism and, finally, full-blown atheism. It is also worth pointing out that the advent of doubt, besides being a chapter in the history of ideas, was also a stage in the history of publishing. The battle between orthodox traditionalists and free thinkers, to give the doubters their generic name, was fought out partly in books, but it was also a time when pamphleteering was at its height. (The pamphlet is the natural length of a sermon, or a letter, and this length seems to have caught on.) Many of the ideas to be discussed in the remainder of this chapter were published in book form but just as much was published as pamphlets – short, physically flimsy tracts, often with a combative style and title (for example, A Discourse against Transubstantiation, 1684; Geologia; or a discourse about the earth before the deluge, 1690; The Unreasonableness of the Doctrine of the Trinity briefly demonstrated, in a letter to a friend, 1692).

The first of the four stages of doubt, rationalistic supernaturalism, was especially popular in England. Its basic tenet was that religion should conform to reason and that in particular revelation should accord with reason.⁴⁹ One of the early advocates of this approach was John Tillotson (1630–1694), archbishop of Canterbury, who argued that religion – any religion, but Christianity in particular – must be considered as a series of rational propositions, supported by logic. Tillotson’s main concern was with miracles.⁵⁰ These, he said, must clearly be beyond the power of human beings to perform, but miracles, to be miracles, must be performed for a logical reason, not simply as a display of magical ingenuity. On this score, he said, the miracles of Jesus conformed to reason: they were performed for a purpose. But not all the alleged miracles of the post-Apostolic saints fell into this category.⁵¹

John Locke, in addition to his many other activities, may be classified as a rationalistic supernaturalist. He believed that Christianity was a supremely reasonable religion because of its basic tenets, which he said were perfectly rational (though Locke, the apostle of toleration, would have denied free speech to religious sects that he thought were an irrational threat to the state, including Roman Catholics).⁵² These basic tenets were that there is one omnipotent God, who requires that man should live a virtuous life in accordance with the divine will, and that there is an afterlife in which sinful deeds in this world will be punished and good deeds rewarded. This, for Locke, was a perfectly rational way for God to order the universe: it made good sense. He argued that miracles may be ‘above reason’ but cannot be contrary to reason.⁵³ A passionate follower of Locke was John Toland (1670–1722), who argued that if God ‘has anything to reveal to us he is capable of revealing it clearly’. It followed for Toland that God would not wish for any possibility of misunderstanding and that therefore true revelation must accord with reason. For him, certain miracles, such as the virgin birth, failed this test and should therefore be jettisoned. In his Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul, published in 1702, William Coward argued that the idea of the human soul – a ‘spiritual immortal substance, united to the Human Body’ – was ‘a plain Heathenish invention, and not consonant to the principles of Philosophy, Reason, or Religion’. He thought it was ‘absurd, and . . . abominable’.⁵⁴

Deistic thought, the second stage in the advent of doubt, also came into existence in England, from where it spread both to the continent and to America. It lasted for about a century and a half, from Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) to Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). However, the actual word ‘deist’ was coined by the Genevois Pierre Viret (1511–1571), to describe someone who believed in God but not in Jesus Christ. One of the main influences on later deists were the new discoveries of science, which suggested to many people that God was not an arbitrary figure, as in ancient Judaism for example, but the maker of the laws which Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and the others had uncovered. Since God had made these laws, the deists contended, God would naturally abide by them and in this way set mankind an example. The discoveries in America, Africa and elsewhere only underlined that all men had a religious sense but on the other continents there was no awareness of Jesus. The deists therefore used this as evidence that religion requires no supernatural elements to support it, that prophecy and miracles have no place in a ‘scientific religion’, and that such a set of beliefs appeals to all reasonable men wherever they are.⁵⁵

Most of the deists were anticlerical. This explains why, for the most part, the deist pamphlets of the time were written either in satirical vein or in an aggressive tone of ridicule.⁵⁶ Most deists insisted that the extensive superstitions and elaborate machinery of worship in the Church were simply concoctions dreamt up by the priesthood, to satisfy their own selfish and political ends. The worst of these elements was that of intercession, which placed the priesthood between man and God, maintaining a set of privileges that had no basis in scripture and was all too easy to see through. More fundamental still were the attacks on the Bible by individuals such as William Whiston (1667–1752), who succeeded Newton as professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and who thought there was great deist significance in the identification of gravity. Another like-minded soul was Anthony Collins: between them they examined carefully the prophecies of the Old Testament and found scant support for the idea that they had predicted the coming of Jesus.⁵⁷ Peter Annet, in his Resurrection of Jesus Considered (1744), came out boldly with an argument that the apostolic accounts of the Resurrection were fabricated, while Charles Blount (1654–1693) was equally blunt about original sin, the concept of which he found unreasonable. He had the same view of heaven and hell, which he said had been invented by priests ‘to increase their hold over the terror-stricken and ignorant masses’.⁵⁸

The most influential French deist, who was a deist partly because he had been to England as a young man, and admired its system of government, was Voltaire. He was also motivated by an intense desire to destroy smugness and intolerance in France. (He thought fanaticism was ‘unworthy’ of any deity.⁵⁹) He derided everything about Christianity, from the idea that the Bible is a sacred book to the miracles, which to him were sheer frauds. ‘Every man of sense,’ he wrote, ‘every good man, ought to hold the Christian sect in horror. The great name of theist, which is not sufficiently revered, is the only name one ought to take. The only Gospel one ought to read is the great book of nature, written by the hand of God and sealed with his seal. The only religion that ought to be professed is the religion of worshipping God and being a good man.’⁶⁰ At the same time, Voltaire echoed the Athenians: he felt that the new views were fine for the literate upper classes, but that the lower classes needed religion, old-style religion, as a form of social cement. In his Social Contract, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) sought to establish deism as the civil religion of France. He thought that the existence of a ‘powerful, intelligent, benevolent, prescient and provident divinity’ should be acknowledged and that people should remain circumspect about ‘what cannot be either disproved or comprehended’. But again, there was no place for Jesus.⁶¹ What Rousseau meant by religion was really a philosophical concern with justice and charity towards one’s neighbour.⁶²

In Germany Immanuel Kant, while accepting the basic tenets of Christianity, as a loving religion, was implacable in opposing the supernatural elements – prophecy and miracles – calling them ‘wholly evil’. He was also opposed to the medieval idea of grace, the superabundance of which had led earlier to the abuse of indulgences. In America both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were deists and so was Jefferson.⁶³

The overall impact of the deists was to achieve a major transformation in the concept of God, arguably the greatest change in understanding since the development of ethical monotheism in the sixth century BC. Out had gone the jealous, petty-minded tribal God of the Israelites, adapted by the Christians and Muslims, and in its place was a ‘grander, nobler God’, the God of all the universe, compatible, as Alexander Pope said, with the new astronomy and natural science. God had lost his ‘divine arbitrariness’ and was now regarded as a law-making and law-abiding deity, identified with the ‘unending repetitions and orderly behaviour of nature’.⁶⁴ This did, however, also run directly counter to the doctrine of the Trinity.

In both Europe and America, however, deism eventually foundered and it did so because it fell between two stools. It was too adventurous and too abstract to comfort the devout, the traditional and the orthodox, while at the same time it was seen as too timid to appeal to the truly sceptical. Nevertheless, it served as a sort of halfway house for the most radical change in ideas since the birth of ethical monotheism. Many people could not have gone directly from orthodox belief to atheism. Deism eased the way.

Thomas Hobbes did not call himself a sceptic, but it is hard to form any different view from his strongly worded remarks, in which he argued time and again that religious beliefs are essentially based on ignorance, in particular ignorance of science and of the future. He thought most religious and theological writing useless, ‘which fill our libraries and the world with their noise and uproar, but wherefrom the last thing we may expect is conviction’.⁶⁵ It was strong stuff but a better, more rational and for that reason more devastating sceptic was David Hume, ‘Le Bon David’, as the French called him, whose huge appetite for intellectual battle may be seen from the range of titles of his works.⁶⁶ These included Of Superstition and Enthusiasm (1742), Essay on Miracles (1747) and Essay on Providence and a Future State (1748). Like Vico, Hume studied religion historically and this taught him, first and foremost, that it had a lot in common with other areas of human activity. He concluded that there wasn’t anything special about religion, that it had emerged as just another aspect of human activity in ancient civilisations and that it was kept alive because parents taught it to their young children, who grew up unable to think in any other ways. He argued that polytheism was the earliest form of religion and arose out of man’s experiences of good and bad. Benevolent gods were attributed to good events, malicious gods to bad events. In either case, he observed, the gods took human form. On the other hand, he thought that monotheism – the more abstract form of the deity – had grown out of man’s observations of nature. The great natural phenomena, strange happenings, such as earthquakes, lightning, rainbows and comets, convinced men that these were the actions of a powerful and arbitrary God. Hume observed, accurately enough, that polytheism has been more tolerant than monotheism.⁶⁷

In particular Hume worked hard to show that the alleged proofs of God’s existence were no such thing and that the anthropomorphic conception of God was also misplaced, even absurd. ‘We cannot learn of the whole from knowledge of a part – does knowledge of a leaf tell you anything about a tree?’⁶⁸ ‘Assuming that the universe had an author, he may have been a bungler, or a god since dead, or a male or female god, or a mixture of good and evil, or morally quite indifferent – the last hypothesis being the more probable.’⁶⁹ Then there were Hume’s devastating criticisms of both miracles and the ‘future state’. He did not deny in principle that miracles had ever taken place but his criteria for accepting the evidence were never met. His chief argument was that, when all is said and done, there is no unimpeachable evidence for any miracle that would be accepted by a reasonable person. Hume insisted that it was equally absurd to imagine that God would ‘even the score’ in a future life, making up for all the injustices in this one. The interrelations between people were too complicated, he said, and made a balancing of the books impossible.

The most important figure in French scepticism was Pierre Bayle, who attacked the Old Testament with all the gusto that Hume had brought to the demolition of miracles. Born in a village near the Pyrenees, amid the independent traditions of the Albigensian region, Bayle poured scorn on such episodes as Jonah and the whale, and his satire on faith was so extravagant as to make it seem all but ridiculous that men should maintain a belief in God in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.⁷⁰

Despite the numerous withering criticisms of miracles, and the increasing scepticism that many held about the ‘future state’, there were very few men of the period who were prepared to come out and say flatly that they did not believe in God. The first outright atheist in this modern sense was probably Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619), an Italian scientist. Widely travelled, his lectures in this way reached many people. But the authorities caught up with him in Toulouse, where he was arrested for heresy and, after he had his tongue cut out, was burned at the stake (though his writings remained popular – Voltaire compared him to Socrates).⁷¹ More reasoned atheists arose in England and France in the wake of Newton’s discoveries.¹³ In England, ‘From All Souls [College, Oxford] to the Royal Society there was an outpouring of atheism in print such as the country had never seen before.’⁷³ There was a street called ‘Atheists’ Alley’ near the Royal Exchange in London (probably so named because the coffee houses there were frequented by the newly knowledgeable ‘men of the world’, including unbelievers).⁷⁴ John Redwood, in his history of the pamphlet war, tells us that the bookshops began to ‘teem with pamphlets, tracts and broadsheets dealing with the atheist scare’.⁷⁵ The theatres too were frequently home to atheist satires.⁷⁶ For plays now taught men ‘how they might live without a Creator; and how, now they are, they may live best without any dependence on his Providence. They are call’d to doubt the existence of God . . . His wise Providence at every turn is charged with neglect . . .’⁷⁷

As intellectual heirs to Newton, the French atheists were known as mechanists (because they were inspired by the idea of a mechanical universe). One of the more prominent was Julien de La Mettrie, who wrote a book called Man a Machine in which he offered a thoroughgoing mechanistic analysis of man and the universe. This, he said, left no room for God. He was supported by Paul Henry Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789), a German émigré who had moved to Paris. He was much more radical than the bulk of his colleagues, openly admitting that concepts of God and supernaturalism had been invented by primitive man who simply did not understand natural phenomena. Like Bayle and Shaftesbury, and the rest of the deists, he insisted that an acceptable morality does not depend on religion. For this reason, and unlike Voltaire, he thought that it was quite safe to teach atheism to the masses. Holbach was also one of the first to argue that man was really no different from other living creatures in the universe, neither better nor worse. It followed that man had to work out his own morality, not derive it from any supernatural authority. This was an important insight and, decades later, would help lead to the theory of evolution.

After the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, the area of scholarship which most affected beliefs about religion was biblical criticism. The first major attack on the scriptures had come as early as the twelfth century, when the Jewish scholar Aben Ezra challenged the tradition that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch. But the first blow struck in modern times was delivered by Louis Cappel in the early seventeenth century, who showed that the original Old Testament had been written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, making it a much later work than had previously been supposed. The most damning consequence of this was that the scriptures could not have been dictated to Moses by God: in other words, the Old Testament was not ‘inspired’. This was a terrible blow. (The very existence of Cappel’s approach was itself a sign of major change: the scriptures were now being treated like secular works, as susceptible of textual and other assessment.) Isaac La Peyrère (1596?–1676), mentioned in the Prologue, also claimed that Moses did not write the Pentateuch and, more controversially still, said that men and women existed before Adam and Eve, who were only the first Israelites (he also said that the Flood was local to the Jews). Thomas Hobbes built on this work, showing that the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were written long after the events they described. Cappel’s and Hobbes’ work was confirmed by Spinoza who argued that Genesis could not have been written by one author and showed that most books of the Old Testament were far later than had commonly been thought. (Spinoza’s views circulated in a number of heterodox manuscripts – i.e., they were too controversial to be printed.⁷⁸) Next came Richard Simon, a French Catholic scholar, who made the discovery – very significant at the time, and published with difficulty in the 1680s – that the books of the Old Testament had not always been in the order in which they had since become stabilised. This was important because it made more plausible William Whiston’s 1722 analysis of certain passages of the Old Testament, which he concluded had been falsified during this process. Likewise it made more palatable Anthony Collins’ argument that the book of Daniel was much later than anyone had thought, a time-frame that cast doubt on the ‘prophecies’ in that book: they had in fact been written after the events. In a sense, this made the book of Daniel a forgery.

Then, in 1753, Jean Astruc, a French doctor with an interest in biblical studies, argued that Genesis was actually the fruit of two basic documents that had been amalgamated, or intertwined. He said that there is one source which describes God as ‘Elohim’ and a second source which refers to God as ‘Jehovah’. These came to be known, and are still accepted, as the E and J sources.⁷⁹ Astruc was followed by a German, Karl David Ilgen, who argued that, in fact, there are nearly twenty documents that make up Genesis, assembled by three groups of writers. This is essentially the view that still prevails.¹⁴ Thomas Burnet, in his Archaeologiae and Theory of the Visible World (1736), calculated the amount of water that fell in the forty days of the flood. He found it insufficient by a long way to drown the earth, and to inundate the highest mountains.⁸¹ His calculations were later incorporated into Thomas Browne’s massive attack on miracles.⁸²

This obsession with the accuracy of the Bible brought with it a new examination of the age of the earth. In the Judaeo/Christian view human history was reckoned to have begun with Adam. The Jewish chronology calculated that the Creation had taken place in 3761 BC, but Christians had a more symbolic, and more symmetrical, view. Under their scheme, there would be seven symbolic ages of man, based on the idea, described in Chapter 10, of a cosmic week – seven ages, each lasting a thousand years (see here above, for a more detailed discussion of the cosmic week). This involved Creation taking place in 4000 BC, and assumed that the Christian era would last two thousand years, after which there would be a final millennium. (Luther was one of those who agreed with this scheme; he argued that Noah had lived at 2000 BC.) Various other scholars made their own calculations. Using the genealogies in the Bible, Joseph Justus Scaliger worked out that Creation took place on 23 April 3947 BC, Kepler chose 3992 BC, while Archbishop James Ussher went still further, in his Annals of the Old and New Testament (1650–1653), in which he calculated that the week of Creation began on Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, and that Adam was created on Friday, 28 October 4004 BC. Finally, John Lightfoot (1602–1675), a rabbinical scholar, added to Ussher’s calculations, working out that Adam was born on Friday, 28 October 4004 BC, at nine o’clock in the morning.⁸³

Not everyone agreed with Scaliger, Ussher or Lightfoot. As more and more people began to lose faith in the Bible, so the calculations of the earth’s age based on the scriptures lost support also. The scientific discoveries – both here on earth and above, in the heavens – began to suggest that the earth must be a great deal older than it said in the Bible. This realisation was associated with the birth of geology, the main task of which in its early days was to understand that very process by which the earth had formed. One of the early insights stemmed from the study of extinct volcanoes in France, in particular in the Puy de Dôme district (near Clermont-Ferrand).⁸⁴ This led to the discovery that basalt, a rock found everywhere, was in fact solidified lava. The early geologists gradually realised that layers of basalt had been laid down many years ago (by a process that could still be observed – and measured – today, where there were active volcanoes) and that the deeper layers were very ancient. In the same way, the newly-established geologists observed sedimentary layers, the rate of deposition of which could also be calculated. Those layers were regularly 10,000 feet thick, and sometimes 100,000 feet thick, making it ever clearer that the earth was very ancient indeed. At the same time it was observed that water – streams and rivers – had cut into many layers of rock, revealing that such layers could be folded, twisted, even turned over completely, showing that the planet had a violent history and, again by implication, that it was much older than it said in the Bible. Robert Hooke, at the Royal Society in London (whose journal, Philosophical Transactions, was strangely silent on this, the greatest philosophical question of the day), had observed that fossils, now recognised for what they were, showed animals that no longer existed.⁸⁵ He therefore put forward the idea that certain species had once flourished on earth and then died out. This too suggested that the earth was older, much older, than the Bible said: these species had come and gone before the scriptures were written.⁸⁶

And so, at that stage, although the church regarded any figure that was substantially at variance from 4000 BC as heresy, the French natural historian Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, in his Les époques de la nature (1779), calculated the age of the earth, first, as 75,000 years, later as 168,000 years, though his private opinion, never published in his lifetime, was that it was nearer half a million years old.⁸⁷ To sugar this bitter pill for the orthodox, he too recognised seven ‘epochs’: one, when the earth and planets were formed; two, when the great mountain ranges erupted; three, when water covered the mainland; four, when the water subsided and the volcanoes began their activity; five, when the elephants and other tropical animals inhabited the north; six, when the continents were separated from one another (he recognised that the fauna and flora of America and Eurasia were similar and concluded that they must have been connected at one point); and seven, when man appeared. Here too, then, was a remarkably modern set of views, which anticipated both continental drift and evolution.

The advent of doubt could not but have a major effect on ethical thinking. The supernatural basis for morality had been questioned since the emergence of humanism, in particular in the essays of Montaigne, mentioned earlier in this chapter. But the most specific development during this period, after Montaigne, was the line of thinking that led from Thomas Hobbes through Shaftesbury and Hume to Helvétius and Jeremy Bentham. Hobbes, it is no surprise to learn, argued that man’s ethics, like the rest of his psychology, are based on self-interest. Life, its predicaments and attendant emotions, may be divided into the pleasurable and the painful. Hobbes thought that the conduct of life should be organised around attempts to maximise one’s pleasure while causing the least pain to others. Shaftesbury (and Bayle, for that matter) accepted the implicit notion encased in this view, that religion and morality did not necessarily have anything to do with one another.⁸⁸ Many people found the separation of religion and morality shocking, but the tide was running. Hume, Helvétius and Holbach all shared what would come to be called a utilitarian view of ethics, that man is essentially hedonistic – pleasure-seeking, but he is also a social animal. The test therefore of any doctrine or policy was, as Helvétius put it in a phrase that became famous, ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.⁸⁹ Social well-being, as well as individual happiness, must be taken into account. Bentham (1748–1832) publicised this approach most in what came to be called his ‘felicific calculus’, the core of utilitarian ethics, which assumed that man is a coldly rational animal and that, therefore, the greatest good for the greatest number is an achievable aim for politicians.

The arguments against God, therefore, not only brought about a decline of faith, in a strictly religious sense, but stimulated a new attitude to history (that the past went back much further than anyone thought), laid the grounding for much of modern science (evolution, continental drift, sociology), for modern economics (Adam Smith’s economic theories, discussed later, in Chapter 26) and for modern politics. ‘The greatest good for the greatest number’ is yet another of those statements/clichés that we take for granted today. But it was unthinkable before scepticism and doubt had brought about the great divorce between religion and morality.