by Peter Watson
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 Al
exander 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 half-way 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.* 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 Ol
d 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.
