A Brief History of Creation (12 page)

Voltaire's views on religion, like his views on nearly everything else, were sometimes arbitrary and often contradictory. They were united in their hatred of superstition, and beyond that, little else. At times, his argument for God could appear utilitarian. He worried about whether morality could exist in a world devoid of a supreme being, a world in which good and evil were all relative. “If God did not exist,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to invent him.” Voltaire had a habit of quoting himself, a backhanded way of elevating his own importance. That quote was one of his favorites.

But there was a deeper reason for Voltaire's advocacy of the divine in the face of this now open disbelief: Voltaire really did see the natural world as proof of a divine intelligence. In the
Dictionnaire
, he had ridiculed the notion of an active God. But he did believe in an ultimate creator, what he called a “Supreme Infinite,” responsible for creation, after which the world existed as it had always existed. Mountains stood where they stood because that is where God had placed them. They had never moved, as some natural
philosophers, like Buffon, suggested. Nor had the seas or the forests. Fossils were not the remains of long-lost species, as some were beginning to suggest. They could tell us nothing about the world in which we lived or the creatures that inhabited it previously.

It was all too complicated to simply have happened by chance. These things had been carefully laid out. Nature had laws, but laws that fit the plan of a creator. They were an “intelligent design,” as such a notion would one day be known. Voltaire's view of the world was much the same as that held by Newton, another deist. In the book on Newton that Voltaire had completed at Cirey, he had written, “If I examine on the one hand a man or a silkworm, and on the other a bird or a fish, I see them all formed from the beginning of things.” The world may indeed be a clock, as Descartes suggested, but it had always been a clock. It had been, from the beginning, fully formed. Complete. “A watch,” Voltaire said, “proves a watchmaker.” If he detested organized religion, he detested atheism even more.

Slowly, as he grappled with the ideas of Maupertuis, Needham, and Buffon, Voltaire came to understand these ideas better than he thought their originators understood them themselves. Voltaire came to see the three men as a dangerous clique, one whose notions were leading men to materialism, after which atheism would inevitably follow. By the fifth letter of their exchange on miracles, he told Needham as much: “You had made small reputation for yourself among atheists by having made eels from flour, and from that you have concluded that if flour produces eels, all animals, starting with man, could have been born in approximately the same manner . . . from a lump of earth just as well as from a piece of paste.” In subsequent letters, Voltaire's tone grew harsher. He began to call Needham “
l'Anguillard
”—the eelmonger—and an “Irish Jesuit.” This last was to Voltaire one of the basest insults imaginable, as he had been schooled by Jesuits who he learned to detest, while he saw the Irish as hopelessly besotted by superstition. He also described Needham's microscope as “the laboratory of the atheists.” Needham, like any proper Englishman, tried to ignore the name-calling. But the last charge, his complicity with atheism, was becoming harder to deny. It was all about to be proved true, in the pages of a book that would shock all of France.

 

B
Y THE MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY,
the axis around which Enlightenment Paris turned was a townhouse near its center that was called, alternately, the Hotel of the Philosophers, the Synagogue, or
La Boulangerie
, French for “the bakery.” That nickname was a play on the name of one of the most radical men who used to frequent the house, the philosopher Nicolas Boulanger, who had written an audacious book suggesting that religions sprang from great disasters that occurred early in history. Men had turned to superstition simply to calm their fears of the natural world. Boulanger was a skeptic and a freethinker, and he fit right in at La Boulangerie.

The owner of the house called himself Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach. His real name was Paul Heinrich Dietrich. A German from just across the Rhine, he had spent five formative years among the radicals in Amsterdam and London before arriving in Paris, where he had taken a French name and a French wife. Like Buffon, one of the many frequent guests at La Boulangerie, d'Holbach had become
fabulously rich through an inheritance from an uncle, to whom he also owed his aristocratic title. On the outskirts of the city, he owned a grand estate, complete with its own pastor, who d'Holbach kept long after he had stopped believing in God. Appearances and status were very important to him.

But d'Holbach's house in town was always at the center of his universe, as it was for so many of the intellectuals who were his frequent guests. Twice a week, he hosted lavish dinners for these friends. He was said to serve the best meals in town. At one time or another, he entertained David Hume, Adam Smith, and Benjamin Franklin. The brilliant young radical Denis Diderot was a close friend and a regular. So, for a time, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. D'Holbach wrote several articles for Diderot's
Encyclopedia
, and probably served as the model for the character Wolmar in Rousseau's best-known novel
Julie, ou la nouvelle H
é
lo
ï
se
. His circle of associates was a radical one. Some may even have been as radical as d'Holbach. Few were as brazen.

During his early days in Paris, d'Holbach had been a deist with a worldview similar to Voltaire's. But by the 1760s, d'Holbach had become an ardent atheist, one who preached his disbelief with the fervor of the newly converted. Some said it was his close friend and collaborator Diderot who had influenced him, but there were plenty in his circle who shared this worldview. What set d'Holbach apart from these fellow travelers were the risks he was willing to take. In 1761, he published a book called
Christianity Unveiled
, an unapologetic assault on the idea of the existence of God. On the title page, he identified the author as the skeptic Nicolas Boulanger, his old friend, who had died before the book was penned. Using Boulanger's name was also an homage to the notorious house where d'Holbach's ideas had been spawned.

It was an ugly book. D'Holbach's writing style was plain, stilted, and hard to read. Diderot told him it lacked all art. But the book's sheer audacity gave it a certain power, and its lack of rhetorical flourish gave it a kind of widespread appeal, ironic since d'Holbach was an elitist snob, scornful of democracy and given to sneering at what he called the “imbecilic populace.” The book found an audience, even though those merely caught with it in their possession were whipped, branded, and imprisoned by the French police. All too aware of the potential repercussions, D'Holbach took exhaustive precautions to keep his own involvement a secret, including making clandestine trips to London to meet with Marc-Michel Rey, a publisher in Amsterdam who had earned a reputation for orchestrating publication of the most dangerous books, including some by Voltaire.

More books on the theme of atheism were to follow, culminating in 1770 with the publication of d'Holbach's most influential work,
The System of Nature: or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World
. It was an attempt to provide a clear-cut framework for the world, to answer existential questions without turning to a supernatural explanation. Like Karl Marx's
Communist Manifesto
, it was the kind of book that summed itself up in its first few lines: “Men will always deceive themselves by abandoning experience to follow imaginary systems. Man is the work of Nature: he exists in Nature: he is submitted to her laws.” The soul does not exist, d'Holbach insisted. God was simply an anthropomorphization of things people did not understand.

In the second chapter, d'Holbach turned to the question of the origin
of life. He touted Needham's experiments as proof that life could organize itself merely by physical processes, that nonliving matter could naturally become living. In a footnote, he invited readers to “see the observations microscopiques of M. Needham” and asked, “would the production of a man independently from the ordinary means be more marvelous than that of an insect from flour and water?”

The book was a scandal. Voltaire called it “a great moral sickness, a work of darkness.” For Voltaire, at the root of that whole moral sickness was a singular idea, the idea that life could come from nonlife. To a friend he wrote that d'Holbach had “founded an entire system on a false experiment made by an Irish Jesuit who has been mistaken for a philosopher.” Voltaire began referring to Needham's account of his experiments as “the story of the eels.” It had become a creation myth for atheism. Adding to the list of his insults against Needham, Voltaire began accusing the latter of pretending to be Jesus Christ.

The System of Nature
was perhaps even more distressing to Needham. “The world recoils in horror at the blasphemies hurled there against its Creator,” he wrote. The use of his name was a personal insult. Yet even as he denounced the book, he was careful not to disavow or even waver in his own scientific observations and conclusions. They had, he said, simply been misinterpreted. His championship of spontaneous generation had made him famous. It had earned him recognition in the Royal Society and other pillars of natural philosophy. He could not let it go, even as it became clear that Voltaire had been prescient in his warning that Needham's microscope was “the laboratory of the atheists.”

S
OON, VOLTAIRE RECEIVED
more ammunition for his feud with Needham, in the form of experimental evidence provided by an Italian university professor named Lazzaro Spallanzani. Spallanzani actually had much in common with Needham. Both were lay priests who had chosen a life in science and won fame as experimentalists. Spallanzani went on to become the first person to perform in vitro fertilization, which he accomplished using frog eggs. He also inseminated a poodle with semen he had taken
from another dog, which was for a time thought to be the first example of artificial insemination, although Arab natural philosophers had, in fact, accomplished this with horses in the Middle Ages.

In 1776, Spallanzani went to work disproving Needham's conclusions on spontaneous generation. He repeated Needham's experiments, but more carefully, always searching for flaws in Needham's execution. Suspecting that air had leaked through Needham's corks, Spallanzani sealed his test tubes over a flame, fusing the melted glass until their contents were completely enclosed. He used all manner of substances: white beans, barley, maize, white beets, and egg yolk. Spallanzani's experiments were exhaustive, superior to Needham's in almost every way—a rare example of careful application of the scientific method for the time. By heating his flasks to different temperatures, Spallanzani showed that some animalcules could be destroyed only at extreme temperatures beyond what Needham had subjected them to. The two men then began their own public debate, which played out in their books and within the highest circles of natural philosophy.

Voltaire was quick to join Spallanzani's arguments to his own. Voltaire wrote Spallanzani almost sycophantic letters in the fawning tone usually reserved for his personal communications with royalty. In his published writings, he referred to Spallanzani as “the Italian savant,” even as he continued to deride Needham as “the Irish Jesuit.” Spallanzani was, in fact, more of a priest than Needham, having actually officiated at mass. The Italian had also been trained by Jesuits. None of that really mattered to Voltaire, though. Nor, really, did the experimental evidence. The crux of Voltaire's argument always remained the same: that positing a naturalistic explanation for how life came to be poses a challenge to the notion of a creator. The question of the origin of life, Voltaire understood, was important at a metaphysical level in a way that no other scientific question could ever be. Those were the stakes he was fighting for.

V
OLTAIRE CONTINUED
his relentless attacks on Needham, even into his last few years. They could still be found in his final book,
Dialogues d'Évhémère
,
published in 1777. The following year, Voltaire died in Paris, where he had traveled to see the play
Irene
by the Englishman Samuel Johnson. It was his first trip to Paris since the de la Barre affair. The last words he wrote were, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.” Church authorities in Paris denied Voltaire a Christian burial, but before their decision was issued, his admirers stealthily slipped his body back to Champagne to be buried in an abbey not far from Cirey, where he and Émilie du Châtelet had lived.

By the time of Voltaire's death, Needham had become head of the Imperial Academy of the Austrian Netherlands, as the territories of modern Belgium were then known. He received his appointment from the last Hapsburg ruler of the once-great Holy Roman Empire, Empress Maria Theresa, who had also appointed Spallanzani to head a university in Italy. Needham could never quite shake Voltaire's criticisms. He spent much of his public life refuting Voltaire's charges, sometimes also feebly reminding people that he was neither Irish nor a Jesuit. He even tried to fight back by trying his hand at a work of literature in the form of satire. He wrote a parody of a thinly disguised Voltaire who, Needham wrote, “misled our minds by the dictates of his heart.” It fell far short in the art so carefully shaped by Voltaire. It was eventually published in the appendix of a book that Needham edited.

Needham's last attempt at experiment returned to the subject of miracles. An old Catholic folk belief held that the ringing of church bells could protect against lightning. French philosophers had taken to pointing out that, on the contrary, the lists of people killed by lightning annually always seemed to include an inordinate number who were ringing those same bells. Needham argued that church bells did, in fact, provide some form of miraculous protection. The work was mostly ignored. Where it was not, it was simply shrugged aside as an oddity.