Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (27 page)

Railing back: Unbelievers say “Muhammad was a liar”

Standing up in the middle of the ninth century Islamic Empire and calling Muhammad a liar took a stainless steel spine. But Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawāndī — yes,
that
Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawāndī — did just that.

Being a former Islamic theologian himself, al-Rawāndī knew what he was talking about, anticipating every argument of the theologians with a devastating counterargument. And he didn’t mince words. Not only did he call Muhammad a liar, but he also said the miracles of Moses and Jesus (both of whom are also revered in Islam) were nothing more than “fraudulent tricks.” Allah acts like “a wrathful, murderous enemy,” he said, adding that he probably couldn’t even add two and four. The Qur’an itself is described as “the speech of an unwise being” that contains “contradictions, errors and absurdities.”

It’s no surprise then that al-Rawāndī’s written works — including his most famous,
The Book of the Emerald —
have vanished, except for a few fragments quoted by his hyperventilating critics. But his impact was still long-lasting; more than 200 years after al-Rawāndī’s death, the Persian theologian al-Shirazi was still spilling gallons of ink arguing against al-Rawāndī’s suggestion that truth can be discovered through human reason without the need for prophecy or revelation.

Being called a zendiq in medieval Islam was generally a death sentence, but some people still managed to have fun with it. No one had a better time than Abu Nuwas, a Persian poet who delighted in shocking polite society by writing about everything Islam forbids, from masturbation to drunkenness to homosexuality. A story was told of an
imam
(Islamic cleric) who began to read from the Qur’an in the mosque. When the imam got to the line, “Oh, you infidels!”, Abu Nuwas shouted out, “Here I am!”

That did it. An angry mob dragged him to the authorities. They assumed he was a heretical follower of Manichaeism, a rival religion of the time. They gave him the standard test, ordering him to spit on a portrait of the prophet Mani, founder of Manichaeism. They knew he wouldn’t be able to do it if he was a follower of Mani.
I’ll do you one better,
he thought, then stuck his finger down his throat and vomited on the portrait.

Confused, the magistrates released him, never considering the possibility that he found Mani and Muhammad equally silly. Even if they had, an atheist was considered less threatening than a heretic. (I make that same point again later in this chapter in the “
Giving Europe the Third Degree
” section.)

Freezing Out the Gods in Iceland

If you want a peek at the soul of a culture, look at their legends — the stories they tell about themselves. For Iceland, that means the Sagas of Icelanders.

The first Sagas were written in the 13th century, at the tail end of a period wracked by violence and political uncertainty — you may be sensing a pattern here — and describe life in Iceland just after the Norse explorers settled it.

Hrafnkell’s Saga tells of a warrior chief, Hrafnkell, who worships Freyr, the Norse god of lovely things such as wealth, sunshine, and sex. Hrafnkell gives Freyr his best offerings and constant devotion, even building a grand temple to the god. Despite all this devotion, Hrafnkell is attacked by an enemy, his temple burned, and he and his people enslaved.

“It is folly to believe in gods,” he says, vowing never to perform another sacrifice. Stories of lost faith in hard times are easy to come by, and you can usually count on the hero to experience a sudden epiphany that leads him back to the fold before the closing credits. But Hrafnkell’s Saga takes an unexpected turn: He escapes slavery, spares the life of his captor in exchange for freedom, and lives his life in peace and contentment
without
gods.

The most famous contributor to the Icelandic Sagas was the wonderfully named Snorri Sturleson. In addition to leading the nation’s parliament and writing history, Snorri — like Euhemerus in
Chapter 4
— was a
mythographer,
a gatherer of myths and beliefs. And interestingly, Snorri came to precisely the same conclusion as Euhemerus about the origin of god belief: Human warrior chiefs and kings were venerated in life, then venerated in death, then gradually became venerated as gods. The more contact a person has with human mythmaking, the more he or she seems to see the man behind the curtain.

Giving Europe the Third Degree: The Inquisitions

If the door-to-atheist opinion was open just a crack in ancient Greece and Rome, it slammed shut completely in 381 CE. That’s the year Roman emperor Theodosius took a break from overseeing the collapse of the empire to ban all religious opinions other than his own, which was Nicene Christianity.

The Christian church fathers spent the early medieval period sorting out what constituted the church’s official doctrine, banning this or that departure from the party line. For seven hundred years, it seemed to work because
heresy
(beliefs or practices that differ from those official sanctioned by the church) went fairly quiet. But by the mid-12th century, new movements within Christianity began finding adherents — and all hell broke loose.

The Inquisition
was a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate unorthodox beliefs and practices in Europe by use of interrogation, torture, and even execution. It continued on and off for more than 600 years with the purpose of securing Catholic religious and political control over the continent.

This section introduces in greater depth what the Inquisition did through the stories of three otherwise unknown villagers in 14th-century southern France, as well as the man who interrogated them for unorthodox thinking.

Eyeing the Inquisition’s main focus

The Inquisition’s main concern wasn’t nonbelievers. Nobody cared too much about the occasional French peasant muttering to himself about God being pretend. The idea was to root out fellow Christians who are forming sects that differed from the orthodox norm — differing sometimes (like many denominations today) in seemingly tiny ways. But the Catholic powers at the time perceived any organized movement to be a threat, so the Inquisitions ground on, generation after generation, casting a wide net to pull in heretics and give them a choice: Conform, or pay a terrible price.

The usual procedure follows instructions in Deuteronomy 17:

If a man or woman living among you . . . has worshiped other gods . . . and this has been brought to your attention, then you must investigate it thoroughly. If it is true . . . on the testimony of two or three witnesses, a person is to be put to death.

So the Inquisitor generally began by finding two or three witnesses against someone suspected of heresy before interrogating the actual suspect.

Meeting Jacques Fournier, Inquisitor

After an uneventful childhood in late 13th-century France, Jacques Fournier first became a monk, then a bishop in the local Catholic diocese. In 1317, he moved on to the Big Dance as an Inquisitor for the Catholic Church.

Fournier was ordered to begin local interrogations to smoke out adherents of Catharism, a sect that believed the good, spiritual God had an evil, physical counterpart, Rex Mundi, and that Rex, not God, created the world. That would answer the question of why evil exists — and there was an overabundance of evil in the 14th century — but it tinkered too much with the rest of theology to be acceptable to the Church.

Though the Catholic Church claimed it was all about theological differences, the Cathar habit of loudly pointing out the corrupt behavior of Catholic clergy surely had something to do with the attention the Cathars received. The Catholic Church did its level best to kill off every last Cathar in a 45-year crusade during the previous century, and for a generation or two it seemed to have worked. But reports of Cathar activity in southern France surfaced again by 1317, and Fournier was tasked with bringing the heretics in his region to the Pope’s justice.

Fournier wasn’t the only Inquisitor at the time, but he took the unusual step of having his interrogations transcribed in exquisite detail. Those transcripts make him pretty useful for my purposes, because while Fournier trawled around for Cathar heretics, once in a while he caught . . . an actual atheist.

Of 578 people interrogated by Fournier, five were executed. Most of the rest, including those I introduce in the next sections, were either imprisoned or forced to wear a double yellow cross, a mark of shame, for the rest of their lives.

Fournier’s efforts were rewarded a few years later when he was first appointed cardinal, then elected Pope Benedict XII.

Finding unbelievers among the heretics

Jacques Fournier was probably surprised when his interrogations turned up an actual unbeliever rather than a heretic, but it did happen, more than once. And here’s where it gets personal. These stories aren’t of philosophers putting forward a challenging opinion in the marketplace of ideas, but everyday folks whose friends and family often reported them to the authorities for honest expressions of doubt. I introduce you to three such doubters, villagers in southern France in the early 14th century who were caught in the net of the Inquisition.

Aude of Merviel

In 1318, two years into his new post as Inquisitor, Fournier interrogated a woman named Aude of the village of Merviel. Aude had come to doubt
transubstantiation,
the Catholic doctrine that says the bread and wine of the Eucharist change into the literal body and blood of Christ (though human senses don’t perceive the change). This doubt apparently led her further into disbelief, until she cried out to her husband, “Sir, how is it possible that I cannot believe in our Lord!” He swore and threatened her, then ordered her to confess to the priest.

The following week, Aude told her aunt the same thing and pled for help: “Aunt, what might I do to believe in God, and to believe that the body of Christ is really on the altar?” Brought in as a witness against Aude, the aunt testified about what she said to Aude in reply, which boiled down to
Try harder to believe — and don’t infect others with your foul ideas!

Imagining Aude’s anguish is painful as she spilled her honest doubts in front of her husband, her aunt, and finally the Inquisitor, meeting nothing but fear and anger at every turn. In the end, she was sentenced to wear a double yellow cross on her back for the remainder of her life.

Guillemette of Ornolac

Guillemette of Ornolac ended up in the Inquisitor’s chair because she told others — seemingly everyone she knew — that she doubted the existence of the soul. Called before the Bishop, one friend of hers described a conversation the two of them had the year before.

When the friend had told Guillemette that she was afraid for her own soul because she sinned so often, Guillemette replied, “The soul? You idiot! The soul is nothing more than blood.” The friend told the Inquisitor that she told Guillemette to never say such a thing, to which Guillemette supposedly replied that she’d say it in front of anyone she liked, adding, “And what would happen to me if I did?”

Bishop Fournier called in another neighbor, who described a conversation in which Guillemette expounded on her reasoning a bit. When she cut off the head of a goose, the goose lived until the blood was gone, so she reasoned that what people call “soul” — the essence of life — is nothing more than blood.

Finally Fournier called in Guillemette. Under Fournier’s questioning, she confessed not only to her idea that the soul is blood, but also to the opinion that death is final. When Fournier asked, “Did someone teach this to you?” — this is the greatest concern, of course, the spread of unapproved ideas — Guillemette said something wonderful: “No. I thought it over and believed it by myself.”

She assured Fournier at last that her folly was in the past, and that she had returned to fully orthodox beliefs. When he asked what caused the change, she answered with unbearable honesty: “I heard tell that My Lord the Bishop wanted to carry out an investigation against me about it. I was afraid of My Lord Bishop because of that, and I changed my opinion after that time.”

Like Audi, she was sentenced to wear a double yellow cross on her back for the rest of her life.

Raimond de l’Aire

The most colorful of Fournier’s suspects was Raimond de l’Aire, a villager who seemed like Diagoras reborn (see
Chapter 4
). Witnesses described Raimond saying that God never made the world, that the world had always existed, that the resurrection was a myth, that the Eucharist was nothing more than bread and wine, that the rituals of the priests meant nothing, and that he gave to the poor not for his soul but so that others would see him as a good man.

At one point he apparently told a friend that Christ was created not through divine intervention, but “just through screwing, like everybody else” — then struck the heel of one hand against the other repeatedly to underline the point.

The witness assured Fournier that he told Raimond he was speaking evil and deserved to be killed. Whether he actually was killed isn’t recorded.

Chapter 6

Enlightening Strikes

In This Chapter

Rediscovering Greek philosophy

Waxing scientific

Daring to know

Revolting (in more ways than one) in France

Checking in on the US Founders

T
he 18th century saw one of the most important eras in intellectual history. Referred to as the
Enlightenment,
this period included the boldest challenges to religion ever mounted. It was also the first time people stood up and called
themselves
atheists.

But the Enlightenment didn’t spring from the ground fully formed. First Europe went through a long and sometimes painful process of waking from its thousand-year nap. This chapter looks at the rediscovery of the doubters of ancient Greece and Rome and the important contribution of science in its cradle before plunging into the heady world of Enlightenment ideas, where everything, up to and including God, was ripe for challenge.

Transmitting the Classics

No culture contributed more to Western civilization than classical Greece. The contributions are so familiar — philosophy, medicine, ethics, government, astronomy, mathematics, art, dance, and drama — that I won’t bother to list them.

But it wasn’t a straight line from downtown Athens to the 21st century. As the Roman Empire declined and fell in the fifth century, it took knowledge of the Greek language along with it. The whole system of Roman education was abandoned, and with it any interest in books, much less those in unknown languages. The most important Greek texts lay untranslated and unread for centuries. Even worse, early medieval scribes started recycling old books, scraping off the old texts and writing prayers and shopping lists in their place.

If not for a couple of unlikely middlemen — the Islamic world and the Catholic Church — Europe may have lost this incredible heritage, and the foundation of modern atheism, for good and all. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, both crucial for later atheist thought, may not have happened at all if the following two hadn’t kept Greek thought alive during Europe’s long nap.

Bringing the Greeks back to Europe: The Arab scholars

The winding road that Greek learning took back to Europe started in eighth-century Baghdad as the Islamic Golden Age was just getting started. To be precise, the rediscovered Greek texts
were
the start of the Islamic Golden Age. And as I note in
Chapter 5
, Islam didn’t really deserve the credit for this golden age — it was Arab scholars who saw the value of these texts and translated them into Arabic
despite
the opposition of the Islamic caliphs. As a result, the scholars brought the brilliant, innovative thoughts of ancient Greece from a nearly dead language into a living one. It hardly mattered what language it was — blood was running through the veins of Greek philosophy and science once again, and the scholars of Baghdad hungrily absorbed, applied, and expanded on them, fueling a golden age of philosophy and discovery three centuries long.

During this time, the Islamic Empire pushed into Sicily and Spain, bringing the culture with them, including those translated Greek texts. Spain became a thriving center of Islamic learning, and ancient Greek learning was right at the heart of things.

For about 600 years, Christian Europe and Islamic Spain did an interesting dance called the
Reconquista
. They’d kill each other for a while, then intermarry and exchange scholars for a few generations before returning to the killing. During the exchanges, Greek ideas and texts began to find their way into the rest of Europe. By the time the Arabs were pushed off the peninsula for good, the seeds of the continent’s reawakening were planted.

Saving atheism: Catholicism’s ironic role

While Europe was plunging into illiteracy after the fall of Rome, several Catholic orders went the other way, making literacy an absolute requirement for their monks. The rules for one monastic order specified that every new candidate was given 20 Psalms to read. If he couldn’t read them, he would receive tutoring three times a day until he could.

Benedictine monks had a required reading time each day. If a monk wasn’t reading during this time, he’d be loudly rebuked, and if necessary, thwacked. Superiors often read books aloud, sometimes also adding commentary. If a monk expressed an opinion about a passage,
thwack.
If he questioned the superior’s commentary,
thwack!
Reading was for passive learning, not for the development of the intellect — and certainly not for debate.

This environment was pretty much the opposite of the atmosphere in ancient Greek schools of philosophy, which encouraged curiosity and contradiction as an important element of learning. But passive reading is still better than no reading at all. One interesting consequence of all the required reading in the monasteries was that books fell apart more quickly than they do in libraries where they sit quietly on the shelves. As a result, the same religious orders that required the reading started to require constant recopying as well. In the larger monasteries, well-lit rooms called
scriptoria
were filled with as many as 20 scribes scribbling in silence throughout the daylight hours, preserving ancient words and ideas even as the books that held them crumbled. Whole monastic libraries were copied and recopied straight through the Middle Ages. That’s how the few surviving works of ancient Greece that were left in Europe after the fall of Rome were eventually delivered into the hands of the early Renaissance.

In addition to Aristotle, these ragged survivors included
De rerum natura
by Lucretius, which was the first and most complete book to imagine a universe without belief in gods — and to very much prefer it. The last surviving copy reached and fueled the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, inspiring the courage to challenge and doubt the very existence of God, thanks in part to the literate values and steady, dutiful hands of Catholic monks. (I wax poetic about that astonishing book in
Chapter 11
.)

Getting a (Bad) Name: Athée

The word “atheist” existed in ancient Greece as
atheos.
Today the word refers to somebody who doesn’t believe in any gods, but the Greeks used it to signify anyone who rejected the gods of a given place and time. With rare exceptions (like Diagoras; see
Chapter 4
), the people who were called
atheos
were assumed to believe in
some
gods, but they didn’t root for the home team.

The term reappears in mid-16th century France as
athée,
but it still wasn’t quite the same meaning as today. It was an epithet, first of all — an accusation, not something anyone used to describe himself. And the accused was said to deny the Biblical God. Whether that person also denied Vishnu, Buddha, and the rest was trivial at that time and place. Denying the God of Abraham was shocking enough.

Not until the late 18th-century Enlightenment did any European start calling
himself
an atheist. Even then, the term still focused only on the God of the Bible.

Not until the 20th century did atheists begin to clearly make the universal point: “I believe there are no gods of any kind, shape, or description. I disbelieve not just in your god, but in all gods named and unnamed. Barring new and compelling evidence, I reject the very idea. Have a nice day.”

Discovering a Whole New Way to Think: The Scientific Revolution

Copernicus’s theory of the sun-centered solar system was published in 1543, though the author wasn’t around when it hit the shelves, having wisely died a few weeks earlier. Even though few people read it and even fewer believed it at the time, this moment is as handy as any for calling the start of the Scientific Revolution.

You need to bear in mind that this revolution wasn’t really about particular theories. It was about defining a powerful new way to think about the universe. By trying to control biases and establish objective frames of reference, this new way of asking questions and questioning answers revolutionized not just the sciences but humanity’s view of itself and its place in the scheme of things.