The Case for God (35 page)

When he dedicated his
Meditations on First Philosophy
to “The Most Illustrious Dean and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris,” Descartes made an astonishing claim: “I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical [i.e., “scientific”] rather than theological argument.”
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In the clear expectation that they would agree with him, Descartes calmly informed the most distinguished body of theologians in Europe that they were not competent to discuss God. Mathematics and physics would do the job more effectively.
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And the theologians were all too happy to agree. It was a fateful move. Henceforth, theology would increasingly be translated into a “philosophical” or “scientific” idiom that was alien to it.

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Even those who could see flaws in Descartes’ Universal Mathematics were excited by the idea of a mechanical universe, ruled at all times and in all places by the same unequivocal laws.
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Increasingly, the mechanical universe would be seen as a model for society. Citizens should submit to a rational government in the same way as the different parts of the cosmos obeyed the rational laws of the scientific God. People were also intrigued by the idea of a single method that would lead infallibly to wisdom and certainty and make the existence of God as necessary and lucid as one of Euclid’s theorems. Doubt and perplexity would soon be things of the past.

In the years after the Thirty Years’ War, when religion seemed so badly compromised, it was thought that reason alone could create the conditions of a sustainable peace. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was also a diplomat who worked tirelessly to bring the new nation-states of Europe together.
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One of his chief projects was the construction of a universal language based on mathematical principles that would enable people to converse clearly and distinctly. The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) was convinced that the religious intolerance that had rent Europe apart was simply the result of an inadequate idea of God. If people were allowed to use their rational powers freely, they would discover the truth for themselves, because the natural world gave ample evidence for God. There was no further need for revelation, ritual, prayer, or superstitious doctrines. Where premodern theologians had been continually alert to the danger of God becoming an idolatrous projection, Locke argued that “when we would frame an
Idea
, the most suitable we can to the Supreme Being, we enlarge every one of these [Simple
Ideas]
with our
Idea
of Infinity, and so putting them together, make our complex
Idea of God.”
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But the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a passionately religious man, returned to the older idea that God was hidden in nature and that it was no use trying to find him there.
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In fact, the mechanical universe was godless, frightening, and devoid of meaning:

Certainty did not come from the rational contemplation of “clear” and “distinct” ideas but from the “heart,” the inner core of the human person. In the “Memorial” stitched into the lining of his doublet, Pascal recorded an experience that had filled him with “certainty, certainty, heartfelt joy, peace.” It had come from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God “of philosophers and scholars.”
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Pascal could see that Christianity was about to make a serious mistake. Theologians were eager to embrace the modern ethos and make their teaching conform to the “clear and distinct” ideas currently in vogue, but how far should the new science impinge upon religion? A God who was merely “the author of mathematical truths and of the order of the elements” could bring no light to the darkness and pain of human existence. It would only cause people to fall into atheism.
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Pascal was one of the first people to see that atheism—meaning a radical denial of God’s existence—would soon become a serious option.
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A person who had not engaged himself with the rituals, exercises, and practices of religion would not be convinced by the arguments of the philosophers; for such a person, faith could only be a wager, a leap in the dark. Pascal had developed his rational powers more than most: by the age of eleven, he had worked out for himself the first twenty-three propositions of Euclid; at sixteen he had published a remarkable treatise on geometry; and he went on to invent a calculating machine, a barometer, and a hydraulic press. But he knew that reason could not produce religious conviction; “the heart” had its own reasons for faith.
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In the Netherlands, a Jewish philosopher had developed an atheistic vision that was at once more radical yet also more religious than either Descartes’ or Locke’s.
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In 1655, shortly after Prado had arrived in Amsterdam, the young Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) stopped attending
services and began to voice serious doubts about traditional Judaism. Spinoza had been born in Amsterdam of parents who had lived as Marranos in Portugal but had successfully adapted to Orthodox Judaism. He had always had access to the intellectual life of the gentile world and had received a traditionally Jewish education, as well as studying mathematics, astronomy, and physics. But, living in a Marrano environment, he was accustomed to the idea of an entirely rational religion and argued that what we call “God” was simply the totality of nature itself. Eventually, on July 27, 1656, the rabbis pronounced the sentence of excommunication on Spinoza too, and he was glad to go. As a genius with powerful friends and patrons, he could survive outside a religious community in a way that his predecessors could not, and he became the first thoroughgoing secularist to live beyond the reach of established religion. Yet he remained an isolated figure, since Jews and gentiles both found his pantheistic philosophy shocking and “atheistic.”

Spinoza shared the Marrano disdain for revealed religion, though he agreed with Descartes that the very idea of “God” contains a validation of God’s existence. But this was not the personalized God of Judeo-Christianity. Spinoza’s God was the sum and principle of natural law, identical with and equivalent to the order that governs the universe. God was neither the Creator nor the First Cause, but was inseparable from the material world, an immanent force that welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite reality of the God active within them. Spinoza experienced his philosophical study as a form of prayer; the contemplation of this immanent presence filled him with awe and wonder. As he explained in his
Short Treatise on God
(1661), the deity was not an object to be known but the principle of our thought, so the joy we experienced when we attained knowledge
was
the intellectual love of God. A true philosopher should cultivate intuitive knowledge, flashes of insight that suddenly fused all the information he had acquired discursively into a new and integrated vision, an
ekstatic
perception that Spinoza called “beatitude.”

Most Western thinkers would not follow Spinoza. Their God was becoming increasingly remote, and those who adopted an immanent
view of the divine were often regarded as rebels against the established order. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end and set up a system of sovereign nation-states, but this new polity could not be established overnight. As the modern market economy developed, it became essential to change the political structures of society. To enhance the wealth of the nation, more and more people had to be brought into the productive process—even at a quite humble level, as printers, factory hands, and office workers. They would, therefore, need a modicum of education in the modern ethos, and, inevitably, they began to demand a share in the decision making of their government. Democracy was found to be essential to the nation-state and the capitalist economy. Countries that democratized forged ahead; those that tried to confine their wealth and privilege to the aristocracy fell behind. No elite group gives up power willingly, of course. The democratization of Europe was not a peaceful process but was achieved in a series of bloody revolutions, civil wars, the assassination of the nobility, militant dictatorships, and reigns of terror.

During the 1640s and 1650s, for example, England had seen a violent civil war, the execution of King Charles I (1649), and a period of republican rule under the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658). Levelers, Quakers, Diggers, and Muggletonians had developed their own revolutionary piety.
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If God dwelled in nature— if, as some said, God
was
nature—there was no need for clerics and churches, and everybody should share the nation’s prosperity. George Fox (1624–91), founder of the Society of Friends, taught Christians to seek their own inner light and “make use of their own understanding without direction from another”;
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in the scientific age, religion should be “experimental,” every one of its doctrines tested empirically against each person’s experience.
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For Richard Coppin, the God within was the only true authority. Because God informed all things, Jacob Bauthumely regarded the worship of a distinct, separate God as blasphemous, while Laurence Clarkson called upon the omnipresent God to empower the people to bring the aristocracy down.

This fervid piety was not quelled by the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 under King Charles II; it simply went underground. The next thirty years were a time of extreme anxiety, since people feared another violent revolution.
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A flourishing market economy was
developing in London and the southeast, but the poor resented the affluence of the new commercial classes, the authority of the recently established Church of England, and the privileges of the landed gentry. In Cambridge, the mathematician and clergyman Isaac Barrow (1630–77) developed a liberal Anglicanism that he hoped would help to build an orderly society, modeled on the cosmos, in which all people kept to their proper orbits and worked together harmoniously for the common good. A regular member of these discussion groups was the young Isaac Newton (1642–1727).
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Like Descartes, Newton aspired to create a universal science capable of interpreting the whole of human experience. Where Descartes’ quest had been solitary, Newton understood the importance of cooperation in science. He wanted to build on the achievements of his great predecessors, and felt, as he wrote to his friend Robert Hooke, as though he were “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
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But these giants had left some unanswered questions: What kept the planets in their orbits? Why did terrestrial objects always fall to the ground? In a series of lectures, published in 1687, Newton argued that the universal science was not mathematics, as Descartes had believed, but mechanics, “which accurately proposes and demonstrates the art of measuring.”
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His Universal Mechanics would start by measuring the motions of the universe and then, on the basis of these findings, go on to explain all other phenomena.
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Newton achieved a magnificent synthesis that brought together in a single theory Cartesian physics, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and Galileo’s laws of terrestrial movement. Gravity proved to be the fundamental force that accounted for all celestial and earthly activity. In order to maintain their orbits around the sun at their relative speeds and distances, the planets were pulled toward the sun by an attractive force that decreased inversely as the square of the distance from the sun. The moon and the oceans were drawn toward the earth by the same law. For the first time, all the disparate facts observed in the cosmos had been brought together into a comprehensive theory. At last the solar system had become intelligible. Everything—the annual orbits of the planets, the rotation of the earth, the motions of the moon, the tidal movement of the seas, the precession of the equinoxes, a stone falling to the ground—could now be explained by gravity. Gravity caused all bodies to incline mutually toward one
another; it prevented the planets from flying off into space and enabled them to maintain their stable orbits at the relative speeds and distances specified by Kepler.

If it was to be truly universal, the Universal Mechanics must account for
all
phenomena. Because gravity could not explain how the solar system came about, Newton had to find its original cause. “Though these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity,” he argued, “yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits by themselves from these laws.”
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The sun, planets, and comets had been positioned so precisely that they “could only proceed from the counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being.”
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Like most seventeenth-century scientists, Newton was convinced that matter was inert: it was unable to move or develop unless acted upon by an outside force. So God was essential to the entire system. There could be no question of excluding God from science. “Thus much concerning God,” Newton concluded, “to discourse of whom from the appearances of things does certainly belong to natural philosophy.”
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