The Case for God (37 page)

It was indeed a proclamation
(evangelion
) of “good news.” Newton’s laws had revealed the great design in the universe, which pointed directly to the Creator God; by this religion, “atheism is now for ever hissed and chased out of the world.”
⁵

Yet Mather showed how easily old beliefs could coexist with the new. During the 1680s, he had warned his congregations that Satan regarded New England as his own province and had fought a bitter campaign against the colonists. Satan himself was responsible for the Indian Wars, the smallpox epidemics, and the decline in piety that had caused such anxiety in the Puritan community. In his
Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions
(1689), Mather did much to fan the fears that exploded in the infamous Salem witch trials (1692), in which he took a leading role. His faith in scientific rationality had not been able to assuage his own inner demons or his conviction that evil spirits lurked everywhere, poised to overthrow the colony.

But despite the explosion of irrationality in Salem, educated Americans were able to participate in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. In both Europe and the American colonies, an elite group of intellectuals was convinced that humanity was beginning to leave superstition behind and was on the brink of a glorious new era. Science gave them greater control over nature than had ever been achieved before; people were living longer and felt more confident about the future. Already some Europeans had begun to insure their lives.
⁶
The rich were now prepared to reinvest capital systematically
on the basis of continuing innovation and in the firm expectation that trade would continue to improve.

In order to keep abreast of these exciting developments, religion would have to change, so Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of theism, based entirely on reason and Newtonian science, which they called Deism. It is not true that Deism was a halfway house to an outright denial of God.
⁷
Deists were passionate about God and almost obsessed with religion. Like Newton, they believed that they had discovered the primordial faith that lay beneath the ancient biblical account. They spread their rational religion with near-missionary zeal, preaching salvation through knowledge and education. Ignorance and superstition had become the new Original Sins. The theologians Matthew Tindal (1655–1733) and John Toland (1670–1722) in the British Isles, the philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) in France, and the scientist, statesman, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and the statesman Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in America all sought to bring faith under the control of reason. The Enlightenment philosophes wanted every single person to grasp the truths unveiled by science and learn to reason and discriminate correctly.
⁸
Inspired by Newton’s vision of a universe ruled by immutable laws, they were offended by a God who intervened erratically in nature, working miracles and revealing “mysteries” that were not accessible to our reasoning powers.

Voltaire defined Deism in his
Philosophical Dictionary
(1764). Like Newton, he thought that true religion should be “easy,” its truths clearly discernible, and, above all, it should be tolerant.

Scarred by the theological wrangling and violence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, European Deism was marked by anticlericalism but was by no means averse to religion itself. Deists needed God. As Voltaire famously remarked, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

The Enlightenment was the culmination of a vision that had been long in the making. It built on Galileo’s mechanistic science, Descartes’ quest for autonomous certainty, and Newton’s cosmic laws, and by the eighteenth century, the philosophes believed that they had acquired a uniform way of assessing the whole of reality. Reason was the only path to truth. The philosophes were convinced that religion, society, history, and the workings of the human mind could all be explained by the regular natural processes discovered by science. But their rational ideology was entirely dependent upon the existence of God. Atheism as we know it today was still intellectually inconceivable. Voltaire regarded it as a “monstrous evil,” but was confident that because scientists had found definitive proofs for God’s existence, there were “fewer atheists today than there have ever been.”
¹⁰
For Jefferson, it was impossible that any normally constructed mind could contemplate the design manifest in every atom of the universe and deny the necessity of a supervising power.
¹¹
“If
Men
so much admire Philosophers, because they
discover
a small Part of the
Wisdom
that made all things,” Cotton Mather argued, “they must be stark blind, who do not admire that
Wisdom
itself.”
¹²
Science could not explain its findings without God; God was a scientific as well as a theological necessity. Disbelief in God seemed as perverse as refusing to believe in gravity. Giving up God would mean abandoning the only truly persuasive scientific explanation of the world.

This emphasis on proof was gradually changing the conception of belief. Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), the New England Calvinist theologian, was thoroughly conversant with Newtonian science and was moving away so radically from the idea of an interventionist God that he denied the efficacy of petitionary prayer. Yet he continued to defend the older view of belief, which, he insisted, involved far more than merely “confirming a thing by testimony.” It was not simply a matter of weighing the evidence: faith involved “esteem and affection” for the truths of religion as well as intellectual submission.
¹³
There could be no true belief unless a person was emotionally and
morally involved in the religious quest. But others disagreed. Jefferson defined belief as “the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.”
¹⁴
Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of West Church in Boston from 1747 to 1766, warned his parishioners that they must suspend their belief or disbelief in God until they had “impartially examined the matter, and [could] see the evidence on one side or the other.”
¹⁵

But like Mather, Mayhew was not always consistent. He preached hellfire sermons and the importance of personal intimacy with a God who would respond to one’s prayers and intervene in one’s life, and this Deism with an admixture of traditional
mythos
was more typical than the austere faith of such radicals as Toland. Only a few could sustain a totally consistent Deist faith. Most people retained traditional Christian beliefs but did their best to purge them of “mystery.” During the eighteenth century, a somewhat paradoxical theology was developing. In the supernatural realm, God remained a mysterious and loving Father, active in the lives of his worshippers. But in the natural world, God had been forced to retreat: he had created it, sustained it, and established its laws, but after that the mechanism worked by itself and God made no further direct interventions. In the past, Brahman had been identical with the atman of each being;
intellectus
had been the cutting edge of human reason. “Nature” and “supernature” had not been hermetically distinct; now they were beginning to seem opposed.
¹⁶
Philosophers were discovering other natural laws that governed human life without any reference to God. Adam Smith (1723–90) expounded the laws of the economy that determined the wealth of nations, Voltaire regarded morality as a purely social development, and the scientific history of Edward Gibbon (1737–94) dealt only with natural causation. The polarity of natural versus supernatural was just one of the dualisms—mind/matter, church/state, reason/emotion—that would characterize modern consciousness as it struggled to master the paradoxes of reality.

Enlightenment thinking involved a relatively small number of people. Not everybody was convinced by the new scientific religion. The nonconformist ideology of the Levelers, Quakers, and Diggers lingered on among the literate English underclass as part of a principled opposition to the establishment.
¹⁷
The scientific assumption that matter
was inert and passive and could be set in motion only by a higher power was associated with policies that sought to deprive the “lower orders” of independent, autonomous action. The literate, convict settlers who had rebelled against industrialized England and were deported to Australia took this commonwealth ideal with them and called themselves Diggers. There was considerable opposition to Newtonian theology among the “Tory” or “country” wing of the Church of England, which may have been more widespread than historians have appreciated.
¹⁸
John Hutchinson (1674–1737), its principal spokesman, had a very large following. The eminent doctor George Cheyne (1671–1743) had been an ardent Newtonian in his youth, but later became disenchanted with liberal, scientifically based Anglicanism and the new science, with its emphasis on induction and calculation. He became a disaffected anti-establishment Methodist. George Horne (1730–92), bishop of Norwich, complained in his private diary that the followers of Hutchinson got no preferment, that the liberal clergy had invented a natural religion that was a mere simulacrum of authentic Christianity, and that Deism had “darkened the sun.”
¹⁹
Mathematics could not provide the same certainty as revealed truth, and natural religion was simply a ploy to keep people in line. It had made “Christianity good for nothing but to keep societies in order, the better that there should be no Christ than that it should disturb societies.”
²⁰

Sadly, many saw Newtonian ideology as indissolubly linked with coercive government. As if in reaction against this rational faith, a host of fervent pietistic movements flourished during the Age of Reason. The German religious leader Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–60) insisted that faith was “not in thoughts nor in the head, but in the heart.”
²¹
God was not an objective fact that could be proved logically but “a presence in the soul.”
²²
Traditional doctrines were not purely notional truths; if they were not expressed practically in daily life, they would become a dead letter. Academics amuse themselves by “chattering about the mysteries of the Trinity,” but the significance of the doctrine lay in spiritual exercises; the Incarnation was not a historical fact in the distant past but expressed the mystery of new birth in the individual.
²³

Pietists who opted for the “religion of the heart” were not in revolt from reason; they were simply refusing to reduce faith to merely
intellectual conviction. John Wesley (1703–91) was fascinated by the Enlightenment and tried to apply a scientific and systematic “method” to spirituality: his Methodists followed a strict regimen of prayer, scripture study, fasting, and good works. But he insisted that religion was not a doctrine in the head but a light in the heart. “We do not lay the main stress of our religion on any opinions, right or wrong,” he explained. “Orthodoxy or right opinion is at best but a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all.”
²⁴
If the rational evidence for Christianity became “clogged and encumbered, this could be a blessing in disguise, as it would compel people “to look into themselves” and “attend to that same light.”
²⁵
Pietism shared many of the Enlightenment ideals: it mistrusted external authority, ranged itself with the moderns as against the ancients, shared the emphasis on liberty, and was excited by the possibility of progress.
²⁶
But it refused to relinquish the older patterns of religion in favor of a streamlined, rationalized piety.

But without discipline, the “religion of the heart” could easily degenerate into sentimentality and even hysteria. We have seen that Eckhart, the author of the
Cloud
, and Denys the Carthusian had all been concerned about a religiosity that confused affective states with the divine presence. The Enlightenment tendency to polarize heart and head could mean that a faith that was not capable of intelligent self-appraisal degenerated into emotional indulgence. This became clear during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening that erupted in the American colony of Connecticut in 1734. The sudden deaths of two young people in the community of Northampton plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. Within six months, three hundred people had experienced “ born-again” conversions, their spiritual lives alternating between soaring highs and devastating lows when they fell prey to intense guilt and depression. When the revival burned itself out, one man committed suicide, convinced that the loss of ecstatic joy must mean that he was predestined to hell. In premodern spirituality, rituals such as the Eleusinian mysteries had been skillfully crafted to lead people through emotional extremity to the other side. But in Northampton, the new American cult of liberty meant that there was no such supervision, that everything was spontaneous and free, and that people
were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions in a way that for some proved fatal.