The Case for God (39 page)

In 1749, Diderot published
A Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See
, the treatise that put him in prison, which took the form of a fictional dialogue between Nicolas Sanderson, the blind Cambridge mathematician, and Gervase Holmes, an Anglican minister who represented Newtonian orthodoxy.
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Sanderson is on his deathbed and can find no consolation in Newton’s proof for God’s existence, because he cannot see any of the marvels that so impressed Holmes. Sanderson has been forced to rely on ideas that could be tested mathematically, and this has led him into an outright denial of God’s existence. At the very beginning of time, Sanderson believes, there had been no trace of God—only swirling particles in an empty void. The evolution of our world was probably a good deal more arbitrary and messier than the tidy, purposive process described by Newton. Here, remarkably, Diderot makes Sanderson envisage a process of brutal natural selection. The “design” we see in the universe is simply due to the survival of the fittest. Only those animals survived “whose mechanism was not defective in any important particular and who were able to support themselves,”
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while those born without heads, feet, or intestines perished. But such aberrations still occur. “Look at me, Mr Holmes,” Sanderson cries. “I have no eyes. What have we done, you and I, to God, that one of us has this organ—while the other has not?”
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It is no good relying on God to find a solution to such insoluble problems: “My good friend, Mr Holmes,” Sanderson concludes, “confess your ignorance.”
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When Voltaire wrote a letter of reproach to him in prison, Diderot replied that these were not his own opinions. “I believe in God,” he wrote, “but I live very well with the atheists.” Actually, however, it made very little difference to him whether God existed or not. God
had become a sublime but useless truth. “It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley but to believe or not to believe in God is not important at all.”
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After his release, Diderot was invited to edit Ephraim Chambers’s
Cyclopaedia
(1728) but completely transformed it, making the
Encyclopédie
a major weapon in his campaign to enlighten society. All the major philosophes contributed, and even though Diderot was constantly threatened with exile or prison, he managed to produce the final volume in 1765.

One of his editors was Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), who presided over a salon in the Rue Royale that had the reputation of being a hotbed of atheism, even though only three of the regular members actually denied God’s existence. In 1770, d’Holbach, with Diderot’s help, published
The System of Nature
, which brought together the discussions of the salonistes. D’Holbach was passionately antitheistic and wanted to replace religion with science. There was no final cause, no higher truth, and no grand design. Nature had generated itself and preserved itself in motion, performing all the tasks traditionally attributed to God.

Enlightened human beings had learned to examine the world rationally, rid their minds of the God delusion, and think for themselves. Science alone could validate morality, religion, politics, and even the arts.
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For d’Holbach, religion was born of weakness, fear, and superstition; people had created gods to fill the gaps in their knowledge, so religious belief was an act of intellectual cowardice and despair. First, men and women had personified the forces of nature, creating divinities in their own image, but eventually they had merged all these
godlings into a massive deity that was simply a projection of their own fears and desires. Their God was “nothing but a gigantic, exaggerated man,” rendered incredible and unintelligible “by dint of keeping together incompatible qualities.”
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God was an incomprehensible chimera, a mere negation of human limitations.
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His infinity, for example, simply meant that he had no spatial boundaries, but such a being was utterly inconceivable. How could you reconcile the goodness of an omnipotent God with human suffering? This incoherent theology was bound to disintegrate in the Age of Reason. Descartes, Newton, Malebranche, and Clarke, who had all tried to save God, were simply atheists in disguise. Clarke, for example, had assumed that matter could not have brought itself into existence, but recent research had proved that he was mistaken. Even the great Newton had succumbed to the prejudices of his infancy. His Dominion was nothing but a deified despot, created in the image of a powerful man.
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If only these philosophers had realized that they need look no higher than Nature, their philosophy would have come out correctly.

The System of Nature
has been called the bible of the “scientific naturalism” or “scientism” that has continued to fuel the assault on faith. Its central belief is that the natural, material world is the only reality; it needs no external Cause because it is self-originating. There is no God, no soul, and no afterlife, and, although human beings can live useful and creative lives, the world itself has neither point nor purpose of its own. It just
is
. Science alone can give us a reliable understanding of all reality, including human intelligence and behavior. Because there can be no evidence for God’s existence, all rational, educated individuals must repudiate religion altogether.

In relying so heavily on modern science, the churches had made themselves vulnerable to exactly this type of attack, which undermined the very scientists who had been the champions of religion. The assembly of French clergy commissioned the leading theologian Abbe Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier to write a riposte; but his two-volume
Examen de materialisme
(1771) fell into the old trap, arguing that scientists had proved the inertia of matter and that, as a result, “we are forced to believe that there is in the universe, a substance of different nature, an active being to which movement must be attributed as to the First Cause, a Motor.”
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Newtonian religion was Bergier’s only resource; he seemed unaware of the traditional premodern conviction
that the natural world could indeed tell us nothing about God. The apophatic method was so alien to him that he apparently found nothing amiss in speaking of God as
a
being and
substance
located
in
the universe.

The French Revolution (1789), with its call for liberty, equality, and fraternity, seemed to embody the principles of the Enlightenment and promised to usher in a new world order, but in the event, it was only a brief, dramatic interlude: in November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) replaced the revolutionary government with a military dictatorship. The revolution made a profound impression on Europeans who were hungry for social and political change, but like other modernizing political movements, it was compromised by cruelty and intransigence. Fought in the name of freedom, it had used systematic violence to suppress dissidence; it produced the Reign of Terror (1793–94) as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, was followed three years later by the September Massacres.

After the September Massacres, the militantly atheistic leader Jacques Hébert (1757–94) had enthroned the Goddess of Reason on the high altar of Notre Dame Cathedral, demoted saints in favor of revolutionary heroes, abolished the Mass, and ransacked the churches. But the general public was not yet ready to get rid of God, and when Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94) seized control, he replaced the Cult of Reason with the more anodyne Deist Cult of the Supreme Being, dispatching Hébert to the guillotine, only to follow him a few months later. When he became First Consul, Napoleon reinstated the Catholic Church. But the symbolism of God’s dramatic abdication in favor of Reason linked the idea of atheism with revolutionary change. Henceforth in Europe—though not in the United States—atheism would be indissolubly associated with the hope for a more just and equal world.

Meanwhile, a different strand of Enlightenment thought undermined the tenets of both the Enlightenment and its science-based religion. Some scientists and philosophers had started to investigate the
human mind and developed a critical epistemology that cast doubt on the competence of the intellect to achieve any kind of certainty.
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The physicist Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), a committed Newtonian in his youth, had become highly skeptical of any attempt to prove God’s existence: philosophers, churchmen, and physicists were finding evidence of God’s hand in “wings of butterflies and in every spider’s web,” though these things could have come about by chance. Future scientists could easily find a natural explanation for the apparent “design” in nature, and then what would happen to a faith that depended on scientific theory?
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It was pointless to try to deduce God’s existence from nature, argued the physicist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83), because our knowledge of the universe was incomplete: we could observe it only at a given moment of time. There was also plenty of natural evidence to suggest that far from being a loving Creator, God might in truth be willful and irresponsible. The brilliant mathematician Marie-Jean Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) thought that scientists should concentrate on the study of psychology; we might find that we were incapable of understanding the natural laws we thought we had observed, which would make the vogue for natural theology a waste of time.
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The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) wittily disposed of Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas. We could never achieve objective knowledge and absolute certainty, because the human mind imposed its own order on the chaotic mass of sense data. All our knowledge was, therefore, inescapably subjective, because it was shaped and determined by human psychology. Our metaphysics was pure fantasy, and the so-called natural laws merely reflected a human prejudice. The “proofs” for God’s existence should be greeted with profound skepticism. Science, which was based on observation and experiment, could give us no information about God, one way or the other. But Hume had gone too far. Violating fundamental scientific and religious presuppositions, he seemed to invalidate the entire scientific enterprise that was now essential to the way people thought. Dismissed as a mischievous eccentric, he found few disciples in his lifetime. Other eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers opposed him by claiming that truth was indeed objective and available to any human being of sound “common sense.”

Some thirty years later, however, the German philosopher Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804) read Hume and felt as though he had been roused from a dogmatic slumber. In the
Critique of Pure Reason
(1781), he agreed that our understanding of the natural world was deeply conditioned by the structure of our minds and that it was impossible to achieve any knowledge of the reality we call God, which lay beyond the reach of the senses. We could neither prove nor disprove God’s existence, because we had no reliable means of verification. Even though Kant regarded the Enlightenment as a liberating movement, his philosophy in effect imprisoned people within their own subjective thought processes. But Kant agreed that it was natural for human beings to have ideas that exceeded the grasp of their minds. He once reassured his servant that he had “only destroyed dogma to make room for faith,”
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and yet he had no time for the rituals and symbols of religion that made faith viable.

On August 8, 1802, Napoleon visited Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827), the leading physicist of his generation.
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A protege of d’Alembert and an admirer of Kant, Laplace shared their modest assessment of the powers of human reason. When discussing scientific matters, he did not mention God at all—not because he was hostile to religion but because he saw God as irrelevant to physics. This indifference to faith was a new departure: the pioneering scientists of early modernity—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton—had all been deeply preoccupied with faith, and some had found God essential to their science. But when he developed his “nebular hypothesis,” Laplace showed how fatally easy it would be to oust God as the ultimate explanation. In a note added to later editions of his popular
Exposition du système du monde
(1796), he suggested that the solar system had been produced by a gaseous cloud that covered the sun and condensed to form the planets; the mechanical laws of nature did the rest. During his visit to Laplace, Napoleon, filled with wonder at the marvels of the cosmos, is said to have cried rhetorically: “And who is the Author of all this?” Calmly, Laplace replied: “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
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It was an emblematic moment, but few people were able either to take it in or grasp its implications. In the very same year as Napoleon made his visit to Laplace, the British churchman Archdeacon William Paley (1743–1805) published
Natural Theology
(1802), which achieved instant success and recognition in the English-speaking world. Like
Lessius a century earlier, Paley reached instinctively for the argument from design as irrefutable proof for the existence of God. Just as the intricate machinery of a watch found in a desert place bespoke the existence of a watchmaker, the exquisite adaptations of nature revealed the necessity of a Creator. Only a madman would imagine that a machine came about by chance, and it was equally ludicrous to doubt that the wonders of the natural world—the intricate structure of the eye, the minute hinges of an earwig’s wing, the regular succession of the seasons, or the intermeshing muscles and ligaments of the hand—pointed to a divine plan, in which every detail had its unique place and purpose. Paley was not suggesting that the universe was simply
like
a machine; it
was
a mechanism that had been directly contrived by the Creator. There had been no change or development. God had created every species of plant and animal in its present form—just as Genesis described.