Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (28 page)

Though it wasn’t intended to address questions of God, this pursuit of objectivity was a big step in making the atheist point of view possible. As long as everyone was thinking inside a religious system built on unquestionable assumptions — among them the assumption that Scriptures are true because they say they’re true — it’s pretty hard to find the exit. By establishing objectivity as a goal worth striving for and showing just how amazing the results can be when you give it a try, the Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment’s challenges to religious thought and just about everything that came afterward.

The Enlightenment and the Renaissance were two of the biggest developments in Western history. But compared to the Scientific Revolution, they’re pebbles dropped into the human pond, and the Scientific Revolution is a Jack Black cannonball.

The following sections look at some of the events in the Scientific Revolution that proved important for later developments in atheism. Without these key moments, atheism would have remained in the starting gate, munching its hay. But with these crucial changes of perspective, atheism was out of the gates and around the first turn.

Copernicus knocks the Earth off-center; Galileo backs him up: The first humbling

It’s easy for a person today to forget what a mental and emotional earthquake Copernicus eventually wrought by suggesting the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe after all. All the problems explaining planetary motion went away if the sun was at the center and Earth was just another planet. But bigger problems quickly rushed in to replace them, including the need for people to eat a massive, steaming slice of humble pie, realizing they weren’t apparently as important in the scheme of things as they thought.

Hearing Copernicus’s theory had to be incredibly disorienting at the time. To the human mind, Earth had been not just central but stationery — see Psalm 93 if you doubt that. The universe had whirled around Earth, then overnight, Earth became part of the dance, unstuck in the fabric of space. I imagine people gazing up at the night sky and suddenly losing their balance, and possibly their dinner as well. (As a side note, after the Earth wasn’t the center of the cosmos, the whole pretext for astrology vanished overnight — though news of this development has yet to reach about 100 million Americans.)

Copernicus explained the motion of the planets much better than Ptolemy’s old system of orbital curlicues and planetary whirligigs. But 95 percent of his book was math with not much direct observational evidence to speak of. That made it easier for those people who wanted to keep denying that the Earth had been demoted from the Big Chair to do so. Historians estimate that for a half-century after publication, only about 15 astronomers in all Europe really accepted the idea. Others dismissed it out of hand — including the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. What sense did it make for God’s children, the center of his concern, to not be in the center of his creation?

Good question.

In the early 1600s, Galileo brought the evidence home when he observed the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter through his improved telescopes and published his findings and his support for Copernicus. The Inquisition declared his conclusions unacceptable, as if declaring something unacceptable was the same as disproving it.

Galileo was arrested and tried for heresy. In exchange for sparing his life, he took it all back. (Some say he then took back the taking back, under his breath — but I’ll leave that one for the mythmakers.) He spent his remaining nine years of life under house arrest for getting the universe right.

As late as 1820, the Catholic Church still referred to the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun as “just a hypothesis.” But Galileo’s books were removed from the Index of Forbidden Books in 1835, and Pope John Paul II vindicated Galileo . . . in 1992. (Mustn’t rush these things.)

Neither Copernicus nor Galileo was an atheist, and decentering Earth by no means disproved God. But it was the first of several serious humblings for the human species. After the Earth was removed from center stage, it was easier for people to consider that religion had gotten a few other things wrong as well.

Reconciling science and religion (or not) — Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth

In the 21st century, trying to reconcile a literal reading of the Book of Genesis with modern science requires a serious misconception of the state of human knowledge. A little dishonesty doesn’t hurt either. But in 1696, science was still stretching its legs, and geology was a babe in arms.

So when an English theologian named William Whiston tried to reconcile the Genesis account with what little was known scientifically about the Earth in 1696, that attempt wasn’t quite as dubious as the “intelligent design” game would be in later centuries. Whiston’s
New Theory of the Earth
was a noble first attempt to make the two systems play nice. Whiston described the how and when of the world’s creation, the Great Flood, and even the origin of Earth’s atmosphere (which he thought may have come from a passing comet — a really interesting hypothesis).

He came from the same tradition as Archbishop James Ussher, who a couple of generations earlier used the generations and ages given in the Bible to come up with an exact date of Creation: October 23, 4004 BCE. Ussher is often ridiculed for that today, which I think is really unfair. He was trying to apply a kind of scientific rigor to the task, using the limited data available at the time.

Ussher and Whiston both deserve credit for a good 17th century try. Unlike their modern counterparts, they weren’t making themselves willfully blind to science. There just wasn’t much science to see yet.

Stirring the Pot: The Clandestine Manuscripts

Though atheist thought had been up and running for centuries in places like China and India, European atheism (aside from a few peeps in ancient Greece) didn’t even start clearing its throat until the mid-1600s. At that time, anonymous books challenging the existence of God started to appear. Minor nobles and major thinkers of the time started to secretly pass them to each other. Blasphemy was still extremely illegal, and saying God didn’t exist was as blasphemous as you could get.

The books were known as
clandestina,
or secret manuscripts. First came an anthology that pulled together some of the ancient Greek writings that challenged religious belief. Books with original arguments that added the perspective gained since the Scientific Revolution quickly followed. Then small pamphlets making individual arguments against belief in God began appearing across the continent — more than 200 in all.

With the sudden appearance of all of these secret documents, people started (secretly) talking and thinking about the existence of God in ways that were completely unthinkable a few generations earlier. They certainly didn’t evict God from Europe’s intellectual life — even the Enlightenment only posted a first eviction notice, maybe turned off a few utilities. But the anonymous clandestina marked the first time early modern Europe seriously considered the possibility that the divine apartment had never been occupied to begin with. (For more on secret and forbidden documents in atheist history, see
Chapter 10
.)

Singing the War Song of an Atheist Priest

In the last years of the 17th century, as Europe continued its slow recovery from 140 years of religious war, a young man named Jean Meslier became a Catholic priest — even though he didn’t believe in God. He did so because his parents wanted him to, and because he felt he could do more to help people in need from inside the church than outside.

During the course of 40 years as a priest, Meslier’s atheism and his contempt for all religion deepened. He felt that the Catholic Church made people subservient in his parish, that believing and saying things that weren’t true was unworthy, and that more misery and fear flows from religious belief than comfort and inspiration. But he felt trapped in his job, unable to be honest about his views for fear of arrest and execution.

So Meslier did his priestly duties every day — serving the poor and sick, giving homilies, burying the dead, and performing baptisms and funerals. By night he then returned to his room and worked on his magnum opus: the first book-length work in Europe written from an explicitly atheist perspective with an author’s name on it. And what a name it was — a priest in the Holy Catholic Church.

He wrote it for his parishioners, then left it for them to find upon his death. It remains one of the most astonishing, provocative, and moving works in the history of atheism. (For much more on Meslier’s testament, turn to
Chapter 11
.)

Thinking Dangerous Thoughts: The Enlightenment Philosophers

Like a lot of social and intellectual movements, the Age of Enlightenment was halfway done before anyone really thought of it as a movement. Important thinkers like Spinoza (refer to
Chapter 11
), Bayle (check out
Chapter 15
), and Voltaire (see the next section) laid the groundwork for an explosion of challenging new questions and ideas. The magnifying glass that had been turned on the natural world throughout the 17th century was turned on human society in the 18th — and what it saw wasn’t pretty. Unearned wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the majority languished in equally unearned poverty and powerlessness. The Catholic Church held vast amounts of land and treasure, had several kings in its pocket, and exerted an oversized influence on what people could say, think, and aspire to.

Talk across Europe and in the American colonies turned to radical ideas like basic human rights, individual liberty, tolerance, and equality. In addition to kings and aristocracies, the greatest impediment to progress in these areas was the overwhelming influence of the church.

There are countless contributors to this new age of “dangerous” thinking, but a few well-placed thinkers can give you the flavor of the times. The following sections introduce those thinkers and their thoughts.

Crushing infamous things with Voltaire

The philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) wasn’t an atheist, but a
Deist,
meaning he believed in a good but mostly non-intervening, non-communicating God. No prayers heard, no wrath dispensed. (Given the knowledge available at the time, I’d probably have been a Deist too.) Deists think the superstitions and rituals created by organized religion only get in the way of understanding. They believe reason is the only valid way to understand God and his creation, not tradition or revelation, and that tradition and revelation are therefore to be challenged and thrown out whenever possible.

Voltaire spent a lot of effort badmouthing the atheists of his time. He said the idea of God is so important that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” But because he challenged traditional religion, he was constantly accused of being an atheist anyway, something that irritated him to no end. Like it or not, his smart and articulate challenges laid the foundation for atheist thought in the Enlightenment and beyond.

Like others of his time, Voltaire saw the Church as the greatest stumbling block to progress. One of his favorite expressions was
“Écrasez l’infâme!,”
which means
Crush the infamous thing! —
specifically the Church and its clergy. Superstition was his enemy, and reason was his highest cause: “Superstition sets the whole world in flames,” he said, “and philosophy quenches them.” No philosopher did more to lay the foundation of the Enlightenment — and to fan the flames of the French Revolution that ended it — than Voltaire.

Daring to know: Kant’s “Sapere aude!”

The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a Deist who felt belief in God was “necessary from the practical point of view.” And like Voltaire, Kant saw natural reason as the best way to understand the world, and he saw organized religion, ritual, and superstition as obstacles to knowledge and progress.

Kant was especially hostile to the idea that “pleasing God” was the way to moral rightness. He felt doing so was actually a huge distraction from focusing on actual, useful, sensible moral principles. (Modern research agrees with him; see
Chapter 15
.)

One of Kant’s biggest contributions to the Enlightenment was an essay he wrote near the end of the period called “What is Enlightenment?” He said the lack of enlightenment came from people’s inability to think for themselves — not because they lacked intelligence, but because they lacked courage. People have developed a reliance on others, especially the Church, to tell them what to think. “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-imposed immaturity,” he said, in an attempt for humanity to find the courage to think for itself.

Kant said that
Sapere aude!
(Dare to know!) should be the motto of the Enlightenment. And the first step in finding that daring is rejecting the terrible idea that dogmas should be accepted without question.

Kant believed strongly that handing doctrines or beliefs from one generation to the next with firm instructions not to change or question them “prevent[s] all further enlightenment of mankind forever.” If they’re valid and worthwhile, ideas will be reaffirmed in each generation. If they’re false or unworthy, humanity can throw them out. Even within a single lifetime, Kant said, humanity must be willing to think freely and to criticize all ideas, including religious ones, so that only the best remain.
That’s
enlightenment. And when immaturity prevents such progress, Kant said, religion “is the most pernicious and dishonorable variety of all.”