The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  Scientific Religion

  In 1610, the English poet John Donne (1572–1631) lamented the state of the world, which he thought was entering its final phase. A deeply conservative man, Donne was a casualty of the Reformation. Born into a devout Catholic family, he had abjured his faith after his brother had died in prison for sheltering a Catholic priest and had become bitterly hostile to the new Catholicism. He was profoundly disturbed by the recent scientific discoveries that seemed wantonly to have destroyed the old cosmic vision of perfection and harmony. These were hard times. Europe was in the throes of economic recession and the social unrest attendant on modernization, and yet in the midst of this confusion, the “new Philosophy”* called “all in doubt.”

  ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;

  All just supply, and all Relation.1

  It was as though the universe had suffered a massive earthquake. New stars had been sighted in the firmament, and others had disappeared. The heavens no longer enjoyed their “Sphericall … round proportion embracing all,” and planets were said to wander in “Eccentrique parts” that violated the “pure forme” that men had observed for so long.2 When these fundamentals had shifted, how could anybody be certain of the truth?

  Donne was not alone in his pessimism. That same year Henry IV of Navarre, who had seemed the only monarch capable of stemming the tide of denominational violence that was threatening to engulf the whole of Europe, had been assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. This was immediately recognized as a tragic turning point and had the same kind of impact in seventeenth-century Europe as did the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in twentieth-century America.3 Henry had been determined to contain the religious passions that were becoming murderously divisive in France and had followed a policy of strict neutrality. He had granted civil liberties to French Protestants, and when the parlement expelled the Jesuits, Henry had reinstated them. His death, which shocked moderate Catholics and Protestants alike, sent a grim message: a policy of toleration had been tried but it had failed. By 1600, England was drifting into a civil war and the principalities of Germany were struggling to achieve independence from the Holy Roman Empire and form nation-states. Sweden supported the Protestant princes, and the Austrian Hapsburgs the Catholics. In 1618, this strife escalated into the full-scale Thirty Years’ War, which killed 35 percent of the population of central Europe, which was reduced to a charnel house. Religion was clearly incapable of bringing the warring parties together. The more Roman Catholic zealots gloried in the slaughter of Protestants and the more Protestants exultantly burned Catholic strongholds to the ground, the more people of moderation and goodwill despaired of a solution.

  But not everybody shared Donne’s misgivings about the “new Philosophy.” The Flemish Jesuit Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), one of the most distinguished theologians in Europe, shows that not all Catholics had developed the tunnel vision of the Vatican.4 Lessius was committed to the Catholic Reformation, had studied in Rome under Bellarmine, and on his return to the University of Louvain had introduced the works of Aquinas in their new guise into the curriculum. But he was also a Renaissance man, open to all the changing intellectual currents of the early modern world. He had studied jurisprudence and economics, and had been one of the first to appreciate the altered role of money in the nascent capitalist economy. In 1612, just two years after Galileo had published The Sidereal Messenger, Lessius not only applauded his discoveries but was able to confirm them, because he too had observed the pitted surface of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter through his telescope and was filled with “immense admiration” when he beheld this evidence of “God’s wisdom and power.”5

  These remarks were included in Lessius’s most important work, Divine Providence and the Immortality of the Soul (1612), a treatise directed “against atheists and politicians.” There had been some concern in recent years about the emergence of “atheism,” though at this date the term did not yet mean an outright denial of God’s existence. It usually referred to any belief that the writer deemed incorrect. For Lessius, “atheism” was a heresy of the past: the only “atheists” he could name were the ancient Greek philosophers. He was especially concerned about the “atomists”—Democritus, Epicurus, and the Roman poet Lucretius (c. 95–55 BCE)—who had believed that the universe had come into being by chance. Democritus had imagined innumerable particles, so tiny that they were “indivisible” (atomos), careering round empty space, colliding periodically to form the material bodies of our world. There was a new interest in atomism in Europe at this time; it certainly troubled John Donne.6 Democritus’s infinite cosmic space suited the Copernican universe very well, now that it had been shorn of the celestial spheres. But Democritus had seen no need for an overseeing God, and Lessius could not accept this. Citing the Stoic philosophy of Cicero, he argued that the intricate design of the natural world required an intelligent Creator. It would be as absurd to deny the hand of divine providence as to imagine that a “faire, sumptuous and stately palace” had been put together “only by a suddain mingling and meeting together of certaine peeces of stones into this curious and artificiall forme.”7

  The French mathematician and Franciscan friar Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) was a committed scientist and had supported Galileo when it was not politically expedient to do so.8 But in The Impiety of Deists, Atheists and Libertines of Our Time, he had no difficulty in identifying modern “atheists.”9 None of them denied the existence of God: some, like the devout Parisian priest Pierre Charron (1541–1603) or the Paduan philosopher Geronimo Cardano (1501–76), were merely skeptical about the ability of human reason to arrive at any final truth. Mersenne was particularly disturbed by the hermetic philosophy of Bruno, another of his “atheists,” who had believed that nature had its own divine powers and needed no supervision. To counter this, Mersenne developed a Christian version of atomism, which added a supervising Creator God to Democritus’s universe.10 The atoms had neither intelligence nor purpose, so nature had no occult power of its own and was entirely dependent upon le grand moteur de la universe. It is significant that in combating “atheism,” both Lessius and Mersenne turned instinctively to the science and philosophy of antiquity rather than to their own theological tradition. Thomas Aquinas had insisted that we could not learn anything about the nature of God from the created world; now the complexity that scientists were discovering in the universe had persuaded theologians that God must be an Intelligent Designer. Denys and Thomas would not have approved.

  Mersenne was present at a conference in Paris in November 1628, when a distinguished group of philosophers listened to a spirited critique of scholasticism in the presence of Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629), the papal nuncio. Also present was the philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes (1596–1650), who refused to join the applause. The assembly, Descartes explained, had made a fundamental error in being satisfied with knowledge that was merely probable. But he had developed a philosophical method based on the mathematical sciences that yielded absolute certainty. It was not easy, but if followed diligently over a long period of time, it could be applied effectively to any field of knowledge, including theology. After the conference, Bérulle took Descartes aside and told him that he had a duty—indeed, a divine mission—to publish this method, if he thought that it could pull Europe back from the abyss.

  Descartes had been educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in Anjou, founded by Henry IV, where he was encouraged to read widely. He had been overwhelmed with excitement when he read Galileo for the first time and had also been fascinated by the skepticism of Montaigne, though as time went on he became convinced that this was not the right message for a world torn apart by warring dogmatisms that seemed unable to find a truth to bring people together. Descartes’ philosophy was marked by the horror of his time. He had been present when the heart of Henry IV, martyr of tolerance, had been enshrined in the cathedral at La Flèche. Throughout his life, he was convinced that both Catholics and Prot
estants could hope for heaven. His goal was to find a truth on which everybody—Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, deists, and “atheists”—could agree so that all people of good will could live together in peace.

  Descartes’ ideas were formed on the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War. On leaving school, he had joined the army of Maurice, Count of Nassau (1567–1625), and traveled Europe as a gentleman soldier, meeting some of the most important mathematicians and philosophers of the day. He claimed afterward that he had learned far more in the army than he would have at a university. As he witnessed the war at first hand, he became convinced that it was essential to find a way out of the theological and political impasse that seemed to be destroying civilization itself; everything seemed to be falling apart. The only way forward was to go back to first principles and start all over again. In 1619, Descartes transferred to the army of Maximilian I of Bavaria. As he was journeying to take up his new post, a heavy snowfall forced him to put up in a small poêle, a stove-heated room, near Ulm on the Danube. For once, he had time for serious, solitary reflection, and it was during this retreat that he devised his method. He experienced three luminous dreams, commanding him to lay the foundations of a “marvellous science” that would bring together all the disciplines—theology, arithmetic, astronomy, music, geometry, optics, and physics—under the mantle of mathematics. Descartes had been haunted by Montaigne’s challenge at the end of the “Apology of Raymond Sebond”: unless we could find one thing about which we were completely certain, we could be sure of nothing. In the poêle, Descartes turned Montaigne’s skepticism on its head and made the experience of doubt the foundation of certainty.

  First, he insisted, the thinker must empty his mind of everything that he thought he knew. He must, he told himself, “accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented in my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it.”11 It was a rationalized version of Denys’s way of denial.12 A scientist must empty his mind of the truths of revelation and tradition. He could not trust the evidence of his senses, because a tower that looked round from a distance might really be square. He could not even be certain that the objects in his immediate environment were real: How did we know that we were not dreaming when we saw, heard, or touched them? How could we prove that we were awake? His aim was to find ideas that were immediately self-evident; only “clear” and “distinct” truths could provide a basis for his Universal Mathematics.

  Eventually, Descartes found what he was looking for. “I noticed that whilst I wished to think all things false, it was absolutely essential that the ‘I’ should be somewhat,” he concluded.

  Remarking that this truth, “I think, therefore I am” was so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I came to the conclusion that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy for which I was seeking.13

  This was the one certain thing that answered Montaigne’s challenge. The internal experience of doubt itself revealed a certainty that nothing in the external world could provide. When we experience ourselves thinking and doubting, we become aware of our existence. The ego rose ineluctably from the depths of the mind by the disciplined ascesis of skepticism:14 “What then am I? A thing which thinks [res cogitans]. What is a thing that thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.”15 Descartes’ famous maxim “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) neatly reversed traditional Platonic epistemology: “I think, therefore there is that which I think.” The modern mind was solitary, autonomous, and a world unto itself, unaffected by outside influence and separate from all other beings.

  From this irreducible nub of certainty, Descartes went on to prove the existence of God and the reality of the external world. Because the material universe was lifeless, godless, and inert, it could tell us nothing about God. The only animate thing in the entire cosmos was the thinking self, and it was here that we should look for incontrovertible proof. Descartes was clearly influenced by Augustine and Anselm. Doubt reveals the imperfection of the thinker, because when we doubt we become acutely aware that something is missing. But the experience of imperfection presupposes a prior notion of perfection, because it is a relative term, comprehensible only in terms of its absolute. It was impossible that a finite being could by its own efforts conceive the idea of perfection, so it must follow “that it had been placed in me by a Nature which was really more perfect than mine could be, and which even had within itself all the perfections of which I could form any idea—that is to say, to put it in a word, which was God.”16 How else could we know that we doubted and desired—that we lacked something and were not, therefore, perfect—if we did not have within ourselves an innate idea that enabled us to recognize the defects of our own nature?

  Most medieval theologians had rejected Anselm’s ontological proof because, despite its apophatic dynamic, he had called God a “thing” (aliquid) that must “exist.” But now Descartes claimed that God was a “clear and distinct” idea in the human mind and was entirely happy to apply the word “existence” to God. Where Thomas had said that God was not a “sort of thing,” Descartes found no difficulty in calling God a being, albeit the “first and a sovereign Being.”17 Like Anselm, he saw existence as one of the perfections. “For it is not within my power to think of God without existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme perfection) though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings.”18 This truth was as clear as—if not clearer than—Pythagoras’s theorem of the right-angled triangle. “Consequently it is at least as certain that God, who is a Being so perfect, is, or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can possibly be.”19

  God was absolutely necessary to Descartes’ philosophy and his science, because without God he had no confidence in the reality of the external world.20 Because we could not trust our senses, the existence of material things was “very dubious and uncertain.” But a perfect being was truth itself and would not allow us to remain in error on such a fundamental matter:

  On the sole ground that God is not a deceiver and that consequently He has not permitted any falsity to exist in my opinion which He has not likewise given me the faculty of correcting, I may assuredly hope to conclude that I have within me the means of arriving at the truth even here.21

  What we know about the external world, we know in exactly the same way as God knows it; we could have the same “clear” and “distinct” ideas as God himself.

  Once Descartes was confident that the material world existed, he could proceed with the second part of his project: the creation of a single scientific method that could bring a world that was spinning out of control under the rule of reason. In his desire to master reality, Descartes could not accept the idea that the cosmos had come into being by accident. His cosmos was an intricate, well-oiled machine, set in motion and sustained by an all-powerful God. Like Mersenne, Descartes revived ancient Greek atomism, but with the crucial addition of an overseeing Creator. At the moment of creation, God had imposed his mathematical laws upon the atoms, so that when an atom collided with another, this was not a matter of chance but achieved by divinely implanted principles.22 Once everything had been set in motion, no further divine action was necessary, and God was able to retire from the world and allow it to run itself.

  In a time of frightening political turbulence, a universe that ran as regularly as clockwork seemed profoundly attractive. Descartes, a devout Catholic all his life, had experienced his “method” as a Godgiven revelation and in gratitude—extraordinary as this may seem— vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto. Yet Descartes’ philosophy was profoundly irreligious: his God, a clear idea in his mind, was well on the
way to becoming an idol, and his meditation on the thinking self did not result in kenosis but in the triumphant assertion of the ego. There was no awe in Descartes’ theology: indeed, he believed that it was the task of science to dispel wonder. In the future people should look, for example, at the clouds, “in such a way that we will no longer have occasion to wonder at anything that can be seen of them, or anything that descends from them.”23

  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.”24 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.25 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.

  • • •

  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.26 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.