The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  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.27 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.”28

  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.29 In fact, the mechanical universe was godless, frightening, and devoid of meaning:

  When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.30

  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.”31

  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.32 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.33 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.34

  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.35 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.36 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”;37 in the scientific age, religion should be “experimental,” every one of its doctrines tested empirically against each person’s experience.38 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 166
0 under King Charles II; it simply went underground. The next thirty years were a time of extreme anxiety, since people feared another violent revolution.39 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).40

  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.”41 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.”42 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.43

  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.”44 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.”45 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.”46

  Indeed, Newton explained in a later work, the discussion of God was a matter of priority in science:

  The main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phaenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the Mechanism of the World, but chiefly to resolve these and such like Questions.47

  In a letter to the classicist Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Newton confessed that from the outset he had hoped to provide a scientific proof for God’s existence. “When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme, I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beleife in a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it usefull for that purpose.”48 When he had considered the mathematical balance of the solar system, he was “forced to ascribe it to ye counsel and contrivance of a voluntary Agent,” who was obviously “very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry.”49 Gravity could not explain everything. It “may put ye planets into motion but without ye divine powers, it could never put them into such Circulating motion as they have about ye sun.”50 Gravity could not account for the superb design of the cosmos. The earth rotated on its axis every day at a speed of about a thousand miles an hour at the equator; if this speed were reduced to a hundred miles per hour, day and night would be ten times as long, the heat of the sun would shrivel vegetation by day, and everything would freeze during the long nights. The motions that Newton had observed were conserved by inertial force, but originally they “must have required a divine power to impress them.”51

  At a stroke, Newton overturned centuries of Christian tradition. Hitherto leading theologians had argued that the creation could tell us nothing about God; indeed, it proved to us that God was unknowable. Thomas Aquinas’s “five ways” had shown that though one could prove that “what all men call God” had brought something out of nothing, it was impossible to know what God was. But Newton had no doubt that his Universal Mechanics could explain all God’s attributes. The Oxford orientalist Edward Pococke (1604–91) had told him that the Latin deus was derived from the Arabic du (“lord”).52 In the laws of gravity that held the universe together, Newton saw evidence of this divine “dominion” (dominatio), the overwhelming force that masters and controls the cosmos. It was the fundamental divine attribute: “It is the dominion of a spiritual being that constitutes a God.”53 But this domineering God was very different from Luria’s self-emptying En Sof or the kenotic God of the Trinity. Having established “Dominion” as the divine quality par excellence, it was possible to infer other attributes. A study of the universe proved that the God who created it must have intelligence, perfection, eternity, infinity, omniscience, and omnipotence: “That is, he continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things and he knows what happens and what is able to happen.”54

  God had been reduced to a scientific explanation and given a clearly definable function in the cosmos. God was actually “omnipresent not virtually only but substantially” in the universe, acting on matter in the same way as the will acts on the body.55 By 1704, Newton had come to believe that all the animating forces of nature were physical manifestations of this divine presence, though he expressed this conviction only in private to close friends.56 Not a single natural power worked independently of God. God was immediately present in the laws that he had devised; gravity was not simply a force of nature but the activity of God himself, he explained to Bentley. Gravity was the “Agent acting constantly according to certain laws that makes bodies move as though they attract each other.”57

  Did blind chance know that there was light, and what was its refraction, and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most conscious manner, to make use of it? These, and such like considerations, always have and ever will prevail with mankind, to believe that there is a Being who made all things, and has all things in his power and who is therefore to be feared.58

  God’s existence was now a rational consequence of the world’s intricate design.

  Newton was convinced that this “beleife,” a word that he habitually used in its modern sense, had prompted the primordial religion of humanity. While he was working on the Principia, he began to write a treatise entitled The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, which argued that Noah had founded a faith based on the rational contemplation of nature. There had been no revealed scriptures, no miracles, and no mysteries.59 Noah and his sons had wors
hipped in temples that were replicas of the heliocentric universe and taught them to see nature itself as “the true Temple of ye great God they worshipped.” This primordial faith had been “the true religion till ye nations corrupted it.” Science was the only means of arriving at a proper understanding of the sacred: “For there is no way (with out revelation)* to come to ye knowledge of a Deity but by ye frame of nature.”60 Scientific rationalism, therefore, was what Newton called the “fundamental religion.” But it had been corrupted with “Monstrous Legends, false miracles, veneration of reliques, charmes, ye doctrine of Ghosts or Daemons, and their intercession, invocation & worship and other such heathen superstitions.”61 Newton was particularly incensed by the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which, he argued, had been foisted on the faithful by Athanasius and other unscrupulous fourth-century theologians.

  Thomas Aquinas’s contemplation of the cosmos had revealed the existence of a mystery. But Newton hated mystery, which he equated with sheer irrationality: “‘Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,” he wrote irritably, “ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.”62 It was positively dangerous to describe God as a mystery, because this “conduces to the rejection of his existence. It is of concern to theologians that the conception [of God] be made as easy and as agreeable as possible, so as not to be exposed to cavils and thereby called into question.”63 For the early modern rationalist, truth could not be obscure, so the God that was Truth must be as rational and plausible as any other fact of life.

  Newton’s scientific theology quickly became central to the campaign against “atheism.” During these anxious years, people saw “atheists” everywhere, but they were still using the term to describe anybody they disapproved of, regardless of his or her beliefs; “atheism” thus functioned as an image of deviancy that helped people to place themselves on the shifting moral spectrum of early modernity.64 In the 1690s, an “atheist” could be recognized by his drunkenness, fornication, or unsound politics. It was not yet possible to sustain unbelief. Certainly people experienced doubts from time to time. John Bunyan (1628–88) described the “storms,” “flouds of Blasphemies,” “confusion and astonishment” that descended on him when he wondered “whether there were in truth a God or no.”65 But it was wellnigh impossible to maintain such skepticism on a permanent basis, because the conceptual difficulties were insurmountable.66 The doubter would find no support in the most advanced thought of the time, which insisted that the natural laws brilliantly uncovered by the scientists required a Lawgiver.67 Until there was a body of cogent reasons, each based on another cluster of scientifically verified truths, outright atheistic denial could only be a personal whim or passing impulse.