The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  But the fear of “atheism” persisted, and when theologians tried to counter the “heresies” of Spinoza or the Levelers, they turned instinctively to the new scientific rationalism. The French priest and philosopher Nicholas de Malebranche (1638–1715) based his anti-atheistic riposte on Descartes. Others followed Newton. The Irish physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91), founding member of the Royal Society, was convinced that the intricate motions of the mechanistic universe proved the existence of a divine Engineer. He commissioned a series of lectures designed to counter atheism and superstition by presenting the public with the discoveries of the new science. Christian leaders, such as John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury (1630–94), were eager to embrace this scientific religion, because they regarded reason as the most reliable path to truth. The Boyle lecturers were all ardent Newtonians, and Newton himself gave his support to the venture.68

  In his Boyle lectures, Richard Bentley argued that the efficient machinery of the cosmos required an all-powerful and wholly benign Designer. Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), who delivered the lectures in 1704, maintained that “almost everything in the World demonstrates to us this great Truth; and affords undeniable Arguments, to prove that the World and all Things therein, are the Effects of an Intelligent and Knowing Cause.”69 Only mathematics and science could counter the arguments of atheists like Spinoza, so there could only be “One only Method or Continued Thread of Arguing.”70 Newton’s Universal Mechanics had proved what the scriptures had long maintained: “He is the Great One, above all his works, the awe-inspiring Lord, stupendously great.”71 Newton had finally refuted those skeptics who believed that “all the Arguments of Nature are on the side of Atheism and Irreligion.”72

  Largely as a result of his Boyle lectures, which made a huge impression, Clarke was hailed as the most important theologian of the day. His God was tangible: “There is no such thing as what men call the course of nature or the power of nature. [It] is nothing else but the will of God producing certain effects in a continued regular, constant and uniform manner.”73 God had become a mere force of nature. Theology had thrown itself on the mercy of science. At the time this seemed a good idea. After the disaster of the Thirty Years’ War, a rational ideology that could control the dangerous turbulence of early modern religion seemed essential to the survival of civilization. But the new scientific religion was about to make God incredible. In reducing God to a scientific explanation, the scientists and theologians of the seventeenth century were turning God into an idol, a mere human projection. Where Basil, Augustine, and Thomas had insisted that the natural world could tell us nothing about God, Newton, Bentley, and Clarke argued that nature could tell us everything we needed to know about the divine. God was no longer transcendent, no longer beyond the reach of language and concepts. As Clarke had shown, his will and attributes could be charted, measured, and definitively proven in twelve clear and distinct propositions. People were starting to become dependent upon the new science. But what would happen when a later generation of scientists found another ultimate explanation for the universe?

  * The term “philosophy” was synonymous with “science.”

  * In the manuscript, the words in parentheses have been added as an afterthought above the line.

  Enlightenment

  For many of the educated elite, the eighteenth century was exhilarating. The Thirty Years’ War was now a distant but salutary memory, and people were determined that Europe should never again fall prey to such destructive bigotry. As Locke had argued, scientists had shown that the natural world gave sufficient evidence for a creator, so there was no further need for churches to force their teachings down the throats of their congregants. For the first time in history, men and women would be free to discover the truth for themselves.1 A fresh generation of scientists seemed to confirm Newton’s faith in the grand design of the universe. The invention of the magnifying lens opened up yet another new world that gave further evidence of divine planning and design. The Dutch microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–73) had for the first time observed bacterial spermatozoa, the fibrils and striping of muscle, and the intricate structure of ivory and hair. These marvels all seemed to point to a supreme Intelligence, which could now be discovered by the extraordinary achievements of unaided human reason.

  The new learning spread quickly from Europe to the American colonies, where the prolific author and clergyman Cotton Mather (1663–1728), whose father, Increase (1639–1723), had been a friend of Robert Boyle’s, undertook his own microscopic investigations and was the first to experiment with plant hybridization. He kept up eagerly with European science and, in 1714, was actually admitted to the Royal Society. In 1721, he published The Christian Philosopher, the first book on science available in America for the general reader. Significantly, it was also a work of religious apologetics. Science, Mather insisted, was a “wondrous Incentive to Religion”;2 the entire universe could be seen as a temple, “built and fitted by that Almighty Architect.”3 This “Philosophical” faith, which could be accepted by Christian and Saracen alike, would transcend the murderous doctrinal quarrels of the sects and heal class divisions:

  Behold, a Religion, which will be found without Controversy; a Religion, which will challenge all possible Regards from the High, as well as the Low, among the People; I will resume the Term, a Philosophical Religion; and yet how Evangelical!4

  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 discri
minate 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.

  Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? Which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance, and humanity?9

  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 wa
s 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.