The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  Nature is not a work; she has always been self-existent; it is in her bosom that everything is operated; she is an immense laboratory, provided with the materials, and makes instruments of which she avails herself to act. All her works are the effects of her own energy, and of these agents or causes which she makes, which she contains, which she puts into action. Eternal, uncreated, indestructible elements, always in motion, in combining themselves variously, give birth to all the phenomena which our eyes behold.50

  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.51

  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.”52 God was an incomprehensible chimera, a mere negation of human limitations.53 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.54 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.”55 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.56 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?57 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.58

  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,”59 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.60 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.”61

  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.

  Paley’s image was attractive at a time when the Industrial Revolution had inspired a new interest in machinery. It made the idea of God as “easy” as Newton believed that it should be: it was not difficult to understand; it gave a clear, rational explanation; and the vision of a universe operating as regularly as clockwork was a comforting antidote to the terrifying tales of the French Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century, Natural Theology was required reading for Cambridge undergraduates and was accepted as normative by leading British and American scientists for over fifty years. The young Charles Darwin (1809–82) found it deeply persuasive.

  But it did not please everybody. The Romantic movement had already started to rebel against Enlightenment rationalism. The English poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake (1757–1827) believed that human beings had been damaged during the Age of Reason. Even religion had gone over to the side of a science that alienated people from nature and from themselves. Newtonian science had been exploited by the establishment, who used it to support a social hierarchy that suppressed the “lower orders,” and in Blake’s poetry Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization, and exploitation of the modern state.62 The true prophet of the industrial age was the poet, not the scientist. He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality:

  Calling the lapsed Soul

  And weeping in the evening dew

  That might controll

  The starry pole

  And fallen, fallen light renew.63

  The Enlightenment had created a God of “fearful symmetry,” like the Tyger, remote from the world in “distant deeps and skies.”64 The God of Newton must undergo a kenosis, return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus,65 and become one with humanity.66

  In 1812, the revolutionary young aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing an atheistic tract, but “The Necessity of Atheism” simply argued that God was not a necessary consequence of the material world. Shelley did not want to get rid of the divine altogether. Like his older contemporary William Wordsworth (1770–1850), he had a strong sense of a “Spirit,” an “unseen Power” that was integral to nature and inherent in all its forms.67 Unlike the philosophes, the Romantics were not averse to the mysterious and indefinable. Nature was not an object to be tested, manipulated, and dominated but should be approached with reverence as a source of revelation. Far from being inactive, the material world was imbued with a spiritual power that could instruct and guide us.

  Since childhood, Wordsworth had been aware of a “Spirit” in nature. He was careful not to call it “God” because it was quite different from the God of the natural scientists and theologians; it was rather

  A presence that disturbs me with the

  joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

  A motion and a spirit, that impels

  All thinking things, all objects of all thought

  And rolls through all things.68

  Always concerned with accuracy of expression, Wordsworth deliberately called this presence “something,” a word often used as a substitute for exact definition. He refused to give it a name, because it did not fit any familiar category. It bore little resemblance to the arid God of the scientists that had retreated from nature but was strongly reminiscent of the immanent force of being that people in the ancient world had experienced within themselves and in animals, plants, rocks, and trees.

  The Romantic poets revived a spirituality that had been submerged in the scientific age. By approaching nature in a different way, they had recovered a sense of its numinous mystery. Wordsworth was wary of the “meddling intellect” that “murders to dissect,” pulling reality apart in its rigorous analysis. Unlike the scientists and rationalists, the poet did not seek to master nature but to acquire a “wise passiveness” and “a heart that watches and receives.”69 He could then hear the silently imparted lessons that had been impressed upon him by the streams, mountains, and groves of the Lake District during his infancy.70 Since reaching adulthood, both Wordsworth and Shelley had felt estranged from this living presence; the receptive, listening attitude had been educated out of them. But by assiduously cultivating this “wise passiveness,” Wordsworth had recovered an insight that was not dissimilar to that achieved by yogins and mystics. It was a

  blessed mood,

  In which the burthen of the mystery,

  In which the heavy and the weary weight

  Of all this unintelligible world,

  Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

  In which the affections gently lead us on,—

  Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

  And even the motion of our human blood

  Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

  In body, and become a living soul:

  While with an eye made quiet by the power

 
Of harmony and the deep power of joy,

  We see into the life of things.71

  Like some of the philosophes, Wordsworth was fascinated by the workings of the human mind; he understood that the mind deeply affected our perception of the external world but was convinced that this was a two-way process. The external world silently informed our mental processes; the human psyche was receptive as well as creative, “working but in alliance with the works which it beholds.”72

  Wordsworth’s younger contemporary John Keats (1795–1821) used the term “Negative Capability” to describe the ekstatic attitude that was essential to poetic insight. It occurred “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”73 Instead of seeking to control the world by aggressive reasoning, Keats was ready to plunge into the dark night of unknowing: “I am however young writing at random— straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness— without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion.”74 He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was “the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.”75 True poetry had no time for “the egotistical sublime,”76 which forced itself on the reader: