Christianity, Science, and the Enlightenment

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Christianity, Science, and the Enlightenment

The Scientific Revolution.

The seventeenth century was the moment when opposition to Christianity's cultural authority came to be located, not so much among scientists, but among intellectuals who championed science as an alternative to Christianity. Here "science" must be understood broadly as the new knowledge that resulted from scientific investigation, from technological advance, and from the empirical collection of data about new peoples and places. For anti-Christian intellectuals, science, technology, and empiricism (the observation and charting of the causes of natural phenomena) proved the Bible's inadequacy to explain the world and confirmed that Christian intellectuals were disconnected from reality. The jabs of these intellectuals, however, did only minor injury to the Christian cause. It was church authorities that held Christianity up to ridicule by persecuting those scientists whose ideas they perceived as a threat and by insisting that the new science was a challenge to Christian authority. Many scientists—Galileo and Newton for example—remained practicing Christians. At the same time, many church authorities condemned science as heresy. The most spectacular demonstration of this process was the decision by the Catholic church to condemn the heliocentric theory, the theory that the earth and planets revolve around the sun. The Catholic church justified this decision with the argument that the Bible taught that the Lord had made the sun stop in the sky. Thus Christian orthodoxy necessarily had to affirm the geocentric argument, the theory that the sun and planets revolve around the earth. It was from this position that the Catholic church rationalized the conviction of the aged scientist Galileo (1564–1642) for heresy. Galileo was forced to recant his scientific findings and to proclaim publicly that the earth in fact remains stationary while the skies revolve around it. And yet, as Galileo is reported to have muttered under his breath after his public humiliation, "the earth does move." The trial of Galileo did not stop scientific investigation, but it did embarrass Christian intellectuals. The irony is that a good many Christian intellectuals actually embraced the new knowledge and sought to celebrate science as proof of the truth of Christianity. Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, had insisted upon seeing the world as a "mirror" of God's greatness. The sort of arguments that began to appear in the seventeenth century emerged from the same inspiration, but went in a different direction. Fixated on the mathematical and mechanical attributes of the world that was revealed in scientific investigation, Christian writers insisted that the symmetry and the efficiency of Nature could not be coincidental; these things must be the designs of a divine hand. Thus everything from the webs of spiders to the law of gravity to human emotions was argued to be evidence for the existence of the Christian God. The intellectuals that promoted these sensibilities, though, rarely advanced into the upper echelons of Europe's state churches. Instead most of the men chosen to lead these institutions had an animus against science and they asserted that faith transcended scientific reality. As such, during the age of the Baroque and Enlightenment, Christianity never made its peace with science.

Deism in England.

In England, one group of Christian thinkers took the rationality of Nature as more than just evidence of the existence of the Christian deity; they took it as an indication of the character of the deity as well. Rejecting the image of the Christian god as an entity who constantly intervened in the natural world to reward his followers and punish his detractors, these thinkers celebrated an idea of the deity who was content to let the world He put in place operate according to the principles He had established. These Deists, as opponents labeled them, did not embrace a uniform set of beliefs. What united Deists were the targets of their attacks. Deists rejected the possibility of miracles, since miracles involved the suspension of the laws of nature and God himself had established the laws of nature, and therefore, would not suspend them. Secondly, Deists took aim at the clergy, whom they indicted for fostering superstitions as religion. For Deists, churchmen were little better than shamans; both groups hoodwinked a gullible public with lies about their ability to manipulate the supernatural, a concept they insisted did not exist since the entire natural order was subjected to the laws the Deity had established at Creation. Most Deists advocated morality as religion's most positive force. Living right and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you were the commandments Deists recognized as coming from God. In England, the great age of Deist thought occurred during the later years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth when, in the relatively free climate created by the ascension of William and Mary and the passage of the Act of Toleration, Deists could publish their views with the anticipation that they were to spark controversy, but not excite government censure.

Major Deists.

Of the many thinkers during Deism's great age, five are worthy of note. John Toland (1670–1722) was the first Deist to attract public notice. In his Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) Toland argued that whatever is "repugnant" to the human mind as irrational should not be believed. He had in mind the many miracles that had traditionally been used to justify and support Christianity. Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, did not consider himself a Deist, yet his work was most closely identified with the term by thinkers on the continent. Shaftesbury's work went in the opposite direction from the work of most Deists, away from challenging the "superstitions" manufactured by "priests" toward identifying the actions implied in living a moral religious life. Still, in his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) Shaftesbury found occasion to lambaste any and all forms of religious fervor as blasphemous. In his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712) Samuel Clarke, who was chaplain to Queen Anne, demonstrated that the doctrine of the Trinity could not be found in the New Testament. For his efforts, a conventicle of the Anglican clergy forced a public apology from him. Anthony Collins (1676–1729) set his sights on disproving the "forgeries" of the clergy. In An Historical and Critical Essay on the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England (1724) he set out to invalidate the Church of England's claim of authority to resolve issues of faith. In A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, written in the same year, he worked out a chronology to demonstrate that Jesus could not have been the Messiah of the Old Testament prophecies. The final Deist figure that made a major mark on the religious ideas of the eighteenth century was Matthew Tindal (1653(?)–1733), who published a book in 1733 that has since become known as the Deist "Bible." The work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature rejected the notion of Christianity as a "revealed" religion. All that was right and moral in Christianity, Tindal argued, might be reasoned from the laws of nature without recourse to Scripture and the fabulous stories it contained.

CHRISTIANITY NOT MYSTERIOUS

introduction: The Irish-born Deist John Toland (1670–1722) had been raised Catholic, but converted to Protestantism at the age of sixteen. In his Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) Toland labored to reconcile Christian teaching with the new rationalism propounded by figures like John Locke. His central insistence that the realm of nature might reveal God rationally came to be accepted by other Deists, but also attracted charges of pantheism from more Orthodox quarters. In the current passage he makes one of the charges that was to garner criticism from the Church of England's clergy: that the mysteries of Christianity and its doctrines were created by the clergy so that they might have control over the explication of the Scriptures.

After having said so much of reason, I need not [laboriously] show what it is to be contrary to it; … what is evidently repugnant to clear and distinct ideas, or to our common notions is contrary to reason. I go on therefore to prove the doctrines of the Gospel, if it be the Word of God, cannot be so. But if it be objected that very few maintain they are, I reply that no Christian I know of now (for we shall not disturb the ashes of the dead) expressly says reason and the gospel are contrary to one another. But … very many affirm, that though the doctrines of the latter cannot in themselves be contradictory to the principles of the former, as proceeding both from God, yet that according to our conceptions of them, they may seem directly to clash; and that though we cannot reconcile them by reason of our corrupt and limited understandings, yet that from the authority of divine revelation, we are bound to believe and acquiesce in them; or as the fathers taught them to speak, to adore what we cannot comprehend. …

In short, this doctrine is the known refuge of some men, when they are at a loss in explaining any passage of the word of God. Lest they should appear to others less knowing than they would be thought, they make nothing of fathering that upon the secret counsels of the Almighty, or the nature of the thing, which is indeed the effect of inaccurate reasoning, unskilfulness in the tongues, or ignorance of history. But more commonly it is the consequence of early impressions, which they dare seldom afterwards correct by more free and riper thoughts. So desiring to be teachers of the Law, and understanding neither what they say, nor those things which they affirm … they obtrude upon us for doctrines, the commandments of men. … And truly well they may; for if we once admit this principle, I know not what we can deny that is told us in the name of the Lord. This doctrine, I must remark it too, does highly concern us of the laity; for however it came to be first established, the clergy (always excepting such as deserve it) have not been since wanting to themselves, but improved it so far as not only to make the plainest, but the most trifling things in the world mysterious, that we might constantly depend upon them for the explication. And, nevertheless they must not, if they could, explain them to us without ruining their own design, let them never so fairly pretend it. But, overlooking all observations proper for this place, let us enter upon the immediate examen of the opinion it self.

source: John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (London: n.p., 1696): 23–27. Text modernized by author.

The Spread of Deism.

Deism in England has been pictured as a thinking man's recreation. It emerged simultaneously with the rise of the coffeehouse, where Englishmen frequently met to converse, smoke, and consume enormous amounts of the exotic new brew. Deist writers thus wrote in a style that was accessible and appealing to the coffeehouse crowd. Deism was not an organized force, but an amorphous and sometimes stylish philosophical and religious preoccupation of the time, but one that Orthodox churchmen in England took quite seriously and which they frequently decried. Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, for example, prompted more than 150 learned rebuttals. Of the many Orthodox responses to Deism that appeared at the time, the most important was that of the Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752), who in The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736) pointed out that Nature, which the Deists characterized as the embodiment of rationality, was as full of irrationalities and ambiguities as the Scriptures and, like the Scriptures, required faith to be comprehended. More influential among intellectuals outside the church were the various arguments advanced by the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Hume understood a point that apparently escaped most of the Deists: that skepticism can be turned back upon the arguments of skeptics. Hume asserted, in other words, that there was no way to prove logically that Nature provided any necessary clues to the intent or character of its Creator. Following the theological wisdom of the day, Deists affirmed that the first religion of humankind had been monotheism, a natural creed that had been subverted and corrupted by the clergy. Hume countered such arguments by insisting that the first humans had been polytheistic, and by showing that the monotheism Deism celebrated was, in fact, a later corruption of primitive polytheism. As a result of these and other critiques, interest in Deism began to wane in England in the 1730s, and the successful attacks of Butler and Hume meant that the movement was not revived later in the eighteenth century. Yet while Deism's importance declined to a position of relative insignificance in England, English Deist ideas sparked imitations that were more permanent in France and Germany. It is not surprising that continental thinkers imitated ideas that had been discarded in England. In that country churchmen had tried to use their influence with government to suppress the ideas of the movement, but to little avail, and secular-minded intellectuals in England had come to express their notions relatively free from clerical condemnation. Such relative freedom existed in France only later in the eighteenth century when the royal government relaxed its censorship. On the continent also, conservative Christian movements like Jansenism in France and Pietism in Germany guaranteed that secular-minded intellectuals had to develop some defense against the arguments of these movements' enthusiasts, and Deism thus provided a welcome alternative to the emotionalism of Pietism or the austere religiosity of Jansenism. In France, thanks to the popularity of things English, major English Deist thinkers were translated into French and published. Many of the philosophes, the intellectuals of the French Enlightenment, identified themselves as Deists. The philosopher Voltaire characterized God as "the great geometrician, the architect of the universe, the prime mover." And it was through these thinkers that American intellectuals like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson came to be exposed to Deist ideas. In the second half of the eighteenth century German Christians also assimilated and reproduced the by-then abandoned English ideas concerning the design of Nature as proof of God's existence. But it was only late in the eighteenth century, and then cautiously, that they began to consider Deism's others aims, such as the abolition of a doctrinal Christianity. In Germany, writers like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) led this avant-garde movement. Lessing was the son of a Lutheran clergyman. During the years 1774–1778, he edited and published a selection of writings he entitled Fragments. These were excerpts from an "apology" for "rational worshippers of God"—a shorthand for Deists. Hermann Samuel Reimarus had originally written this defense of Deist principles, but he had been too fearful of persecution to publish his treatise while alive. The firestorm of criticism that Lessing's publication of the Fragments ignited validated Reimarus' fears. To defend himself, Lessing wrote The Education of the Human Race between 1777 and 1780, a treatise in which he argued that it was now permissible for humankind to leave revealed religion behind and progress forward to a rational understanding of faith. Lessing's most effective response to his critics, though, was his play Nathan the Wise (1779), a story that argued that the human pursuit of knowledge transcended religion.

Christianity and the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment as an intellectual movement was anti-Christian, but the nature and character of anti-Christian sentiment differed in different lands. The Enlightenment aimed to open up every aspect of life on earth to intellectual scrutiny and rational analysis. Taking the Scientific Revolution as an example of what the human mind could do when it applied itself, promoters of the Enlightenment promised that further dramatic discoveries were waiting to be made in the study of Nature and in the study of society, culture, and the arts. Enlightenment thinkers postulated an opposition between "religious" and "rational" modes of thought. Religious thought was superstitious and credulous. It was the darkness to which rationalism was the light. Texts by Enlightenment thinkers typically portrayed Christian churchmen as conservative and reactionary, and Christian churches as backward and intellectually stifling. Their attacks on religion were motivated by more than just a perspective that religious thinking violated human reason, however. Enlightenment thinkers were asserting that the nature of rational human knowledge was, in and of itself, different from that which Christian doctrine and theology had taught for centuries. The Enlightenment was a declaration of independence for secularism, a proclamation of self-emancipation for those who wanted to investigate any and all subjects, free from considerations of religious truth and without fear of clerical reprisals. For centuries, Christian theologians and officialdom had characterized knowledge according to whether it aided or hindered human salvation. The thinkers of the Enlightenment abandoned such judgments. For them, knowledge was to be judged good if it served to validate experiences and phenomena that had been observed in the real world. In the course of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment took different paths and moved in very different directions in various European regions. It is the French Enlightenment that is best known and studied, and it was a movement that was vehemently anti-clerical. France was also the only Catholic land in which the Enlightenment grew deep roots. The French Catholic clergy provided the philosophes with examples to ridicule and condemn. France was also the one state where atheists made a point of publicly rejecting their belief in the Christian God. According to a long-standing anecdote, David Hume came face-to-face with this unprecedented rejection of Christianity while serving as a member of the British diplomatic corps in Paris. One evening at a dinner party hosted by the Enlightenment philosophe Paul Henry Thiry, the Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), Hume remarked that he had never met an atheist. The Baron lamented Hume's bad luck, but then assured him that he was surrounded then by at least seventeen of them. The Deism of Voltaire, rather than the atheism of d'Holbach, is probably more reflective of the disposition of the French philosophes and their followers toward Christianity. Like Voltaire, most French who participated in the Enlightenment did not reject Christianity outright as much as they attacked the Catholic clergy and the cultural authority the church claimed. By contrast, Enlightenment thinkers in Britain had little to say on the subject of religion. Certainly David Hume

AN ENLIGHTENMENT EXAMINATION OF AN OLD TESTAMENT MIRACLE

introduction: Although Deism remained in fashion among English intellectuals for only a short while, the movement affected the Enlightenment in France and Germany during the later eighteenth century. German Enlightenment philosophers faced a generally more conservative public that resisted any attempts to modernize Christianity. In 1777, though, the philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) published the Fragments of Nikolaus Reimarus. These were philosophical musings that had been greatly influenced by deism. The furor they caused forced Lessing to defend himself from the charge of heresy in several subsequent works.

If we look at … the miracle of the passage through the Red Sea, its inner contradiction, its impossibility, is quite palpable. Six hundred thousand Israelites of military age leave Egypt, armed, and in battle order. They have with them their wives and their children and a good deal of rabble that had joined them. Now, we must count for each man of military age, four others at least; partly women, partly children, partly the aged, partly servants. The number of the emigrants, therefore, in proportion to those of military age, must be at least 3,000,000 souls. They take with them all their sheep and oxen, that is to say a large number of cattle. If we count only 300,000 heads of households, and give each of them one cow or ox, that would add up to 300,000 oxen and cows, and 600,000 sheep and goats. In addition, we must count on at least 1,000 wagon loads of hay or fodder; to say nothing of the many other wagons containing the golden and silver vessels which they had purloined, and piles of baggage and tents needed for such an enormous army—even if we count only 5,000 wagons, which is one wagon to sixty persons. At least they arrived at the Red Sea, and put down their camp near its shore. Pharaoh followed them, with 600 selected wagons and all the wagons left in Egypt, in addition to all the cavalry and infantry, and, as it was nightfall, he settled down not far from them. Josephus estimates this army at 50,000 cavalrymen and 200,000 infantry. It cannot have been small, for it was planning to confront any army of 600,000. But let us only count half of this—namely 25,000 cavalrymen, and 100,000 infantry, plus the wagons. During the night, the column of cloud and fire places itself between the Israelites and the Egyptians; God then sends a strong easterly wind which through the whole night pushes away the sea and makes the ground dry. Then the Israelites enter, dry of foot, and the Egyptians follow them, so that the former have crossed while the latter are in the middle of the sea. In the watch of the morning, God looks down upon the army of the Egyptians, allows the water to return so that it is restored to its full flood, and thus all the Egyptians drown, and not a one remains. It is this that the Biblical narrative partly tells us explicitly, partly compels us to infer.

source: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Fragments, in Deism: An Anthology. Ed. Peter Gay (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1968): 160–161.

made it the target of a good deal of his skeptical speculation. But the political economist Adam Smith was far more typical of the British Enlightenment, and Smith, as demonstrated in his classic, The Wealth of Nations, was concerned to identify the "natural" motivations for human behaviors. His focus, in other words, did not challenge alternative Christian explanations of human behaviors as much as ignore them. In Germany, the difficulties of thinkers like Lessing illustrate that one challenge of the Enlightenment in this region proved to be in getting any rationalist critique of Christianity into print. Yet it was in German-speaking Europe, more so than anywhere else in Continental Europe, that rulers looked to the works of Enlightenment thinkers popular elsewhere in Europe for hints at ways in which they might reform their state's churches. Prompted by the critiques of clerical authority that were common in the works of thinkers like Voltaire, Frederick the Great of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria both moved to reform the churches in their lands according to Enlightenment principles.

AN ENLIGHTENMENT ATTACK ON CHRISTIANITY

introduction: Paul Henri Thiry, the Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), was one of the French Enlightenment's most controversial figures. He vigorously attacked the Christian tradition and all religions as nothing more than edifices "in the air." In this excerpt from his Common Sense, published in 1772, d'Holbach praised atheism as the only sensible and rational choice for thinking men and women.

In a word, whoever will deign to consult common sense upon religious opinions, and bestow in this inquiry the attention that is commonly given to objects, we presume interesting, will easily perceive, that these opinions have no foundation; that all religion is an edifice in the air; that theology is only the ignorance of natural causes reduced to system; that it is a long tissue of chimeras and contradictions. That it represents, in every country, to the different nations of the earth, only romances void of probability, the hero of which is himself composed of qualities impossible to combine; that his name, exciting in all hearts respect and fear, is only a vague word, which men have continually in their mouths, without being able to affix to it ideas or qualities, which are not contradicted by facts, or evidently inconsistent with one another.

The idea of this being, of whom we have no idea, or rather, the word by which he is designated, would be an indifferent thing, did it not cause innumerable ravages in the world. Prepossessed with the opinion, that this phantom is an interesting reality, men, instead of concluding wisely from its incomprehensibility, that they are not bound to regard it; on the contrary infer, that they cannot sufficiently meditate upon it, that they must contemplate it without ceasing, reason upon it without end, and never lose sight of it. Their invincible ignorance, in this respect, far from discouraging them, irritates their curiosity; instead of putting them upon guard against their imagination, this ignorance renders them decisive, dogmatical, imperious, and even exasperates them against all, who oppose doubts to the reveries, which their brains have begotten.

source: Baron d'Holbach, Common Sense, in The Portable Enlightenment Reader. Ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1995): 141.