The Original Atheists: First Thoughts on Nonbelief - Softcover

S. T. Joshi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616148411 ISBN 13: 9781616148416

Publisher: Prometheus, 2014

Synopsis

This is the first anthology ever published to feature the writings of leading eighteenth-century thinkers on the subjects of atheism, religion, freethought, and secularism.

Editor S. T. Joshi has compiled notable essays by writers from Germany, France, England, and early America. The contributors include Denis Diderot (a principal author of the multivolume French Encyclopédie), Baron d'Holbach (System of Nature, 1770), Voltaire (Philosophical Dictionary), David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and other lesser-known thinkers.
     With a comprehensive introduction providing the intellectual and cultural context of the essays, this outstanding compilation will be of interest to students of philosophy, religious studies, and eighteenth-century intellectual history.

About this title

About the Author

S. T. Joshi (Seattle, WA) is a freelance writer, scholar, and editor. He is also editor of the American Rationalist. His previous books include The Unbelievers- The Evolution of Modern Atheism; Documents of American Prejudice; In Her Place- A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women; God's Defenders- What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong; Atheism- A Reader; H. L. Mencken on Religion; The Agnostic Reader; and What Is Man? And Other Irreverent Essays by Mark Twain.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE ORIGINAL ATHEISTS

FIRST THOUGHTS ON NONBELIEF

By S. T. JOSHI

Prometheus Books

Copyright © 2014 S. T. Joshi
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61614-841-6

Contents

INTRODUCTION, 7, 
PART 1. THE FRENCH AND GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENTS, 
Jean Meslier From Testament (1729), 17, 
Julien Offray de La Mettrie From Man a Machine (1748), 33, 
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac "On the Origin and Progress of Divination" (1749), 39, 
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) From Philosophical Dictionary (1764), 51, 
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach From The System of Nature (1770), 71, 
Denis Diderot "Conversation between the Abbé Barthélemy and Diderot" (1772–73), 91, 
Immanuel Kant From Critique of Pure Reason (1781), 111, 
PART 2. THE BRITISH ENLIGHTENMENT, 
John Locke "Of Faith and Reason, and Their Distinct Provinces" (1690), 141, 
Anthony Collins From A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713), 149, 
David Hume "Of Miracles" (1748), 163, 
Jeremy Bentham and George Grote From Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (1822), 181, 
PART 3. THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT, 
Thomas Jefferson Selections, 203, 
Ethan Allen From Reason, the Only Oracle of Man (1784), 217, 
James Madison A Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1784–85), 237, 
Thomas Paine From The Age of Reason (1794), 245, 
NOTES, 255, 
SOURCES, 267, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 271, 
INDEX, 277, 

INTRODUCTION

The first atheist of whom we know is one Diagoras, who lived in the latefifth century BCE. It is typical that nothing of his works aside from randomfragments survives and that he was forced to flee Athens because he declared thatthere were no gods. Even in the ages preceding Christianity, the enunciationof explicitly atheistic, or even agnostic, views carried with it the threat ofboth legal punishment and social obloquy. It is therefore unsurprising that,once Christianity gained ascendancy in the Roman Empire (in the early fourthcentury CE), avowed atheists were few and far between. All that changed withthe dawn of the eighteenth century in Europe, and the following questionmust be asked: Why? More pertinently, Why now?

The answers are multitudinous and complex but can be boiled down to twoimportant developments that had occurred over the preceding several centuries.The Renaissance that began in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuriesgenerated two discrete but parallel intellectual movements—the advance ofscience and the rediscovery of classical learning. The former is perhaps the betterknown, but it is still worth underscoring. There is scarcely any question that therevolutionary findings of such thinkers as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo hadthe effect of knocking the earth and its occupants from both physical and moralcentrality in the universe. If our planet was only a tiny atom in the midst of avirtually boundless array of stars, galaxies, and nebulae, then it became harder tobelieve that a god had specifically designed the earth for a chosen species calledhuman beings. Complementary developments in other sciences had the effectof replacing supernatural causation with natural causation: increasingly, God wasno longer required to explain the workings of the universe or the creation anddevelopment of natural organisms. All this work culminated in the discoveriesof Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who became a kind of intellectual icon whowas thought to have explained the workings of the universe once and for all. Itwas the deist Alexander Pope who deliberately evoked (and, indeed, gently parodied)religious imagery in describing Newton's achievements:

Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night:God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.

The second development—the resuscitation of classical learning—hada somewhat more indirect role in the growing secularism of the age, but itwas ultimately no less significant. In the medieval era, only Plato and Aristotlewere read and studied—chiefly, in Plato's case, for the fancied similarities ofhis ethical views to those of Christianity, and, in Aristotle's, for purportedlysupplying the logical foundation for Christian metaphysical thought. The greatmajority of "pagan" writers from the Greco-Roman period were shunned asbenighted figures who had failed to benefit from Christian teaching. Dantemay have fetishized Virgil as his spiritual leader in the Divine Comedy, but lesssuperficially Christian writers were under the ban. The Renaissance, however,had rediscovered the thought of such thinkers as the pre-Socratics (includingLeucippus and Democritus, the founders of atomism), the Stoics (also in someregards considered forerunners of Christian moral belief), and in particularEpicurus and his Roman disciple Lucretius. The Epicurean belief that the godslived in the spaces between the stars and, in their perfection, had no concernor involvement with a flawed humanity, was an intriguing hypothesis; it wasnot surprising that, even in antiquity, the Epicureans were considered closetatheists. It didn't hurt that Lucretius had expounded Epicureanism withextraordinary panache in his long poem De Rerum Natura (first century BCE),with lengthy sections on the utter extinction of consciousness upon the death ofthe body, the natural origin of human and other life on earth, and other topicsthat would become the cornerstones of atheistic, agnostic, and deist thought inthe centuries to come. His pungent line "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum"(1.101: "How many evils can religion engender!") was not overlooked.

While there were skeptics and agnostics prior to the eighteenth century,they remained solitary and isolated figures: Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)was perhaps the most noteworthy, his pregnant utterance "Que scaisje?"("What do I know?") becoming the epitome of skepticism. Let us recallthat Michael Servetus (1509?–1553), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and anynumber of other figures were executed for expressing heterodox views: anyopen declaration of atheism would have been a one-way ticket to the stake.

The seventeenth century laid the groundwork for the secularism to come.Galileo's humiliation by the Inquisition in 1633—he was forced to declarethat the sun revolved around the earth, even though he knew better—generatedoutrage at such an infringement of intellectual freedom. At aboutthe same time, Sir Francis Bacon was laying down the outlines of philosophicalempiricism with such works as The Advancement of Learning (1605)and Novum Organum (1620). Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651) and otherworks, proclaimed a resolute materialism that saw even God and the humansoul as material entities; as a result, he was frequently branded an atheist,even though he rejected the accusation. In France, Descartes and his followerschampioned deductive reasoning in their Cartesian philosophy; nominally,Descartes claimed that this methodology allowed for a proof of the existenceof God on rationalist grounds, but his searching inquiry into the grounds forbelief of any proposition, however self-evident, had broader ramifications thanhe himself realized. It was at this time that the tormented Christian BlaisePascal expressed, in his Pensées (1669), a searing doubt about the truths of theChristian revelation that no doubt echoed that of many of his contemporaries.

In the late seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) was a pioneerof skepticism. His multivolume Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97)not only revealed a prodigious learning in science, history, and religion, butalso expressed severe doubts about the role of religion in political and sociallife and frankly advocated religious toleration. The work was manifestly a precursor,from many perspectives, to the Encyclopédie (1751–72) of Diderot andd'Alembert.

And yet, in a real sense, the French Enlightenment of the eighteenthcentury, whose intellectual luminaries were so numerous and so vocal, hadits origin in England. Bacon was manifestly a revered ancestor of the scientificmethod, and John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690)was a grand summation of empiricism in much the same way that Newton'swork summed up current thinking on astronomy and physics. Deism, thedominant "religion" of Enlightenment thinkers, also originated in England,with such figures as Charles Blount (The Oracles of Reason, 1695), John Toland(Christianity Not Mysterious, 1696), Anthony Collins (A Discourse of Free-Thinking,1713), and numerous others. The main thrust of these works wasthe discounting of the "miracles" of the Bible, which were increasingly seen asimplausible and even unworthy of belief: a God who had presumably designedthe natural world as a smoothly running machine would, it was believed,never stoop to such legerdemain as stopping the sun in its tracks (as in thetale of Joshua) or even permitting Jesus to walk on water. With Newton andothers confirming the unvarying regularity of Nature, God was left as a kindof Epicurean figure who had started the mechanism at the beginning of timeand lay back to admire his handiwork without further intervening in humanaffairs. This line of thought culminated in David Hume's celebrated essay "OfMiracles" (1748), although it was also reflected in Conyers Middleton's influentialtreatise A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers (1749).

With the dawn of the eighteenth century, all these tendencies fused intoopen or at least veiled expressions of atheism. Even if the renegade ex-priestJean Meslier (1664–1729) was something of an outlier in the ferocity ofhis condemnation of Christianity and of religion in general, other thinkerswere not slow to declare themselves religious skeptics. Among the thinkersincluded in this book, Meslier, d'Holbach, Diderot, Hume, and Bentham can,with fair certainty, be called atheists; most of the others were deists, secularists,or doubters. It is also possible that some of these, among many others,resisted any public declaration of atheism because of the threat of legal penalties.In many of their writings, these thinkers exhibit an outward respecttoward religion in general and Christianity in particular while deliveringpungent and fatal blows to its central arguments.

One of the means by which religious doctrine was questioned was by thenew field of anthropology, practiced by thinkers in both France and England.A renewed focus on the study of history, reaching back into the earliest stagesof primitive human life, suggested that religion and its appurtenances—ritual,divination, and so on—were natural products of a stage of primitiveexistence whereby human beings were confronted with natural forces whoseoperation they failed to understand, and which they thereby attributed to thework of superhuman entities. The chapter from Etienne Bonnot de Condillac'sTreatise on Systems (1749), printed here, is a penetrating investigation of thissubject, and it also was utilized in what is without doubt the most exhaustivetreatise on atheism written in that century, and perhaps any century—thatis, d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770). It is true that these thinkers couldnot draw upon much fieldwork in their anthropological arguments, whichaccordingly remained largely theoretical; but this work—culminating inDavid Hume's Natural History of Religion (1757)—proved to be remarkablyprescient and was substantially confirmed a century or more later when suchanthropologists as Edward Burnett Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871) presentedvery similar arguments.

The study of history damaged respect for religion in other regards, byquestioning its role in the course of human affairs. Montesquieu (Charles-Louisde Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, 1689–1755)praised Christianity lavishly in The Spirit of Laws (1748) but condemnedthe Inquisition. In England, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire (1776–88) saw in Christianity the chief culprit in the fall of the RomanEmpire. And Condorcet (Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis deCondorcet, 1743–1794), in Sketch of an Historical Picture of the Progress of theHuman Spirit (1795), saw an inexorable historical progression from the barbarismof medieval Christianity to the rationalism of his day.

The one significant obstacle toward a fully viable atheistic view of theuniverse—or, more specifically, of the operation of natural forces on thisplanet—was the perceived validity of the argument from design. This argument—thatthe phenomena of earthly life, and in particular those of thehuman organism, show such a congruence between means and ends that theymust have been designed by an intelligent and all-powerful entity—was whatlargely prevented Voltaire from becoming a full-fledged atheist. The bestthat other thinkers—such as La Mattrie in Man a Machine (1748)—could dowas merely to assert that Nature (now virtually personified, especially amongdeists) could in fact have engendered the human eye, the human hand, andother objects that seem superficially to have required a creator-god. Kant, inthe Critique of Pure Reason (1781), simply declared that the argument fromdesign was insufficient to establish the existence of a deity, but that is as far ashe could go. It required the theory of evolution to destroy the argument onceand for all, although it continues to rear its head implausibly and fallaciouslyin the contemporary "intelligent design" movement.

The relationship between religion and the state was the subject of abundantdiscussion among Enlightenment thinkers, especially in France. Thisis because the Catholic Church still occupied a position of unique centralitywithin the French polity. The clergy was considered the First Estate, and it hadimmense wealth and power. Voltaire's polemical works on religion (includinghis satires, such as La Pucelle [1755], a bawdy satire on Joan of Arc) wererepeatedly condemned by the state and the church and were regularly banned,forcing him to publish many of his works anonymously or pseudonymously.

Once again, the French in particular looked to England as a model forthe proper role of religion within the state. England had never engaged inthe religious wars that, in the seventeenth century, had ravaged continentalEurope and done much to create revulsion in intellectuals who were appalledat the idea of waging war over arcane points of religious doctrine. It is truethat England (and more particularly Scotland, under the influence of rigidPresbyterians) had participated to some degree in the witchcraft trials that, inEurope, caused hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to be executed.But following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Anglican Churchin England was largely defanged, and French philosophes could only look withenvy at the relative powerlessness of the established church in England. When,in 1762, the French church engaged in such a spasm of barbarity as the executionof Jean Calas (a Protestant who was accused of murdering his son becausehe had suspected him of secretly converting to Roman Catholicism), Voltaireimmediately responded with the Treatise on Toleration (1763). Admittedly,Voltaire placed no particular emphasis on the need to preserve the separationof church and state; nor, like Pierre Bayle, did he defend tolerance on thegrounds of individual liberty of conscience. Following contemporary Britishexample, which gradually removed civil disabilities from dissenters but stillprohibited individuals who were not members of the Church of England fromholding public office or even from practicing their religion openly, Voltairepresented the case for toleration as a means of maintaining social order: anestablished church is not in itself an evil, so long as it is not fanatical, superstitious,or intolerant.

These and similar arguments undoubtedly had their effect on a coregroup of American Enlightenment thinkers as they were nurturing the birthof their country. Notwithstanding the tendentious polemics of certain pioushistorians, past and present, there is little doubt that such figures as ThomasJefferson and James Madison were thorough skeptics and deists whose understandingof history made it clear to them that the United States must avoidthe intertwining of religion and the state, for the benefit of both religionand the state. This is why Madison, in "Memorial and Remonstrance againstReligious Assessments" (1784–85), warned that even the minimal infringementof religious liberty that was being proposed by the Virginia state legislature(a small tax to support "teachers of the Christian religion") was anopening wedge that could lead to tyranny. His thoughts on the issue led to thepassage of the First Amendment, the strongest guarantee of religious freedomin modern history.

To be sure, not all thinkers in the eighteenth century were atheists or secularists.The most significant exception was perhaps Jean-Jacques Rousseau,a devout Christian who was nonetheless sufficiently heterodox in several ofhis opinions that some of his works—such as Émile (1762), advocating religioustoleration—were condemned in both Catholic France and CalvinistGeneva. Many American political figures, such as George Washington andJohn Adams, were pious in varying degrees, although they too recognizedthe virtues of separating church from state. But it is undeniable that the freethinkersof the French, German, British, and American Enlightenments—bothby their challenging writings and by the courage with which many ofthem defied persecution by religious bodies that had the power to condemn,exile, and even execute them—laid the intellectual groundwork for the atheistsof succeeding centuries. Their work remains vital, not least because of thevigor and fearlessness with which it took on the forces of religion and combatedthem with a bracing mix of reason, passion, and satire. As such, they setan example that we would do well to follow.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE ORIGINAL ATHEISTS by S. T. JOSHI. Copyright © 2014 S. T. Joshi. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1616148411
• ISBN 13: 9781616148416
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288