Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá

May 13, 2013. Six months ago, I started on a journey of discovery — a journey of learning — a journey of trying to understand where I came from — a journey of learning about the sources of modern thinking and western values. Six months ago, I started writing the blog you are reading on the European Enlightenment.

What I found was an incredible story – a story of small groups of 17th century Europeans sickened and disheartened by a century and half of warfare, persecution, intolerance, fanatical hatred, and base political manipulation conducted in the name of religion. Individually and working together, members of these groups looked to philosophy, to reason, to the study of nature, to tolerance, and to ancient and distant cultures to try to find ways to stitch together what had been broken when western Europe erupted in a fury of violence — violence directed both internally and externally — against those who religious beliefs failed to agree with the desires of the powerful and the power-hungry among the many groups of political and ecclesiastical leaders.

Protestants being burned at the stake for their faith on May 21,1559 in Valladolid, Spain

What those groups discovered was science – they were the people who took the discoveries of Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler and turned them into the modern sciences of today. And they built great system of thought — those of Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton being the most influential — that united science and religion for generations of the foremost thinkers of the foremost countries of Europe. And they discovered democracy, modern government, and almost every other modern discipline of study or investigation, be it archeology and study of ancient cultures, or be it natural theology and the natural origins of the religious impulse.

They laid the foundations — scientific, economic, and cultural – of our modern world. And it was all based on the search for the unity of science and religion, of reason and belief — at least it was at first.

A Task Unfinished

But the task that these few, enlightened, and brave individuals started centuries ago remains unfinished. The wounds that tore apart Europe remain — in the main — unhealed. Indeed, in a number of ways the Enlightenment made it worse by creating new sectarians who hated all religion with unbridled fanaticism — and frequently found ways to exercise their hatreds in ways whose effectiveness was technologically enhanced.

And science — this extraordinarily wonderful tool of learning that undermines prejudice and superstition — was twisted into new and invidious forms of prejudice and hatred in the guise of “scientific” racism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and the like. These prejudices have delayed — and continue to delay — the advent of racial equality in the United States and around the world to this very day.

The hatred of religion — and the distrust of divine revelation in favor of natural religion — eventually came to permeate later enlightenment thought to the extent that it blocked, and sometimes extinguished, the search for moral and ethical standards for conducting life, giving rise to materialistic philosophies which embraced force, pleasure, wealth, and power as the rewards to strive for and denied the age-old teachings of the need for spiritual growth. One result is a world stratified into the wealthy and the rest, to the great discontent of those who find themselves among the rest.

So, the great tasks of the enlightenment remains unfinished. We need to pick them up, make them or own, and advance them further.

Next

Next week, we start a new series of blogs. I’m not sure what to call it – maybe something like “Finishing the Enlightenment.”

In these blogs, we will look at the great Enlightenment themes we discussed in the last 26 blogs, examining how they are addressed in modern society, by modern religious thought, and also by the teachings of the Baha’i Faith – teachings which directly and powerfully address most, if not all, of the major concerns of the enlightenment and the role of all the world’s religion in the further advancement of humanity.

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This is the 26th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá

Apr 29, 2013. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

The enlightenment theme of freedom resonates as strongly today as it did 250 years.

For citizens of the United States – freedom is a core American value. The first amendment of the US Constitution puts it this way:

Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The founders of the United Nation also held freedom to be a fundamental right and enshrined it in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. …

Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance (from the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia).

Few thinkers are more closely associated with the call for freedom than the great enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778, also see Rousseau in Wikipedia):

The concern that dominates Rousseau’s work is to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance. …

In his mature work, he principally explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest (from the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia).

In the following, we examine Rousseau’s ideas about freedom. And then – since this is a blog about science and religion – we consider his ideas about freedom of religion.

“Man is born free and yet everywhere he lives in chains.”

Rousseau considers that there are four types of freedom – natural, civil, moral, and “republican.” He considers these most thoroughly in The Social Contract, an extraordinarily influential work of political philosophy.

Natural freedom, for Rousseau, belongs to man in a pre-civilized and “savage” state. For from being vicious and thuggish – as the English philosopher Hobbes famously characterized primitive man – man was physically free and naturally uncorrupted. According to Rousseau, “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.” But Hobbesian competition for resources is inevitable:

Natural freedom involves an unlimited right to all things [but] in a world occupied by many interdependent humans, the practical value of that liberty may be almost nonexistent. This is because any individual’s capacity to get what he or she wants will be limited by his or her physical power and the competing physical power of others. Further, inevitable conflict over scarce resources will pit individuals against each other, so that unhindered exercise of natural freedom will result in violence and uncertainty, (From the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia.)

But in this state, man is not moral and is good only in a negative sense, meaning that he and she are like animals, innocent and neither good nor bad.

The escape from natural freedom leads to socialization and to civilization, with all of its complexities, power relationships, inequalities, oppressions, and injustices. The challenge, then, is to acquire civil freedom, i.e., freedom acquired through self-restraint from the pursuit of natural freedoms, in a social setting that is naturally despotic and corrupt. But this requires a “very remarkable change:”

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.

Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left … (Rousseau in the Social Contract, Bk 1, Ch 8.)

“Moral freedom” results when one obeys the law of society out of an inner and sincere desire to do so. Here, we “obey only ourselves” because it is here that we can freely and independently choose to abide by the laws of society. In Baha’i administrative procedures, to give an example, we are asked to abide by the decision of a Local Spiritual Assembly or any other administrative assembly even if we believe the decision to be wrong. Though the decision restrains and constrains us, we can choose freely to obey it.

The final form of freedom, according to Rousseau in his private notes, is republican freedom. This “consists, not in my being subject to my own will, but rather in the fact that the law protects me from being subject to the will of any other particular person in the manner of a slave or serf” (reference is the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia).

This, it seems to me, is the freedom that is provided by a just and progressive society, one without racism, sexism, or inherent intolerance. I take it to be at the heart of both the constitution of the United States of America and the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations and the goal of the Baha’i Faith for the whole world.

The question that we will avoid for now due to lack of time and space – but the basic question that Rousseau considers – is how to achieve societies that provide for civil and republican freedom. And is because of his attempts to answer that question that Rousseau is so justly famous.

Rousseau on Religion

Given the critical eye cast by Rousseau friends – Diderot, Hume, and others – towards religion, one might expect Rousseau to also be critical towards it. He is critical of Catholicism and the Christianity of the Gospels – for very surprising reasons – and he seems to endorse a kind of public state religion. But his overall thinking is that there must be religious toleration. But he adds some strange – and foreboding – twists.

He addresses religion in the last chapter of the Social Contract. Basically, he sees three types. One type – the Christianity of the Gospels is his example – is centered on morality and God. This kind of religion is – he thinks – good and true but unfortunately not concerned with the here and now: “Christianity is a wholely spiritual religion, concerned solely with the things of heaven; the Christian’s homeland is not of this world.” This, to Rousseau, means that Christians can’t be good citizens.

Organized transnational religion – think Catholicism – are another type of religion. Precisely because Catholicism is highly organized and different than the state – Rousseau’s basic unit of organization – it is bad. And it is bad because it competes with the state for people’s allegiance, has considerable resources at its disposal, can intervene, and therefore encourages stubbornness and divisiveness.

Civil religion, he thinks, is a good thing. It is “good in that it joins divine worship to a love of the law, and that in making the homeland the object of a citizens’ adoration, it teaches them that the service of the state is the service of the tutelary God.” But, unfortunately, “it is based on error and lies, it deceives men, and makes them credulous and superstitious.” And it is “bloodthirsty and intolerant” as well.

He concludes by recommending that only those religions which are tolerant to other religions are to be allowed, but that there must be religion – preferably a civil religion – as religion is a necessary underpinning of morality and the state.

And then he makes a claim that is astonishing – and foreboding given that we know the evils of state religion of the communist style and the excesses of the French revolution. Here is how the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia characterizes this claim:

Rousseau [then] argues that those who cannot accept the dogmas [of religion] can be banished from the state. This is because he believes that atheists, having no fear of divine punishment, cannot be trusted by their fellow citizens to obey the law.

He goes even further, to suggest the death penalty for those who affirm the dogmas but later act as if they do not believe them.

This – and some other similar related ideas – has led many to see Rousseau as preparing the way for state totalitarianism of the 2oth century variety – and the horrors of the French revolution.

Next

Next week, we change tactics. Rather than further characterizing enlightenment themes and thinkers – and there are many extraordinarily interesting philosophers and topics left to pursue – we will start characterizing themes critical of religion in the writings of the enlightenment thinkers and see how they are addressed in the Baha’i teachings.

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This is the 25th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá

Apr 22, 2013. According to the `Abdu’l-Bahá – the son and successor of the prophet-founder of the Bahá’í Faith – there are four accepted methods of comprehension. These are sense-perception, reason, tradition, and intuition. None of them is sufficient as a basis for certain knowledge:

[A] man is not justified in saying, “I know because I perceive through my senses,” or “I know because it is proved through my faculty of reason,” or “I know because it is according to tradition and interpretation of the Holy Book,” or “I know because I am inspired.” All human standards of judgment are faulty, finite. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 20).

David Hume (1711-1776, also see Hume in Wikipedia), sometimes called the “most important philosopher ever to write in English,” would have agreed.

Famously skeptical, he viewed philosophical metaphysics and the continental European celebration of reason and rational thought as entirely unfounded.

He was a thorough-going empiricist. Like Locke and Berkeley before him, he believed that knowledge comes only through sense experience. But such knowledge was neither certain nor beyond question. Cynically (or perhaps not, the case is hard to tell) he viewed human conviction as ruled by passion. Human morality – he believed – was founded on a self-interest that colored all attempts at certainty.

Hume had little love for religion, no regard for tradition, and no regard for intuition. Here is how he summarized his case against the three in The Natural History of Religion:

Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

(Understandably, this view won him a formidable reputation as an atheist).

Yet Hume is one of the most delightfully readable of the philosophers, and his philosophical preoccupations have proven very influential, not only in utilitarianism, logical positivism, philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, the economics and political philosophy of his friend Adam Smith, but in science as well, where he is regarded as one of the founding fathers of cognitive science.

Hume on Religion

Given the wide range of Hume’s thought, it perhaps best to consider his philosophical perspectives as they relate to religion – our topic. This is an arena where his skepticism seems to have had a powerful impact on the world.

Hume seems to have been an entirely irreligious man. Apparently, he held religion to be entirely based on human needs. Roy Porter, writing in The Creation of the Modern World, his history of the British enlightenment, characterizes Hume’s aforementioned The Natural History of Religion thus:

Hume trained his scepticism against … the Deists, reasoning that their much-vaunted pristine monotheism or natural religion was but wish fulfilment. In reality, all religion had its origins in fear and ignorance, and the first faiths had been crude and polytheistic.

In time, the progress of the mind drew monotheism out of polytheism, clarity out of confusion. Monotheism, however, in its turn bred enthusiasm, defined in Johnson’s Dictionary as ‘a vain belief of private revelation, a vain confidence of divine favour or communication’. … Hume’s strategic distinction between enthusiasm – fanatically intolerant but driving men to assert their liberties – and the superstition which made men law-abiding through cowed objection – was to prove highly influential, notably in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

Thus Hume sabotaged Christianity by advancing a naturalistic account of the religious impulse, while equally discrediting the Deist myth of prehistoric monotheism.

Wikipedia – less fervently – summarizes the text as follows:

In this essay, Hume pioneers a naturalist account of the causes, effects, and historical development of religious belief. Hume locates the origins of religion in emotion, particularly fear and the desire to control the future. He further argues that monotheism arises from competition between religions, as believers seek to distinguish their deities as superior to all rivals. The monotheist drive [is] to dominate other beliefs, and to burnish the primitive, emotional core of religion under a veneer of theology. Hume concludes that this yields intolerance, intellectual dishonesty, and unnatural moral doctrines.

Personally, I find it hard to square Hume’s highly speculative causal argument with his views on empiricism, the importance of avoiding fallacious and simplistic metaphysical arguments, and his skeptical insights. His arguments don’t stand up to his own standards of proof.

It doesn’t seem that Hume trained his brilliantly skeptical mind in the methods of self-aware self-examination that a truly scientific methodology requires. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a skeptic viewed his own reasonings as beyond skeptical reproach.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Hume delayed publication of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion until after he died. It is a delightful read. Presented as a dialogue between Cleanthes, Philo, and Demea, it explores the prevailing philosophical views about proof of the existence of God, presenting arguments for and against them. Many of the points Hume made are highly regarded even to this day and continue to provide ammunition for those who hold to the view that belief in God is inconsistent with modern reason.

One of the most important points Hume makes is that the idea of God is – using the modern way of talking about it – contentless. Hume, like Hobbes before him, thinks that human reason cannot comprehend God. Because – Hume believes – all of our ideas are derived from sensory experience (either directly or built up from them) there is no way that we can get real-life empirical proof of the existence of God. And true to his empiricist convictions, he can’t believe in the power of reason to point towards causal proofs.

Hume also attacks the cosmological argument, which in the 18th century was based on two ideas that happen to feature strongly in the writings of `Abdu’l-Baha. This is the idea that “nothing can come from nothing” and that therefore the universe must have a first cause (i.e., God). The grounds supporting this view are two maxims:

• Whatever exists must have a cause or ground for its existence.
• No cause can produce or give rise to perfections or excellences that it does not itself possess.

Hume attacks this position by claiming that the necessary causality hasn’t been proven to hold.  From his point of view, the maxim’s are metaphysical assumptions – and it is entirely possible that something can come from nothing. (Note that this is a conclusion that is inconsistent with scientific accounts of the university which hold that there are laws of nature that hold everything in a kind of cosmic causal thrall.)

The Argument from Design

Closely related is the argument from design, which holds that the universe has perfections that show that it must be designed by an intelligence similar to that of a human mind. Hume puts the following argument into the mouth of Cleanthes:

Look around the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines… All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, exceeds the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has executed.

This can’t hold true, Hume argues, as the relationship between human and machines is far different from that between the author of the universe and nature. You can’t extend the analogy. Hume has his mouthpiece Philo say:

In a word, Cleanthes, a man who follows your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology, by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis.

This, of course, is recourse to empiricism. Nobody has seen the world arising from design, so the evidence is lacking.

Nor can one claim perfection for the world – because it contains evil, it is imperfect. Hume has Philo suggest that the world “is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard … [created by] some infant Deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance … [or] the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated Deity.”

The Problem of Evil

Hume then brings up the problem of evil. As summarized on the Stanford Internet article on Hume and Religion, the problem can be put as questions:

Is God willing to prevent evil but unable to do so? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is God able to prevent evil but unwilling to do so? Then he is malevolent (or at least less than perfectly good).

If God is both willing and able to prevent evil then why is there evil in the world?

Hume denies that bad things that happen in this world are compensated for in the next, the usual answer to this problem. Again, its empiricism. We don’t have any way of measuring it and thus proving it, therefore we have to just accept the idea that the world is imperfect. Therefore, we cannot infer that God is perfect.

Of course, the belief in miracles and the existence of the soul are all met with similar fates. We can not attain true knowledge about God or religion – Hume claims – from these approaches.

A Conclusion

Putting aside Hume’s unreasoned hostility to religion – clearly, not liking it is in his DNA and he has a hard time not thinking of anyone who likes it as a fool – its amazing how strong the correspondence of his thought is with`Abdu’l-Bahá’s analysis of the failure of the four ways of knowing. As far as I can tell, Hume is in total agreement with `Abdu’l-Bahá’s points that sense-impression, reason, tradition, and intuition don’t lead to reliable knowledge.

`Abdu’l-Bahá concludes with a statement about how reliable knowledge is to be found.

Briefly, the point is that in the human material world of phenomena these four are the only existing criteria or avenues of knowledge, and all of them are faulty and unreliable.

What then remains? How shall we attain the reality of knowledge? By the breaths and promptings of the Holy Spirit, which is light and knowledge itself. Through it the human mind is quickened and fortified into true conclusions and perfect knowledge. This is conclusive argument showing that all available human criteria are erroneous and defective, but the divine standard of knowledge is infallible.

I wonder what Hume would say?

Next Time

Next week, we study Rousseau.

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This is the 24th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Apr 15, 2013. Immanuel Kant (for the Wikipedia entry, see Kant) is frequently acclaimed the greatest philosopher of modern times, an equal – or near equal – to Plato and Aristotle.

One reason for this acclaim was Kant’s powerful and compelling solution to the undermining of religion and faith that was the central crises of the Enlightenment. Rather than putting religion and faith on a sound philosophical or scientific footing, as Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz had intended, the Enlightenment had led to the widespread conviction that science – especially the enormously successful Newtonian mechanistic science – denied both the existence of the soul and the fundamental moral and religious beliefs of the time.

Kant argued that this was not so. His system, he claimed, avoided that problem while maintaining the integrity of reason. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes his perspective as follows:

… a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion.

Although convoluted in detail, the basis of his conclusion is simple: both science and religion are products of the mind and must be in accord with the mind’s innate structures. So far, so good.

But Kant held that religion was not based on reason and knowledge – these were the engines of science and philosophy. Rather, religion was based on our moral sensibilities – which Kant argued were of equal importance with our logical sensibilities. By showing that there were limitations to empirical and rational knowledge – the domains of science and philosophy – Kant claimed to show that belief in God was immune to the skepticism of the enlightenment.

Famously, he summarized his view thus:

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

What he meant by this was that there is a higher unknowable moral reality beyond the reach of our rationality or empirical study.

But consider, by way of contrast, how the Baha’i Faith views the relationship between the two:

If we say religion is opposed to science, we lack knowledge of either true science or true religion, for both are founded upon the premises and conclusions of reason, and both must bear its test. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 107)

If valid, the Baha’i view is a far more powerful and effective resolution to the problem than that of Kant.

Kant’s Philosophy of Religion

Kant holds that two kinds of metaphysical systems are possible, the metaphysics of experience (or nature) and the metaphysics of morals. This view – combined with his view of the limitations of reason – underlies his approach to the philosophy of religion (see here and here).

One of the most important consequences of his perspective is his view that there can be no strictly rational proof of the existence of God. Reason does not – indeed, cannot – reach out to the extent needed to make definite proof. So he denies the validity of all the traditional rational proofs of the existence of God.

But, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe in God. There are, he argues, powerful moral arguments for such belief. Because of the need to consider practical moral truths as of the greatest importance, we must “postulate” the immortality of the soul, the existence of purpose in the world, and the existence of God. But at the same time, we must keep in mind the fallacious tendency of the human mind to overstep the limits to reason to create rationalistic systems of thought beyond the realm of evidence.

Radical Evil and the Ethical Commonwealth

On the basis of this style of argument about the importance of moral reasoning, Kant created a rich, deep, full and influential system of moral theology, often reinterpreting traditional Christianity in ways that remain influential in modern liberal Protestant thought to this day. For example, he modifies the Christian concept of “original sin” to that of “radical evil” where we make satisfaction of our own ends more important than doing the morally right thing. To overcome this evil, we need to change our heart – and Christ is the model exemplar for virtuous and moral action that shows us how to do so.

When the overcoming of radical evil is successfully done on a society-wide – or world-wide – basis, it can be expected to lead to perpetual peace among nations as “the highest good” and a political order capable of maintaining that good. But, he holds that organized religion can help perpetuate “radical evil” through ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order.

Some Consequences of Kant’s Philosophy of Religion

Kant’ philosophy of religion has been extraordinarily influential (as outlined here and here). One thing it helped launch, of course, was the modern academic field of the philosophy of religion.

Modern Protestant theology – especially liberal theology with its emphasis on moral progress and social reform – has been strongly influenced by Kant.

Modern debates on science and religion also owe a substantial debt to Kant, partly because he was one of the founding fathers of the philosophy of science and wrote extensively on the relationship of science to religion, but also because of his view that religion is a moral phenomena rather than rational phenomena. The eNotes website entry on Kant describes the impact of the distinctions he drew:

Kant’s position, then, radically separated science from religion, as if the two subjects contained no common ground. … Religion becomes morality while science becomes Naturbeherrschung, mastery of the world. …

Most recently something of a Kantian position on the relationship between science and religion has been advocated by the noted American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941000) who, without ever naming Kant, introduced the notion of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) as a means of dealing with the realities of science, which is concerned with the factual construction of nature, and religion, which concerns itself with moral issues about the value and meaning of life.

Despite Kant’s enormous influence – and the pronouncedly moral character of his work – its hard not to ask some critical questions. Is it true that religion has only moral content? Is it to be fenced off from the rigor and analytic qualities of reason and science? Does it need that protection? And hasn’t Kant diluted – rather than strengthened – religion by making it so vague and unanchored so as to be a plaything of philosopher-theologians (some well-intentioned, to be sure, some not). Given the loss of influence – and the over-philosophical character – of much of liberal theology – and its antagonistic feuds with other branches of Christianity – would it be amiss to think that Kant inherited much of the Enlightenment’s antagonism to revealed religion?

Next Time

There are still some influential Enlightenment thinkers we haven’t looked at – most notably Hume and Rousseau. We will remedy that next time by starting with the skeptical Hume.

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This is the 23rd in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Apr 8, 2013. One of the last – and probably the greatest philosopher – of the important enlightenment thinkers was Immanuel Kant (for the Wikipedia entry, see Kant). To understand his importance, it is worth quoting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields.

What did Kant have to say about the all-consuming themes of the enlightenment – philosophy, religion, atheism, science, reason, rationalism, and empiricism? Again, to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia:

He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality.

In short, all understanding – be it of God, of science, of religion, of anything – stems from the structures of understanding built into our mind – “the mind actively structures how we see the world“. So reason and scientific investigation are of central and absolute importance, but, what it reveals – and the limitations of what it can reveal – are determined by how the mind works.

What follows is Kant’s “grand synthesis:”

Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature …

But, like a beautiful California beach covered with brilliant and alluring white sand opening on a crystalline aqua ocean, there are problems in the depths.

On California beaches, it is the deadly undertow and the sneaker waves that can drag the unwary to their death (and, of course, the occasional shark). For the inheritors of Kant’s philosophy – Hegel, Marx, Freud and others – it is that the hidden and unknowable structures of the mind take on a life of their own – powerful and corrosive nationalisms, dialectical materialisms, or hidden and base roots of behavior – and that catastrophic consequences in the moral, political, and financial worlds follow.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution

Kant was born in Konigsburg, in the northern part of Prussia bordering modern Lithuania. He never strayed.

At first a reasonably conservative and popular university lecturer, he taught a mix of the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff – the great German thinkers of the day – and the empiricisms of Newton and the British philosophers, including the famously skeptical David Hume.

But how could these seeming incompatible sources of knowledge – rationalism and empiricism – be reconciled to each other? A big part of the problem was that of the intellect. How could the intellect – and reason – obtain to knowledge? If, as the Enlightenment loudly and often proclaimed – reason and thought was the key to understanding everything, even religion – then how can we understand reason’s ability to work in such powerful and all-embracing ways?

It was Hume’s challenge to the usual understanding of the workings of cause and effect that awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber”,  Describing this awakening, he later wrote:

I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.

Fr. Seamus Mulholland, writing on Kant on the Pathways School of Philosophy website, summarizes Kant’s approach to reconciliation:

As he saw it, rationalism operates in the sphere of innate ideas, with their analytical and therefore aprioristic ideas; this necessity, however, is not based on experience and consequently does not apply to reality itself. On the other hand empiricism starts completely from experience and thus (it seems) from reality, but it arrives only at a posteriori and therefore synthetic statements that lack necessity.

Kant sought to unite the concept and experience; he sought a necessity that extends to the order of objective reality and an order of objective reality that in itself contains necessity.

The Stanford Encyclopedia puts it in slightly different terms. Referring to Kant’s magisterial – and nearly impenetrable – Critique of Pure Reason – it explains his thinking:

However, Kant’s revolutionary position in the Critique is that we can have a priori knowledge about the general structure of the sensible world because it is not entirely independent of the human mind. The sensible world, or the world of appearances, is constructed by the human mind from a combination of sensory matter that we receive passively and a priori forms that are supplied by our cognitive faculties. We can have a priori knowledge only about aspects of the sensible world that reflect the a priori forms supplied by our cognitive faculties.

In Kant’s words, “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them”. So according to the Critique, a priori knowledge is possible only if and to the extent that the sensible world itself depends on the way the human mind structures its experience.

Kant described his new thinking as his “Copernican Revolution”. When Copernicus couldn’t make sense of the idea of a universe centered on the earth, he flipped things around to see if it made better sense when the sun was at the center of the universe:

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.

This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.

The Crisis of the Enlightenment

Kant’s thinking came at the end of the Enlightenment when the attacks on morality and religion – especially from British empiricists and French deists and atheists – was reaching a crescendo. The French revolution was about to happen – and its celebration of reason gone awry was the harbinger of the first of the great world wars. Soon militarism, Napoleonic frenzy, and unrestrained nationalism was to throw Europe and much of the world into chaos. And romanticism – the celebration of passion and elevated states of feeling – was at the door and ready to take over.

The Enlightenment was the celebration of reason – and of science in general and Newtonian science in particular. It opened up vast new vistas of progress. But, how could order and coherence be maintained if everyone were to think willy-nilly just for themselves and not for the general good?

According to the enlightenment, reason was the judge. Kant proclaimed:

Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.

But everybody was supposed to think for themselves. And the path forward was unclear. At the heart of the crisis of the enlightenment was the “sovereignty of reason.” Again, the Stanford Encyclopedia:

The problem is that to some it seemed unclear whether progress would in fact ensue if reason enjoyed full sovereignty over traditional authorities; or whether unaided reasoning would instead lead straight to materialism, fatalism, atheism, skepticism, or even libertinism and authoritarianism.

The Enlightenment commitment to the sovereignty of reason was tied to the expectation that it would not lead to any of these consequences but instead would support certain key beliefs that tradition had always sanctioned. Crucially, these included belief in God, the soul, freedom, and the compatibility of science with morality and religion. Although a few intellectuals rejected some or all of these beliefs, the general spirit of the Enlightenment was not so radical. The Enlightenment was about replacing traditional authorities with the authority of individual human reason, but it was not about overturning traditional moral and religious beliefs.

But if science – especially Newtonian mechanistic science and its clockwork mechanisms that deny the existence of the soul and freedom of choice – is the essence of reason and rationality, what does the Enlightenment really have to offer? And what if “modern science, the pride of the Enlightenment, the source of its optimism about the powers of human reason” was the cause of undermining “traditional moral and religious beliefs that free rational thought was expected to support?”

Kant claimed to have solved the problem. He claims to have proven that “a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion.”

Next Time

But did Kant really solve the problem? Does free rational inquiry – of and by itself – support morality, the need for order, and other human interest? Does reason deserve “the sovereignty attributed to it by the Enlightenment?” We address these and other question in fuller detail in the next blog when we look at Kant’s defense of religion.

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This is the 22nd in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Apr 1, 2013. What was the enlightenment about really?

If you believe Kant, it was about learning to think for yourself. Here is how he says it in his famous – and mercifully readable – essay “What is Enlightenment?”

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.

And in a very real sense, that is indeed what the enlightenment was all about.

More Than Just Thinking for Yourself

But it was about much else too. At its heart were many issues that were the same – or at least very similar – to those that drove Luther and the leaders of the Reformation to break away from the Catholic Church. One of Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg read:

Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the richest of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?

In other words, why does the pope live in such luxury amidst so much riches, wealth, and power while the poor wither away in poverty?

By the end of enlightenment, there was a widespread belief that not only were the church and the priesthood completely corrupt, but also that belief in Christ was a kind of confidence game used to pacify, control, constrain, and extract money from ordinary uneducated people.

A related issue was Luther’s demand that people be allowed to read the Bible for themselves. He held that what the Bible said was more important than the pronouncements of even the most eminent of the clergy. Here is how he said it at the famous Leipzig Debate in 1519:

No believing Christian can be forced to recognise any authority beyond the sacred Scripture, which is exclusively invested with Divine right.

This statement – and the belief of many in the reformation – has had extraordinary and continuing resonance to this day. If all authority is God’s and if it is to be understood as true only when interpreted by an individual through his (or her) reading of sacred scripture, then the authority of religious leadership is without basis. Only understanding obtained through conscientious reading of holy scripture was “invested with Divine Right.”

This denial of the authority of the church was to continue to have consequences. By the time the Enlightenment was coming to a close, the authority of both the monarchical and princely governments of Europe and any and all churches were often denied.

New Sources of Authority

By the middle of the 17 century, religious divisiveness – rather than abating as a result of the new concepts introduced by Luther and other Protestant thinkers – heated up to intolerable levels giving rise to years of wars and multiple scores of violent persecutions and exiles. Rather than settling down to scriptural-inspired agreement, people many times disagreed completely, often claiming their personal interpretation of scripture as the final authority. And the devious and the powerful were clever and determined enough to use this to their advantage.

But there was – as they say in the movies – a new kid on the block. Science! And because science was grounded in learning, abstraction, nature, classical thought (especially that of Aristotle), mathematics and closely related to humanism, it brought philosophy – discarded by Luther – back to the fore.

If religion and obedient attention to scripture couldn’t resolve the problem of determining the truth and uniting society – and it seemed to many in the 17th century to be more highly productive of schism and conflict – then something else was needed and might not that something else be science? or philosophy? or both?

Thus, in the years preceding the enlightenment proper – which stricter historians want to confine to the 18th century – leading thinkers embraced a potent and enervating mix of science, philosophy, and religion as the way forward. One of the results was the scientific revolution – the opening of a veritable treasure-house of inexhaustible wealth of continually growing knowledge. Other results were the embrace of rationalism – the idea that clear and simple thought partook of the nature of divine knowledge due to its similarity to hard-core mathematical certainty. And empiricism, the view that is was only investigation and the senses that led to the truth.

It was these basic ideas that led to Kant’s famous statement that the enlightenment was all about thinking for yourself. Instead of individuals understanding divine truth by reading scripture, truth was to be discovered by thinking for yourself. It followed that superstition – blind belief unmitigated by thought – was a bad thing. Also, blind belief in church authority continued to be a bad thing. Education became one of the highest goods. Doing mathematics, using empiricism, applying science to any and all topics of understanding, and developing political systems of thought that could capitalize on the growing propensity of people to think for themselves all became priorities.

And all of this came into maturity in the Enlightenment of the 18th century.

The Significance of the Enlightenment

And here is the thing. Many – maybe most – of these conclusions were correct, we moderns think. Yes, we all have to think for ourselves, not to blindly submit to superstition or authority. And yes, the power of science is very great and seemingly inexhaustible. And further, many of the criticisms and critiques of religion were correct. Many in the priesthood or the church were there for opportunity and power and were corrupt. And systems of thought that decreed arbitrary interpretative authority or rule of the many by the few violated the lessons of philosophy and science. And so the world changed – it became progressive, it shrank the world into a whole.

It was not without problems even more severe than those of the reformation and the religious conflict that it struggle to supersede. Enlightenment traditions of thinking for yourself were marvelously similar to age-old traditions of scheming for your own advancement. So why not scheme rather than think for yourself.  And yet, clearly there was a difference between the two.

And enlightenment attacks on organized religion and sitting governments morphed rather easily into political movements that literally contemplated world domination. But, something had happened. The world had changed. The genie of science, worldwide expansion, and exploding knowledge had been let of the bottle.

Next

The trick is how to use this genie for the best. For that, next week we go to Kant and his synthesis of the great systems of thought of the enlightenment – he even almost allows God back into the picture, allowing that he might be needed as the ground for morality and happiness.

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This is the 21st in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 27, 2013. I wrote last week’s blog – The Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion #19: Deism, Atheism, and the French Revelation – hurriedly. When I reread it several days later, I was struck by its harsh language. What I said about the French Revolution was:

Enlightenment thought, especially deism – and its rejection of revealed religion – played a central role in … the French Revolution (1789–1799). Deists and atheists competed with each other in the persecution of religion and the slaughter of priests, eventually turning on each other during the orgy of violence that was the Terror.

This week, I have been agonizing. Should I have used such strong language?

Deism and atheism certainly played role in the terrors of the French Revolution. The anti-clericalism of the revolution was certainly couched in the language of deistic and atheistic enlightenment thought. But clearly many other factors were at work, most notably an outpouring of hatred towards the ancien regime – a reactionary mix of authoritarian hereditary monarchism, aristocratic privilege, and Catholic religious political power that had outlived its welcome.

There are larger questions as well.

• Were atheism and deism dominant factors in the repeated and extraordinary outpouring of violence that has characterized the modern world over the last 250 year? Many other factors – nationalism, the emergence of modern technologies and greater military capabilities, or competition for trade, colonies, and political power – are certainly a necessary part of the picture.
• And, isn’t it true that atheism, deism, and the rejection of revealed religion that was characteristic of the enlightenment was a consequence of the decay of religion, its loss of relevance, and the harm it did? Were not the anti-religious philosophes – and their revolutionary followers – reacting to the very real problems that they saw associated with religion?

In other words, aren’t atheism, deism, and attacks on revealed religion symptoms of problems with society and the role of religion in it rather than the cause of those problems?

These questions are increasingly relevant in face of resurgent claims from modern atheists – many identical to those raised by both atheists and deists more than 250 years ago – that religion is responsible for much of the violence of modern world.

So, before moving to the last of the great enlightenment philosophes – the extraordinarily capable and influential Immanuel Kant – let’s briefly consider these questions about the impact of atheism on society.

Atheism, Deism, “Mass Cleansing,” and Claims about the Effects of Religion

Two phrases that I used in my last blog were very strong. Reading them later, they struck me as harsh, uninviting. I wrote of “mass slaughter” and an “orgy of violence” in the French Revolution. Was I being fair?

I tried to find softer, better, easier words. Certainly, there were synonyms that could be used to described the limited bloodletting of the French Revolution (as opposed to, say, the massive bloodletting of Napoleon’s subsequent wars of conquest). But none, in my opinion, fit what was to follow. I could not – in honesty – make it soft.

The Goddess of The Cult of Reason

The more important question, of course, is about atheism and deism. Did these, directly or indirectly, create or contribute to the rise of ideologies and fanaticisms that triggered our multiple modern incidents of “mass cleansing?”

The question is analogous to similar questions that Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, d’Holbach and others raised – and answered – with respect to religion. Religion and “priestcraft,” they held, caused the hatreds, the expulsions, the persecutions that had dominated much of European life in the 16th and 17th centuries. Eliminate religion (atheism), or revealed religion (deism) – they thought – and replace it with Reason, Science, Rationality, Empiricism, or even Natural Religion and everything would be much better. Of course, if atheism and deism, or nationalism, or racism were to result in the same levels of violence of the 16th and 17th centuries – or as the case turned out to be – even greater levels of violence, then the radical anti-religious philosophes would be wrong. Religion per se could not be held to be the cause.

New atheism and its view that “religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises” (see The rise of the ‘New Atheists’) is in the same boat. Its claims are equally refuted by the lessons of history if instituting the principles of atheism and deism increase, rather than lessen, mass violence.

“Mass Cleansing” and State Atheism in the 20th Century

The French Revolution – and Napoleon’s wars of conquest – triggered nationalist movements across Europe and in European colonies around the globe. But 19th century outbreaks of mass violence by in large were confined to the European periphery – in colonies or in the fight against the Ottoman empire. Conquest or racism – not ideology – was the driving factor.

In the 20th century, things changed. Here is how Daniel Jonah Goldhagen – author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners – summarizes what happened in his important book Worse Than War (see the PBS website Worse Than War):

Our time’s most lethal killers—Hitler in Europe, Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il in North Korea, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong in China and Tibet—have acted from beliefs calling for their societies’ or the world’s thorough transformation. … Hitler killed perhaps 20 million people, Stalin 8 million or more, Mao perhaps 50 million, the dynastic Kims perhaps more than 4 million, and Pol Pot the highest percentage of the inhabitants of any country, more than 20 percent of the Cambodians, totaling 1.7 million.

And they made slaughtering people a constitutive feature of their civilizations, because their ideologies, as varied as they were, un­ceasingly summoned them to eliminate others to preserve the present and create a radically new future.

Atheism – state atheism – was an integral part of the ideologies that embraced mass slaughter (except in Hitler’s nominally Christian Germany where racism, conquest, and a quasi-scientific type of social Darwinism seem to have been the driving forces.) Marx, following Hegel and Feuerbach, saw religion as created by man:

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world …

Religion was the “opium of the people”, but in the sense of the persecuted and misused poor attempting to escape suffering:

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

But, it was Lenin’s interpretation – or more accurately, his misinterpretation – of Marx that became the foundation of Marxist-Leninist state atheism:

Religion is the opiate of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.

This view of atheism, combined with the Marxist vision of class conflict and Lenin’s view that class conflict must be led by “vanguard” professional revolutionaries, gave rise to a vision of religious institutions and religious belief as counterrevolutionary and blocking progress. Much as happened in the French Revolution, it became much easier to kill opponents whose ideologies were viewed as wrong than to rectify their thinking – or to run the risk of them fighting back. And the 20th century context of total war made this much easier.

It is in this sense, it seems to me, that the radical revolutionary aspects of enlightenment thought – and its atheistic and deistic distrust and hatred of revealed religion – became an enabler of mass slaughter. Revealed religion – the radicals among the atheists and deists held – was a means to control and manipulate the masses of people. Those who were manipulated were ignorant fools prey to superstition. Those who manipulated them were hungry for power and influence. Revealed religion – they came to believe – was evil.

Thus the enlightenment – denigrating religion – turned believers and organized religion alike into enemies “within”. And eventually into enemies – among many other class enemies – that had to be ruthlessly eradicated “for the good of the masses.”

So we have answered our first two question. Yes, my strong language – given the history of the 20th century – is justified.

And yes, it seems that atheism is an enabler of tyranny and mass slaughter. It is an enabler in its radical political form – a form that became an important part of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. It led to political formulations about enemies within who had to be liquidated. These enemies were often “liquidated”, sometimes on a massive scale.

Next

My third question remains unanswered here. Weren’t the critics of religion reacting to very real issues? We address this question in the next blog.

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This is the 20th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 18, 2013. The European enlightenment came to an end in two extraordinary political revolutions.

One – in the British colonies of North America – adopted the Enlightenment principles of tolerance, freedom of religion, and separation of state and religion as proposed by enlightened religionists, deists and atheists alike, even as it embraced slavery, racism, and campaigns against the native inhabitants of its conquered lands.

The other – in the most powerful country of Europe – initiated the modern era of nationalism, world war, the secular state, and widespread slaughter in the name of purification of society, while at the same time pioneering mass education, widespread political participation, and government reforms that were copied around the world.

Enlightenment thought, especially deism – and its rejection of revealed religion – played a central role in both revolutions. In the American revolution (1763 – 1783), atheism seems to have played little or no role. In the French revolution (1789–1799), deists and atheists competed with each other in the persecution of religion and the slaughter of priests, eventually turning on each other during the orgy of violence that was the Terror.

After the French revolution – and the resulting Napoleonic wars (1803–1815) – the enlightenment pursuit of tolerance, just government, and freedom from authoritarian religion and government through skeptical, philosophical, and rationalist pursuit of the truth lost much of it attractiveness. Romanticism, German Idealism, a revitalized Catholicism, Protestant Evangelicalism, and then the great systems of Marxism, nationalism, materialism, evolutionism, and secularism took its place.

Below, we briefly outline some of the main events of French Revolution and the impact of enlightenment thought on religion in France.

The French Revolution and the Church

In 1789, the French monarch King Louis XVI called a meeting of Estates-General – an assembly of the clergy, the nobles, and commoners that had last met in 1614 – for help in addressing a severe economic crisis effecting the French government. The three parties failed to agree on their respective powers, and a National Constituent Assembly mainly consisting of commoners, was formed. It effectively took control of the French government after the storming of the Bastille on 14 July, 1789, issuing the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man – inspired by Enlightenment – six weeks later.

When the Estates-General convened, there were 130,000 members of the clergy, the Catholic church owned 6% of French real-estate, was not taxed, and levied a 10% tithe (see The French Revolution and the Catholic Church). The National Constituent Assembly abolished the tithe, took ownership of church land, abolished monastic vows, and then established the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which made the clergy employees of the state. When the clergy were asked to sign an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution, they rebelled. Wikipedia tells what happened:

This led to a schism between those clergy who swore the required oath and accepted the new arrangement and those who remained loyal to the Pope. Overall, 24% of the clergy nationwide took the oath. Widespread refusal led to legislation against the clergy, “forcing them into exile, deporting them forcibly, or executing them as traitors.” Pope Pius VI never accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, further isolating the Church in France.

During the Reign of Terror, extreme efforts of dechristianization ensued, including the imprisonment and massacre of priests and destruction of churches and religious images throughout France. An effort was made to replace the Catholic Church altogether, with civic festivals replacing religious ones. The establishment of the Cult of Reason was the final step of radical dechristianisation.

These events led to a widespread disillusionment with the Revolution and to counter-rebellions across France. Locals often resisted de-Christianization by attacking revolutionary agents and hiding members of the clergy who were being hunted. Eventually, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety were forced to denounce the campaign, replacing the Cult of Reason with the deist but still non-Christian Cult of the Supreme Being. … The persecution of the Church led to a counter-revolution known as the Revolt in the Vendée, whose suppression is considered by some to be the first modern genocide.

Clergy who refused to sign the oath – and those who protected them – were made liable to death on sight. As many as several thousand priests were slaughtered.

Late in 1791, the assembly accepted a constitution that briefly made France a constitutional monarchy. In 1792, the monarchy was abolished and France was declared a republic. Closely thereafter, the Republic went to war with Prussia and Austria, leading to the execution of the King on suspicion of collaboration with the enemy.

By 1794, the republic achieved major victories against its foreign adversaries and had established internal stability, but at considerable expense in lives. In the Vendee, the loss of life was “between 117,000 and 450,000 out of a population of around 800,000.” Mass drownings of priests were part of the suppression by the revolutionary government reprisals The Revolt in the Vendée was triggered by the governments dechristianisation campaign.

Government-sponsored terror and infighting among political factions in The Reign of Terror led to a frsyj tolls estimated as “in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris), and another 25,000 in summary executions across France.” Of those, roughly 3,000 were priests.

An Evaluation

Diarmaid MacCulloch, writing in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, characterizes the effect of the French revolution on religion thus:

The National Assembly was as determined to reform the Church as in everything else. Its plan was to create a national church like in England, but Catholic in doctrine and without the faults evident in the English Church. Gallician Catholics in France had long sought such arrangements, and indeed since the fifteenth century the monarchy had episodically done much to encourage such an outcome.

Yet what was proposed took the most extreme form – it would be a national Church indeed, because bishops would be elected by the entire male population, including the newly emancipated Protestants and Jews. Church lands were confiscated, and the rural labouring classes watched in growing anger as wealthy merchants, office-holders and former officials flush with compensation for lost jobs all used their cash to build up new landholdings. …

Copying the indiscriminate use of force that had characterized religious warfare and persecution 150 years early, the “enlightened” leaders of the new Republic started executing their enemies:

In 1792, spurred by provincial rebellions in the name of Catholic Christianity and the King, the State had begun large-scale executions of its aristocratic and clerical enemies in Paris. The numbers were at first small scale by modern standards of State terror, but they were horrifying at the time, particularly since they included nearly all available members of the French royal family, the King and Queen among them …

When the Vendee rebelled in the name of Catholicism, the republican dictatorship responded in a way that had earned Christian kings their harshest criticisms:

At Nantes there were mass drownings of prisoners, beginning with priests, and the massacres in the Catholic Vendee set standards for later European atrocities in dehumanizing victims in order to make mass slaughter easy and virtuous. Europe’s first single-party dictatorship in the name of the people had emerged. The awful tidy-mindedness of Enlightenment thought bred an insistence on everyone being liberated in ways defined by Revolutionaries – forcing them to be free …

The deist party – the Jacobins – were the most radical of all.

… the Jacobins, most extreme Revolutionaries of the French Republic, radicalized the snickering skepticism of French philosophes about the whole Christian message. They came to regard any form of Christian faith as a relic of the ancien regime which they were destroying, though they had to acknowledge that the people on whom they were imposing liberty, equality and fraternity craved for some sort of religion. The Revolution which had begun with a sincere effort to improve the Church now sought to replace it with a synthetic religion, constructed out of classical symbolism mixed up with the eighteenth century’s celebration of human reason: the Christian calendar of years and months was abolished, religious houses closed, churches desecrated.

And the church survived:

As wars with all France’s neighbours dragged on, the French people became increasingly disillusioned with their masters: the Church had been shattered apparently to no purpose, and, since before the Revolution it had a virtual monopoly on caring for the poor and helpless, the weakest suffered most by the destruction of Church institutions.

Above all else, what this shows is that deists and atheists – those who most strongly rejected revealed religion, religious institutions, and priests – could be as inhumane and unjust as the worst pope or divine monarch.

Later events – the horrific mass slaughters of tens of millions of people by 20th century anti-religion fascist states or socialist states adhering to state atheism – showed that anti-religionists could far exceed the scope of even the most murderous religious institutions in the killing fields.

Spinoza, Bayle, Toland, Voltaire, d’Holbach, Diderot – or their modern new atheists counterparts – were and are simply incorrect when they place the blame for persecution and terror on revealed religion.

Next

Next, we continue our exploration of the Enlightenment by studying the critical philosophy of Kant.

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This is the 19th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

`Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 11, 2013. In 1911, `Abdu’l-Bahá’, the appointed head of the Baha’i Faith after the death of Bahá’u'llah, visited Paris where he met with many of the prominent notables of the city, including scientists, philosophers, and distinguished leaders of thought. Shortly afterwards, in New York City, he described his impressions:

Paris is most beautiful in outward appearance. The evidences of material civilization there are very great, but the spiritual civilization is far behind. I found the people of that city submerged and drowning in a sea of materialism. Their conversations and discussions were limited to natural and physical phenomena, without mention of God.

I was greatly astonished. Most of the scholars, professors and learned men proved to be materialists. I said to them, “I am surprised and astonished that men of such perceptive caliber and evident knowledge should still be captives of nature, not recognizing the self-evident Reality.” (`Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 16)

One of the reasons we have been studying developments in the European Enlightenment is to find out how the “scholars, professors, and learned men” of Paris and other leading cities of the Europe came to be “captives of nature,” i.e., materialists and atheists.

Our conclusion – to put it simplistically and inadequately – is that western European Christianity imploded on itself. This implosion led to political, military, and ideological conflict in the name of religion, to two centuries of religious warfare, and to intolerance and religious persecution in Europe and then around the world in European colonies.

The reaction to this implosion among leaders of thought was to first attempt to unify religion on the basis of science, reason, and philosophy. Modern science, modern philosophy, and much of modern mainstream religion came out of that attempt. Next, the reaction was to reject revealed religion in favor of what was thought to be an innate “natural” religion, a movement we now call deism. And finally, the reaction was to reject belief in God altogether, leaving behind what we sometimes call humanism or secularism – a belief in a philosophical materialism based on how empiricism, rationalism, philosophical speculation and the new sciences of the Enlightenment interpreted the world. We examine here the views of two prominent Enlightenment thinkers who pioneered this later development.

Diderot

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) ) was the editor, guiding light (along with D’Alambert), and chief writer of the famous French Encyclopédie, almost certainly the most influential publication of the Enlightenment (it had 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations, many now iconic.) The International World History Project summarizes its influence as follows:

Published in 28 volumes from 1751 to 1772, it was a literary and philosophic work that was to have profound social and intellectual effects. Its publication was troubled by strong reactions against it by both church and state.

[Diderot] gathered around him a team of dedicated litterateurs, scientists, and even priests, many of who, as yet unknown, were to make their mark in later life. All were fired with a common purpose: to further knowledge and, by so doing, strike a resounding blow against reactionary forces in church and state. As a dictionnaire raisonné (“rational dictionary”), the Encyclopédie was to bring out the essential principles and applications of every art and science. The underlying philosophy was rationalism and a qualified faith in the progress of the human mind.

The atheism and materialism apparent in some articles enraged many readers. Some of Diderot’s writings foreshadowed the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. He also formulated the first modern notion of the cellular structure of matter.

Illustration from Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

Diderot was trained by the Jesuits, but fell away from his training rather quickly to favor the deism of Spinoza, the skepticism of Bayle, and the love of the rational and philosophical pursuit of truth that was the signature motif of the enlightenment. He then embraced the materialistic atheism that was in vogue among many enlightened French thinkers at the time – and usually kept strictly private.

In his 1749 publication Lettre sur les aveugles (An Essay on Blindness), he went public with his thought, perhaps unwisely. He used the example of blind person coming to grips with his dependence of sense impression to argue the case for a materialistic and atheistic description of human reality. One result was that he was put in prison for three months – and made to sign an oath claiming he would never again criticize religion. Nonetheless, he developed his materialistic views further in several later publications.

A quote frequently attributed to Diderot – “Mankind shall not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest” – has never been verified as coming from him, and is probably too extreme to accurately represent his point of view. Diderot – also a pioneering literary figure and critic – had an atheism that C. A. Sainte-Beuve, a leading 19th century French literary critic, characterized as follows:

Diderot’s atheism, although he flaunts it at intervals with a deplorable flourish of trumpets, and although his adversaries have too pitilessly taken him at his word, can generally be reduced to the denial of an unkind and vindictive God.

Holbach

Paul-Henri Thiry, usually known as Baron d’Holbach (1732 – 1789, also see Baron d’Holbach in Wikipedia) was a German-French philosopher, atheist, and materialist. Very wealthy, he was the author of some 400 articles in the Encyclopedie, author of an attack on Christianity called Christianity Unveiled, penned a very controversial book advocating a thorough-going materialism called The System of Nature, and hosted one of the most important and influential of Parisian salons.

For d’Holbach, all is nature. And nature is matter and motion:

The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects. [The System of Nature, 15]

Wikipedia describes his views thus:

[d'Holbach describes] the universe in terms of the principles of philosophical materialism: The mind is identified with brain, there is no “soul” without a living body, the world is governed by strict deterministic laws, free will is an illusion, there are no final causes, and whatever happens takes places because it inexorably must. Most notoriously, the work explicitly denies the existence of God, arguing that belief in a higher being is the product of fear, lack of understanding, and anthropomorphism.

It wasn’t a widely popular idea at the time (1770). Voltaire argued against it vehemently and Goethe claimed in his memoirs that it permanently turned him away from French philosophy.

According to d’Holbach, ethical principles – how one lives one’s life – should be based on the pursuit of happiness and enlightened self-interest. Ignorance of these ethical principle and ignorance of nature leads to destruction of society through the creation of religion:

The ignorance of natural causes created Gods, and imposture made them terrible. Man lived unhappy, because he was told that God had condemned him to misery. He never entertained a wish of breaking his chains, as he was taught, that stupidity, that the renouncing of reason, mental debility, and spiritual debasement, were the means of obtaining eternal felicity. [The System of Nature, 349–350].

Religion, thus, is the source of vice and unhappiness. According to d’Holbach, it

… has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

His views, at first notorious, became popular among certain political parties in the French revolution and were admired and adopted by thinkers such Karl Marx in the 19th century. For modern defenders of atheism – for example, the French atheist philosopher Michel Onfrey – d’Holbach is a hero.

Next

In retrospect, it is remarkable how naive Diderot and d’Holbach were. Imagining that an embrace of reason and philosophy – and the elimination of belief in God – would eliminate intolerance, fanaticism, ideology, and persecution, they set the stage for atheism as a state religion and a secular belief system that facilitated blood-letting and persecution that far exceeded the worst of the age of the European wars of religion.

And, of course, they were among the first of those “captives of nature” that `Abdu’l-Baha’ met in Paris in 1911.

Next week, we consider the first of the great atheistic blood-lettings – the French Revolution.

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This is the 18th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Mar 4, 2013. The new atheism espoused by hot-selling authors – Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens being the most prominent – has become a major media and internet success.

Maya Bohnhoff provides an overview of some important new atheist beliefs in a series of blogs on Common Ground (IQ1, IQ2, IQ3, IQ4, IQ5, IQ6, and IQ7). There she outlines the views of Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and a protegé of Richard Dawkins, as presented in an Intelligence Squared Debate “Science Refutes God” recently aired on National Public Radio.

At the core of Krauss’s atheism are three beliefs: One is that science, logic, rationality, evidence, reason, and empirical methodology refute the existence of God. The second is that belief in God is based on vague hopes, fears, and irrational delusions. And the third is that science tells us that there is no purpose to reality. Krauss holds – as do many new atheists – that science not only proves that God doesn’t exist, but that it replaces belief in God and religious faith.

In her analysis, Bohnhoff concludes that Krauss fails to provide evidence or logical support for his beliefs,and that he doesn’t explain how they would in any way be benefit to humanity. Yet, he clearly views his beliefs as logical and true, as presumably do those in the audience who were swayed to vote in his support.

Why does Krauss – and why do so many in his audience – believe as he does?

The short answer is that Krauss’s atheism represents an old and well-entrenched perspective of Western thought that has enjoyed widespread support for more than 250 years and is frequently accepted unquestioningly. Krauss didn’t need to provide proof. People already believe it to be true.

The Preamble to Atheism

In our series of blogs about the Enlightenment vision of science and religion, we have explored many of the intellectual developments in western Europe that underlie our modern secular understanding of religion. What we saw was that a marriage of science, religion, and philosophy – Newtonianism and Cartesianism foremost – proved extraordinarily attractive to thinkers, intellectuals, theologians, and rulers throughout 17th and early 18th century Europe.

What happened next was that the religious part of that marriage started to thin away. Descartes’ idea that rational thought, if it saw things clearly, was powerful enough to acquire certainty about divine truths first came to the fore. It led to the view that philosophy and clear philosophical thinking could lead to an understanding of both physical and spiritual reality. It wasn’t too long before thinkers like Spinoza starting claiming to have insight into both the nature of the world and the nature of God, and his insights conflicted nearly completely with the precepts of the revealed religions known at the time (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam).

Secondly, the idea of a “natural religion” started to take hold, especially after the spectacular successes of Newton’s physics and theology. His was the view that humanity could find proofs of the existence of God through the power of scientific and rational investigation. It included a way of thinking, perhaps unique to western Europeans, that originally there was a purely natural religion embraced by the ancients, and that the modern revealed religions were a falling away from that natural religion.

These views came together in what we now call deism, beliefs that the revealed truths of revelation and of the Bible were of secondary importance. And deism promoted the corrosive view that religious practice and religious institutions were an invention by various priesthoods and elites intent on power, control, and influence. Deism – and its attitude towards revealed religion and religious institutions – acquired remarkable sway as a result of the extraordinary religious wars and sectarian struggles of the day, struggles that resulted in widespread carnage and social fragmentation as religious and political elites fought – oftentimes murderously and viciously – over political and spiritual ends. What educated thinkers saw clearly was a game of high-stakes political gamesmanship pursued by means of warfare and persecution where religion, priests, and ideologies served as a kind of football.

What these same thinkers also saw was the collapse of the authority of the Bible as the word of God, as scholar after scholar showed it to be an assemblage of stories penned by various and diverse priestly scribes. No longer could the Old Testament be thought of – at least by educated people – as written by Moses. And the New Testament was starting to be seen as written long after the Jesus had walked the earth – and as composed of various gospels that contradicted each other.

By 1800 or shortly thereafter, widely read thinkers like Pierre Bayle had written so entertainingly, so truthfully, and so skeptically about the iconic religious figures of the past that large segments of fashionable and educated society were willing to ignore institutionalized religion’s claims.

Atheism

After discarding belief in the validity of revealed religion, the next step was discarding the belief in the existence of God – atheism (also see atheism and atheism in the age of the enlightenment in Wikipedia). At first, atheism was discussed furtively due to the social stigma attached to it. Then, it increasingly came out into the open, eventually to be widely embraced in the French Revolution.

The Treatise of the Three Impostors (Traité sur les trois imposteurs) was the furtive publication that seems to have kicked things off. Probably published in the Netherlands around 1710, it was rigorously suppressed. The Enlightenment scholar Margaret Jacobs tells the story:

There, as far as current scholarship can tell, relatively obscure deists and pantheists – Rousset de Missy included – had written The Treatise. The charge that the founders of the three great world religions had been imposters stood out as the most outrageous ever made by advocates of the Enlightenment. …

The book incurred so much hostility from the authorities that most copies just disappeared. Only in 1985 at the library of the University of California in Los Angeles did a scholar, Silvia Berti, discover the first printed copy ever known to have survived the censors.

It was not accidental that Jean Rousset de Missy, the young refugee turning iconoclastic radical and Freemason, had a major hand in organizing, if not partially writing and guiding the Three Imposters into print. Decades after that escapade he would help to lead a revolution in 1747-48 in The Netherlands. The anger against organized religions that he and his work symbolized could also take deeply political directions.

By 1750, however, respectable French and German high society could talk about atheism privately, although public acknowledgement of lack of belief in God was still not allowed. And although they didn’t publish it in their own name, two of the greatest thinkers of the French enlightenment were atheists. One was Denis Didirot, editor and guiding light (along with D’Alambert) of the enormously influential Encyclopédie. The other was the wealthy Baron D’Holbach, author of some 400 articles in the Encyclopedie, a scandalous attack on Christianity called Christianity Unveiled , and a radical, controversial, and influential treatise on materialism and atheism called The System of Nature. D’Holbach also hosted of one of most important and influential Parisian salons.

Next

Next week, we explore the thinking of Diderot and Holbach.

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This is the 17th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Feb 25, 2013. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706, also see Wikipedia on Bayle) was a French Huguenot scholar and polemicist forced into exile for his religious beliefs. He was the foremost Enlightenment skeptical writer, exercising a strong influence on the thinking of Locke, French atheism, philosophes like Voltaire, German Aufklarung philosophers, and mainstream Enlightenment thought. The influential Columbia History of Western Philosophy puts it this way:

His work provided what was later called “the Arsenal of the Enlightenment.” In applying skeptical arguments to the issues of the time and unearthing historical data, Bayle initiated several important developments in the philosophy of the next century. By treating the Bible, or at least the Old Testament, as amenable to the same kind of analysis as any secular history, Bayle began a kind of biblical criticism that soon led to questioning the moral decency and significance of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Scholars – to this day – still argue whether he was a Christian or not. Bayle himself insisted that he was. His method, he claimed, was to destroy reason so as to buttress faith. Others argued that he destroyed what was false so that the truth would become clear.

A Philosopher Who Loved to Quarrel

Bayle was born in France into a Huguenot (a French Calvinist Protestant) family in Provence. Although his father was a Protestant minister, he declared his belief in Catholicism after attending a Jesuit college – but changed his mind after 18 months. After working as a private tutor in Geneva, he became professor of philosophy at the leading Huguenot school in France, but then had to flee to Rotterdam when the school was suppressed. He took a chair in philosophy at the Ecole Illustre, but lost it in 1693 through his love of quarreling and controversy.

He then worked on and published one of the greatest, the most popular, and the best-selling intellectual works of the enlightenment – the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary). This, the first of the great encyclopedias of the enlightenment, remained essential reading for generations after its publication.

Against Superstition

Bayle’s attitude towards superstition was thorough going, general, and the topic of the Pensees diverses sur la comete, his first notable publication (1682). There, he argued that superstition and idolatry was widely prevalent, which is why comets are considered supernatural portents. The Enlightenment historian Jonathan Israel describe the book as follows:

Bayle continually extrapolates from belief in comets as supernatural signs to build a comprehensive argument about commonly held beliefs and superstition in general. A deeply rooted and almost universally held view may originate, he argues, in a variety of factors, none of which, however, need have much to do with solid evidence and argument.

A ‘tradition or ‘superstition’ can easily prevail, he maintains, in any society even if it has no rational foundation at all, owing to the compelling psychological force of what is commonly believed and because most men like to be relieved of the burdensome responsibility of examining opinions which are widely held.

Basic to Bayle’s critique of ‘superstition is the proposition that simply because something has long been believed, or because everyone believes it, by no means signifies that there are adequate grounds for believing it to be true.

If much – or most – belief is superstition, it follows that intolerance is caused by superstition.

Toleration

For Bayle, as for Spinoza and many of the leading thinkers of the enlightenment, toleration was of the central importance. In 1685, the century-old Edict of Nantes was revoked by the Louis XIV, effectively expelling the Protestant Huguenots from France and ending a period of toleration. Bayle, by then a well-known editor and professor in Rotterdam in the Netherland, responded by advocating for complete toleration – not only for Catholics, Protestants, and anti-Trinitarians of various sorts, but also for Jews, Muslim, and even atheists. This, at the time, was an astounding proposition.

He argued on the basis of skepticism. How was it possible – given that so much belief was blind adherence to dogma and given that so much of seemingly rational thought was the result of such blind adherence – to say with complete certainty that this person’s views were right or that person’s views were wrong? The best anyone could do, he argued, was to follow one’s conscience. And, he argued, everyone was equally entitled to follow one’s conscience.

For this, Voltaire called him the “attorney general of philosophers” and “the eternal honor of human reason”, holding him to be sworn enemy of all dogmatism.

Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher who almost singlehandedly resurrected the enlightenment from oblivion, praises Bayle’s accomplishment as an extraordinary development in religious thought. The greatest barrier to humankind, Cassirer argues, is not lack of knowledge, but rather dogmatic pretense to knowledge:

Of much deeper effect are those divergences from truth which do not arise from a mere insufficiency of knowledge but from a perverted direction of knowledge. It is not mere negation so much as this perversion which is most to be feared. And the falsification of the true standards of knowledge appears as soon as we attempt to anticipate the goal which knowledge must attain and to establish this goal prior to investigation.

Not doubt, but dogma, is the most dreaded foe of knowledge. It is not ignorance as such, but ignorance which pretends to be truth and wants to pass for truth, is the force which inflicts the mortal wound on knowledge. The real radical opposite of belief is not disbelief, but superstition; for superstition gnaws at the very roots of faith and dries up the source from which religion springs.

Bayle is the first thinker to become an out-and-out advocate of this truth.

Skepticism

Bayle is most famous for his skepticism – and he was skeptical about almost everything. He did not build new systems of thought. He tore down old systems. He was “the great teacher of doubt.”

His main vehicle for skepticism was his celebrated Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. There, as biographical essays, he wrote of the famous skeptics and atheists of the past, providing a wide education in skeptical thought to a generation eager to be separated from their beliefs. It was his article on Spinoza that brought Spinoza’s thought – widely considered to be subversive and atheistic – into the mainstream of the Enlightenment.

Bayle’s skepticism is much debated. The Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes that his is the Academic skepticism of Greek Platonism:

This skepticism is not the negative dogmatism … that nothing can be known. Rather, it is … to preserve the integrity of one’s power of judgment; that is, not to dissipate it in accepting as true what one does not perceive to be true [and] to avoid precipitateness and prejudice and to rely only on one’s own ability to discern the truth. Integrity is a matter of honestly preserving the wholeness of one’s own judgment.

Peter Gay, the noted German-American historian of the Enlightenment, describes Bayle thus:

A literary man of such range, a philosopher of such astringency, was more to the philosophes than a teacher of doubt or the author of a valuable work of reference. He embodied the prin­ciple, so important to the Enlightenment, that the destructive and constructive phases of criticism are two aspects of a single activity.

Next

Bayle was extraordinarily influential on 18th century French atheistic thinking, which we explore next.

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This is the 16th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Feb 17, 2013. The teachings of the Baha’i Faith decry the loss of religion in the affairs of humankind. Shoghi Effendi, the appointed head of the Baha’i Faith, quotes Bahá’u'llah as follows in The World Order of Baha’u'llah:

‘The vitality of men’s belief in God,’ Bahá’u'lláh has testified, ‘is dying out in every land; nothing short of His wholesome medicine can ever restore it. The corrosion of ungodliness is eating into the vitals of human society; what else but the Elixir of His potent Revelation can cleanse and revive it?’

‘The world is in travail,’ He has further written, ‘and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its face is turned towards waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its plight that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. ‘

Shoghi Effendi

These travails, however, are not without purpose. According to the Baha’i teachings, an old world order inadequate to the challenges of the future is dying away. And a new world order – fully capable of addressing the needs of a struggling humanity – is coming to the fore. Again, Shoghi Effendi:

As we view the world around us, we are compelled to observe the manifold evidences of that universal fermentation which, in every continent of the globe and in every department of human life, be it religious, social, economic or political, is purging and reshaping humanity in anticipation of the Day when the wholeness of the human race will have been recognized and its unity established.

A twofold process, however, can be distinguished, each tending, in its own way and with an accelerated momentum, to bring to a climax the forces that are transforming the face of our planet. The first is essentially an integrating process, while the second is fundamentally disruptive. The former, as it steadily evolves, unfolds a System which may well serve as a pattern for that world polity towards which a strangely-disordered world is continually advancing; while the latter, as its disintegrating influence deepens, tends to tear down, with increasing violence, the antiquated barriers that seek to block humanity’s progress towards its destined goal.

This twofold process is – I think abundantly clear – evident in the events of the European Enlightenment that we have been discussing in these blogs. When we consider the attacks on the religious institutions of the day launched by Spinoza from 17th century Holland, we clearly see the “disintegrating influences” tearing away at the barriers of blind belief in authority, of superstition, and of the hostile sectarianism that infected Europe of the 17th century.

Spinoza’s Critiques of Religion

We have briefly reviewed Spinoza’s thinking in The Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion #4: Spinoza, Pantheism, and Popular Darwinism. While Spinoza’s thought – a denial of Descartes’ view that mind and matter can be treated separately from each other – is currently experiencing a revival, it is probably correct to say that his philosophical system developed in support of his criticism of authority and revealed religions – Judaism, Islam, and especially Christianity – rather than the other way around.

Jonathan Israel – whose erudite books on the Enlightenment have been an important source of quotes in these blogs – sets the scene. Of all the great systematic thinkers of the Enlightenment, only Spinoza denied the authority of organized religion and scripture:

[A]ll new streams of thought which gained any broad support in Europe between 1650 and 1750, such as the philosophies of Descartes, Malebranche, Le Clerc, Locke, Newton, Thomasius, Leibniz, or Wolff, sought to substantiate and defend the truth of revealed religion and the principle of a divinely created and ordered universe.

If the great thinkers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century uniformly reviled bigotry and ‘superstition’ and discarded, if not expressly rejected, belief in magic, divination, alchemy, and demonology, all except Spinoza and Bayle sought to accommodate the new advances in science and mathematics to Christian belief (if not always to that of one or other Church) and the authority of Scripture.

The effect of Spinoza’s criticisms, and that of the deists and atheists who followed in his stead, was both dramatic and traumatic. Israel again (in Radical Enlightenment):

From the 1650s onwards, first in one land, then another, variants of the New Philosophy breached the defences of authority, tradition, and confessional theology, fragmenting the old edifice of thought at every level from court to university and from pulpit to coffee-shop.

Against Miracles:
What was is that Spinoza said and wrote that was so corrosive of religion and belief in the validity of scripture? At the top of the list was his attack on miracles. According to Spinoza:

[T]he notion of ‘miracle’ can only be understood with respect to men’s beliefs ‘and means simply an event whose natural cause we—or at any rate the writer or narrator of the miracle—cannot explain in terms of any other normal happening’. Hence, a ‘miracle’ is simply something the cause of which cannot be explained according to philosophical ‘principles known to us by the natural light of reason’.

Consequently, none of the ‘miracles’ or other supernatural happenings recounted in the Bible were, in fact, miracles or supernaturally caused.

It follows, Spinoza holds, that there is no truth to descriptions of miracles. They do not “afford us any understanding of God’s essence or His existence, or His Providence.” Rather, they describe things that “are far better understood from the fixed and immutable order of Nature.” Given that, as Israel puts it, “miracles were seen as the ‘first pillar’ of faith, authority, and tradition by theologians at the time, Spinoza’s rejection of the possibility of miracles seemed to bring all accepted beliefs, the very basis of contemporary culture, into question.”

It also implies that most people are deluded. Israel again:

The clear implication is that those who acknowledge miracles, refusing to base their conception of the universe on the unalterable laws of Nature, are merely deluded visionaries and not philosophers.

But there were further implications according to Spinoza.

Against Scripture, Established Religion, and the Priesthood:

If – as Spinoza holds – ordinary, everyday people are deluded by stories of miracles as recorded in Jewish and Christian scripture, who is doing the deluding? And why?

Spinoza’s answer has a familiar ring to it. Scripture explains things to common people without attempting to “teach things through their natural causes or engage in pure philosophy.” Scripture, according to Spinoza, uses poetic language not to explain the truth, but by using “such method and style as best serves to excite wonder and consequently to instil piety in the minds of the multitude.” This is done by those who “know that if ignorance, or rather stupidity, is removed, then foolish wonder, the only means they have of justifying and sustaining their authority, goes with it.”

Israel, our guide to Spinoza’s radical thought, writes:

Here, in embryo, is the concept of priestcraft as a system of organized imposture and deception, rooted in credulousness and superstition, which loomed so large in the subsequent history of the Enlightenment and was to receive massive amplification in the books on ancient oracles and priestcraft …

In a letter to someone who protested his views, Spinoza replied that they should read Church history and “see how falsely they relate much about the Pope and by what events, and with what artifice, the Roman pontiff finally gained supremacy over the Church six hundred years after the birth of Christ.”

In short, God is to be understood only by reason, philosophy, and science by philosophers and scientists. Steven Nadler in the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, puts it this way:

The key to discovering and experiencing God, for Spinoza, is philosophy and science, not religious awe and worshipful submission. The latter give rise only to superstitious behavior and subservience to ecclesiastic authorities; the former leads to enlightenment, freedom and true blessedness (i.e., peace of mind).

Some Comments

There are, of course, very real problems with saying that only reason, philosophy, or science, or that only philosophers or scientists, can understand God. For one thing, there is the well-known fact that philosophers never agree on much of anything, much less about the nature of God.

But, even supposing that agreement were forthcoming, how is it conceivable that replacing one set of authorities – those who are expert on scripture, i.e., priests – with another set of authorities – scientists and philosophers who are expert on the nature of God – is going to solve the problem created by religious intolerance and superstition. It is simply an exercise in changing who has authority.

None the less, Spinoza’s arguments about miracles – it is hard not to conclude – were in many ways substantially correct, although the conclusions he drew from them are far from the only reasonable conclusions one can draw.

Spinoza, it so happens, was a brilliant scholar of considerable ability and depth. Among other things, he recognized that Jewish scripture – in his day attributed to the authorship of Moses – was actually the work of different scribes writing at different times.

In both of these areas where he shed the light of reason – and despite the cynical, manipulative, negative, and critical conclusions about religion that he drew from them – the issues Spinoza addressed were centrally important. Miracles are not – if the modern thinking and the Baha’i scriptures are to be a guide – the proof of validity of religion. And priestly writings, while they can and should capture the truths of revelation – are not the same thing as the authenticated teachings of the Divine Prophets of God.

Next

Next time we explore Bayle, an influential precursor to 18th century French atheist thinking.

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This is the 15th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Feb 10, 2013. Western Europe in 1650 – 350 years ago – was quite a different place than it is now. Conflict over religion – and an extraordinary degree of religious intolerance – was commonplace and often devastatingly destructive.

The Reformation - the name we use for the extraordinarily violent schism that tore apart Western European in the name of Christianity – had created hatreds, pogroms, expulsions, intolerance, and conflict after conflict. Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinist, Anglicans, Huguenots, and others had formed – and had broken – alliances with emperors, kings, and princes in a never-ending series of bitter and highly destructive wars of religion and dynasty that devastated large parts of Europe, especially Germany and the Low Countries.

This was in addition to the extraordinary cruelty of the religious persecutions – and large-scale ethnic cleansing – of the Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. These included frequent massacres, forced conversions, and forced expulsions of entire populations – large populations – of the often highly educated, sophisticated, and capable Muslim and Jewish communities of the peninsula. The notorious Spanish Inquisition and the less well-known Portuguese Inquisition - aimed mainly at Christians who had been forced to convert from Judaism – were but one aspect of this process. (The expulsion of Jews wasn’t limited to the Spain and Portugal – at least 15 other European states, including England, France, and many German states – carried out similar expulsions in the 13th to 16th centuries.)

Responding to Intolerance

In the mid-1600s, how then should a capable, thoughtful, and concerned thinker and leader respond to the religious carnage and extraordinary religious intolerance of the times?

Erasmus

Catholic humanism and arguments against intolerance of the type preached by Erasmus of Rotterdam had failed. The Council of Trent – held between 1545 and 1563 – had recommended and instituted much-needed reforms of the Catholic Church, but it had also institutionalized and further politicized conflict with other denominations, setting the stage for the convulsive European wars of religions that were to follow.

But four things were new:

1. Philosophy had been revolutionized both by Renaissance humanism – a second rediscovery and avid exploration of ancient Greek and Roman thought – and by new scientific developments, most notably astronomical advances that had overthrown the certainties of Aristotelian philosophy.
2. The emergence of powerful methods of scientific study – the empiricism of the British and the rationalism of the great continental scientists – that offered tantalizing glimpses of new ways to achieve truth and of reconciling differing religious creeds and ideologies.
3. An awareness of a wider diversity of religious viewpoints stemming from the growing admixtures of religious communities – like the Portuguese Jews, Huguenots, and Socinianists fleeing persecution – in emerging commercial centers like Amsterdam. Community after community of believers of one sort or another lived next to each other, worked with each other, argued with each other, intermarried, and formed alliances and pressed their respective cases.
4. World trade had made it apparent that there were other great world religions in addition to Islam and Judaism. Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism were discovered and known to be structured quite differently than Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

Surveying what lay before you, and being philosophically inclined, what would you do?

• You could found a new sect of Christianity or a movement in Christianity, as did Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and many others. This was often done with the point of view that the established church and the priesthood was the cause of the corruption of the truths of religion.
• You could, as did Descartes, Francis Bacon, Malebranche, John Locke, Newton and Leibniz and their followers, look for a new way to understand religion and God based on science and rational/empirical philosophical methodologies, a way that could reconcile and unite warring factions in a common understanding, thus preserving Christianity.
• Or you could use natural theology – the view that science and rationality itself was adequate to reveal the truths of God – as did the deists and Spinoza.
• Or you could conclude it was religion itself that was the problem, and that it was mankind’s susceptibility to belief in God that was the cause of the problems, as did the deists and Spinoza.

Atheism

Those who came believe in the last point of view came to be called “atheists.” Atheists, according to a well-crafted BBC website on religion, “are people who believe that god or gods (or other supernatural beings) are man-made constructs, myths and legends or who believe that these concepts are not meaningful.”

In the enlightenment, few were willing to acknowledge being atheists. Rather, they tended towards professing belief in God, but not in the God of revealed religion. Or they believed in the God revealed by reason and philosophy, denying that this was the God worshipped by those intolerant enthusiasts around them.

We tend to see those who thought this way – Spinoza prominent among them – as “closet” atheists, i.e., atheists hiding their views so as to avoid suspicion. But this appears to be inaccurate, as rejecting belief in God wasn’t seen as an alternative in that distant age. Rather, people like Spinoza and his followers developed ways of thinking that rejected revealed religion. Over a period of time, those ways of thinking “migrated” into atheistic thought.

Spinoza

Spinoza – although he declared his belief in God with great sincerity – is widely considered to be the founding father of modern atheism. Jonathan Israel – whose erudite histories of the Enlightenment have set new standards for completeness – hails Spinoza as the founder and “integrator” of modern atheism:

Spinoza’s prime contribution to the evolution of early modern Naturalism, fatalism, and irreligion, as Bayle—and many who followed Bayle in this—stressed, was his ability to integrate within a single coherent or ostensibly coherent system, the chief elements of ancient, modern, and oriental ‘atheism’.

No one else in early modern times did this, or anything comparable, and it is primarily the unity, cohesion, and compelling power of his system, his ability to connect major elements of previous ‘atheistic’ thought into an unbroken chain of reasoning, rather than the novelty or force of any of his constituent concepts which explains his centrality in the evolution of the whole Radical Enlightenment.

As you may have guessed, Israel is an enthusiast for atheism.

But, beyond this, Spinoza – along with Descartes and Leibniz – was one of the three greatest continental builders of rationalistic systems of thought. Israel again:

It should not be overlooked, though, that some of his other contributions, notably his Bible criticism and revolutionary doctrine of substance, were highly innovative and, in themselves, exerted a vast international impact.

Sometimes, Spinoza is credited with being the central fountain of wisdom of the enlightenment and its project to free mankind from superstition, “priestcraft”, authoritarian government, intolerance, and fanaticism. Sometimes he is ignored. More usually, he is thought to be a great philosopher of the 17th century who strongly and persuasively criticized received religious opinion, belief in the scriptures as revealed by God, belief in priestly and ecclesiastical authority, and provided an alternative system of belief that became the intellectual foundation of philosophical and metaphysical denial of the validity of religion.

Next

We have briefly reviewed Spinoza’s thinking in The Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion #4: Spinoza, Pantheism, and Popular Darwinism. In our next blog, we look at his critiques of the Bible – many of which have well withstood the test of time – and the strands in his thought that led to the development of the modern atheism in enlightened France in the 18th century.

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This is the 14th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Feb 3, 2013. Deism – according to Wikipedia – is “the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of God.”

Bahá’is – like myself – believe that there is strong evidence for the existence of God in the natural world, and even more evidence in the powers of our mind and intellect, but that the strongest evidence comes from divine revelation as revealed by the Manifestations of God – Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Bahá’u'llah, and the like.

Deists typically believed that there was little or no need for divine revelation. Yes, Christ may have been an exemplary moral teacher, and yes, Christianity may be beneficial to the state and to society, but it is not necessary for the enlightened to abide within its embrace. As the years went by and deism became more radical, Christianity itself came to be seen as poisoning “natural religion.” Roy Porter in The Creation of the Modern World puts it this way:

[Deists] granted that reason lighted the way to a knowledge of a Supreme Being and of man’s duties – atheism was as blind as superstition – but further held that Christianity either added nothing at all to ‘natural religion’ or contained foolish and false elements, and hence must be purged, reinterpreted or rejected.

Especially doubtful – according to deists – are miracles, ancient scripture, the need for ecclesiastical institutions, and theological conceptions, Trinitarianism being a frequent target.

Several American founding fathers – Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson – were deists. James Madison and Abraham Lincoln likely were too. The radical political activist Thomas Paine wrote a popular deist tract – The Age of Reason – that characterizes deist belief thus:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

Deism was a slippery slope that – accompanied by the frequent wars, intrigues, arguments, prejudices, hatreds, and controversies associated with religion and its institutions – led many Europeans, must notably the elite and the educated, to reject belief in God. The view that the study of nature – and right philosophical thinking – was the correct path to the knowledge of God seems to have led inexorably to a rejection of Christianity and revealed religion. Deists believed in God as revealed in “natural religion” but not in God as revealed in Christianity.

The Origins of Deism

Oliver Cromwell

Modern deism is primarily a British creation, although there were strong contributions from Spinoza’s thought and the Netherlands.

Religious belief – and theological politics – was a complicated business in England and the United Kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries. Henry VIII created the English church in 1534 so that he could divorce and remarry, and the church allied itself with the Reformation. Mary returned England to Catholicism in 1554, burning hundreds at the stake for heresy. Elizabeth restored Protestantism, stayed pragmatic and moderate, but angered the more radical Puritans. Charles I – succeeding his father James I – infuriated Parliament and the Puritans, thereby losing his head. Oliver Cromwell’s republic ended with Charles’s sons – Charles II and James II on the throne. Both were Catholic in their sympathies – leading to an intense distrust on the part of their subjects. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 overthrew James II, putting the Protestant William of Orange of the Netherlands in his place as a constitutional monarch. The result was anger, new sects, multiple denominations, intense debates over theology, a visceral distrust of Catholicism and priests, and paradoxically, growing tolerance and religious freedom.

In this environment, its easy to see how the “sweet light of reason and science” could come to be considered the way to God, especially in light of Newton’s profound and world-changing scientific developments. Reason, science, and philosophy – rather than ideologies, conflicting superstitions, battling prelates, and ancient custom – came to be seen as the true path, rather than Christianity.

Two thinkers – Thomas Hobbes and Lord Herbert of Cherbury- led the way. Hobbes wasn’t a deist, but he espoused a materialist conception of the universe that held that all things – including thought, heaven, hell and even God – were “corporeal” and “matter in motion”. There were, Hobbes held, no supernatural explanations, undermining traditional theological explanation.

Herbert argued that true religions shared five points in common:

1. There is one Supreme God.
2. He ought to be worshipped.
3. Virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship.
4. We ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them
5. Divine goodness doth dispense rewards and punishments both in this life and after it.

Why then were there so many differences between religions? Herbert’s answer was self-deception, the workings of imagination, and priestly guile.

Four English Deists

John Toland (1670 – 1722), Anthony Collins (1676 – 1729), Matthew Tindal (1657 – 1733), and Bernard Mandeville (1670 – 1733) are not household names, nor are they usually mentioned as leading Enlightenment thinkers, but their influence was instrumental in leading the enlightened away from a belief in Christianity – especially belief in the Christian clergy – and towards hostility to religion. Writing three centuries ago, they argue points of view that can seem as current now as they were when written.

John Toland

Toland, born in Ireland, educated in Scotland, Holland and at Oxford, published Christianity not Mysterious in 1696. Its aim, according to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (see Bartlesby.com), was to show that Christianity should not be contrary to reason. The Cambridge History summarizes his views as follows:

Toland’s [goal was] to demonstrate that nothing contrary to reason, and nothing above reason, can be part of Christian doctrine. There are no mysteries in it. Revelation has unveiled what was formerly mysterious. Whoever reveals anything must do so in words that are intelligible, and the matter must be possible. The things revealed, therefore, are no longer mysteries. This holds, whether the revelation come from God or from man. The only difference between the two cases is that a man may lie, and God can not.

Everything mysterious about Christianity must be discarded, Toland declared.

The wealthy Collins wrote a number of books that closely engaged with the central English philosophical and religion controversies of the time. In his An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason of 1707, his first book, he argued that revelation must agree with a philosophical understanding of natural religion. In A Discourse of Freethinking, published in 1713, he argued that only reasoning could determine what was true or not in religion. He also accused the clergy of feuding and engaging in the ‘vile arts’. In a Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, published in 1724, Collins denies authority to prophecies and miracles on the grounds of incompatibility with Enlightenment reason and philosophy.

Matthew Tindall

Tindall was a lawyer, known for his important contributions in prosecuting pirates and in encouraging press freedom. His Christianity as Old as the Creation, first published in 1730, came to be known as the “Bible” of deism. In it, Tindall argues that the most important role of Christianity is to confirm what man can know about God through reason. Here is how the Cambridge History summarizes Tindall:

Tindal grasps firmly the principles of natural religion, as they were taught by … theologians of the day. Reason convinces us of the being and attributes of God, and of the truths of morality; the goodness of God makes it impossible that He should have concealed from any of His creatures what was necessary to their well-being. Christianity, therefore, cannot displace deism … it can only confirm it.

How then did so much religious conflict and controversy come about? It was the fault of the priests:

… the pride, ambition, and covetousness of the priests … has been the cause … of the great corruption of religion.

Mandeville – like Freud later – saw power, pride, vice and self-interest as the root of human behaviour. In his most famous book, The Fable of the Bees published in 1714, he argued that what made the world function was vice and self-interest. In Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness, published in 1720, he charged (as summarized by Irwin Primer) that:

Bernard Mandeville

… clergy everywhere—pagan and Christian, Catholic and Protestant—have always perpetrated frauds, abuses, and even shocking crimes to advance their worldly power and wealth. His anti­clerical argument is easily summarized: when the clergy have the power to force consciences and persecute in the name of their creed, they always do so. Ecclesiastics will continue to foster disputes and social upheavals from the safety of their pulpits if they are not re­strained by the state.

Modern readings of Mandeville – someone who was a forerunner to Adam Smith and modern capitalism – see him as an anthropologist studying the roots of religious functioning and dysfunctionalism. Irwin Primer again:

Mandeville the naturalist was primarily interested in the springs of human behavior, and throughout this book he writes as a psychologist investigating the conduct of human beings in religious contexts; his subject is really the psychology of religion. Indeed, in the one place in his book where he announces his purpose, he dwells not on the politics of religion or religious controversies, but on the more basic understanding of the motives that drive human behavior:

“My aim is to make Men penetrate into their Consciences, and by searching without Flattery into the true Motives of their Actions, learn to know themselves …“

As we discussed in our last blog, Voltaire and the like-minded in France and on the continent, picked up British Deist beliefs and modes of argument and wielded them as weapons against Christianity in their battles with the European clergy.

Summary

Growing up in a modern secular environment – for me it was a college campus where religion was deemed hopelessly outdated – one imbibes deism and its beliefs with one’s mother’s milk. Religion is corrupt, or it is for the simple. Priests and clerics are essentially in it for their own interests.  If one doesn’t deny the existence of God outright, it is best not to go to Church to find him. All of these prejudices – a kind of educated secular cultural heritage – owe much to the deists.

Yet deism seems to also have been part of complex and lengthy process of moving away from religions run and administered by specialist groups – priests, clergy, and the ordained – and towards, even if slowly and painfully, an age where all are responsible for their own spiritual growth and nourishment.

If this sentiment is true – and I think it is – perhaps we ought to be forgiving of the rampant sarcasm, causal arrogance, and cruel characterizations of religion of the deists we describe above.

Next

Next time, we start to examine atheism – a venerable and radical belief system that burst onto the world stage in the French revolution. Modern atheism has its spiritual forebears in extraordinarily cynical critiques of the Bible and ecclesiastical institutions advance by Spinoza and his near-contemporary Pierre Bayle. We will start with them.

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This is the 13th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Jan 28, 2013. The Newtonian synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy – developed from 1690 to 1720 – was hugely successful in England and highly influential in Europe and North America. It was inclusive, unifying, and compatible with different theologies. It allowed religion to embrace scientific studies. And although it helped ease the way for scientific results that contradicted scripture, it also helped fight back atheism and materialism, some of the powerful philosophical products of the Enlightenment.

Outside of England and Scotland, the Newtonian synthesis was popularized and disseminated by a number of thinkers and scientists, but most notably by Voltaire (1694 – 1778, also Voltaire in Wikipedia). Voltaire, the most famous of the writers, thinkers, intellectuals, and philosophes associated with the Enlightenment, was the one most responsible for introducing Newton’s thought and the Newtonian synthesis into France. Newton – Voltaire claimed – was the antidote to French backwardness in intellectual affairs. By this, he meant adherence to the physics of Descartes, adherence to Catholicism, and adherence to dogmatic philosophical systems.

But Voltaire was a deist – someone who rejected revealed religion, specifically the institutions of Christianity – and he used Newton to buttress his criticisms of Christianity and the French church, undermining the Newtonian synthesis for his own ends.

The Greatest of the Philosophes

François-Marie d’Arouet – Voltaire – was born into a prosperous French family in 1694 and received an excellent education at the famous Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His father pushed him towards a legal or a bureaucratic career, but Voltaire aspired to be playwright and escaped to the libertine social life of Paris in the 1720s. There, his genius, wit, and sociability granted him access to the highest literary and aristocratic circles. He succeeded in grand style with his first play, but fell into trouble for criticising the government and for quarrelling, leading several times to imprisonment in the Bastille. One quarrel – with the young nobleman Chevalier de Rohan – led him to volunteer for exile in England.

Anglomania

Voltaire was captivated by England and English constitutional monarchy, English satirical writing, English political criticism, English journalism, English liberalism, and above all, English science, theology, and philosophy as expounded by Newton, Locke, and Francis Bacon. He immersed himself in Newton’s writing, met with Newton’s circle of supporters, and returned to France determined to create change.

With skillful and judicious investments – and an inheritance from his father – he acquired considerable wealth and the independence that such wealth allowed, and he acquired highly placed friends (he even resided at Versailles, the seat of the French monarchy). He also formed a liaison with the remarkable Emilie Le Tonnier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, whose translation of Newton’s Principia into French is still the standard text.

In 1733, he wrote the first of his influential books on philosophical and social issues – the Letters Concerning the English Nation – and praised English religion, philosophy, government, and especially English science. It led to scandal, as it was critical of French ways (and published without leave of the government), so he left Paris to stay at the Du Châtelet family estate at Cirey. There, with Du Châtelet’s able assistance, he launched a campaign to dislodge the French embrace of the famous Descartes and to establish Newton’s ascendency. In 1738 (and with revisions in 1745) he published Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton which helped to win the resulting cultural war. By 1750, France belonged to Newton.

Voltaire – extraordinarily prolific – at the same time penned plays, poems, stories, and histories (of Louis XIV, of the Swedish King Charles II, and the pioneering universal history called Essais sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations). He was named the Royal Historiographer of France and then was summoned by his friend Frederick the Great to join the Prussian court in Berlin.

Voltaire Fights For Freedom – and Against the Church

Another scandal – he had described his friend and colleague Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (then President of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin) as a despot and a philosophical buffoon – sent Voltaire back to France. He settled conveniently close to the border in the town of Ferney – now Ferney-Voltaire – where he built a château. In his remaining years (1755 – 1778), he waged cultural war against despotism and ecclesiasticism and invented the role of the public intellectual. Here is how the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia puts it:

During this period, Voltaire also adopted what would become his most famous and influential intellectual stance, announcing himself as a member of the “party of humanity” and devoting himself toward waging war against the twin hydras of fanaticism and superstition. While the singular defense of Newtonian science had focused Voltaire’s polemical energies in the 1730s and 1740s, after 1750 the program became the defense of philosophie tout court and the defeat of its perceived enemies within the ecclesiastical and aristo-monarchical establishment.

In this way, Enlightenment philosophie became associated through Voltaire with the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famous motto, “Écrasez l’infâme!” (“Crush the infamy!”). This entanglement of philosophy with social criticism and reformist political action, a contingent historical outcome of Voltaire’s particular intellectual career, would become his most lasting contribution to the history of philosophy.

And he promoted liberty – he thought that “liberty of speech, no matter what the topic, is sacred and cannot be violated.” He also promoted hedonism – he thought that personal sexual liberty was sacrosanct and condemned what he saw as “moral codes of sexual restraint and bodily self-abnegation” of the Christian church.

He promoted skepticism, arguing that “no authority, no matter how sacred, should be immune from challenge by critical reason.” He was “unwavering in his hostility to church authority and the power of the clergy”. Critical reason, he believed, should not be used to create philosophical systems of authority, but rather used as a “solvent” to undermine authority and “the false and deceptive dialectic that anchored traditional philosophy.”

And here his embrace of Newtonian thought and British empiricism played a central role in his fight against dogmatism and arbitrary authority, in philosophy as well as religion. Again, the Stanford Internet Encyclopedia:

Against the acceptance of ignorance [and] the false escape from it found in sophistical knowledge … Voltaire offered … the power and value of careful empirical science.

While Newtonian epistemology admitted of many variations, at its core rested a new skepticism about the validity of apriori rationalist accounts of nature and a new assertion of brute empirical fact as a valid philosophical understanding in its own right. European Natural philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century had thrown out the metaphysics and physics of Aristotle with its four part causality and teleological understanding of bodies, motion and the cosmic order. In its place, however, a new mechanical causality was introduced that attempted to explain the world in equally comprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter acting by direct contact and action alone. …

Newton pointed natural philosophy in a new direction. He offered mathematical analysis anchored in inescapable empirical fact as the new foundation for a rigorous account of the cosmos. … Natural philosophy needs to resist the allure of such rational imaginings and to instead deal only with the empirically provable. Moreover, the Newtonians argued, if a set of irrefutable facts cannot be explained other then by accepting the brute facticity of their truth, this is not a failure of philosophical explanation so much as a devotion to appropriate rigor. …

For Voltaire (and many other eighteenth-century Newtonians) the most important project was defending empirical science as an alternative to traditional natural philosophy. … All of Voltaire’s public campaigns, in fact, deployed empirical fact as the ultimate solvent for irrational prejudice and blind adherence to preexisting understandings. In this respect, his philosophy as manifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemological convictions he gleaned from Newtonianism.

It was in these ways that Voltaire employed Newton’s thought, even turning it against Newton’s embrace of revealed religion.

Summary

Voltaire was a remarkable and extraordinarily gifted man, and his promotion of Newton was a centrally important contribution the Enlightenment. But Voltaire was also an extraordinarily gifted polemicist at war with Christianity, determined to undermine and overthrow its institutions. The youthful`Abdu’l-Bahá, writing in 1875 in The Secret of Divine Civilization at the behest of Bahá’u'llah, says:

Among those who have repudiated religious faith was the Frenchman, Voltaire, who wrote a great number of books attacking the religions, works which are no better than children’s playthings. This individual, taking as his criterion the omissions and commissions of the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic religion, and the intrigues and quarrels of the spiritual leaders of Christendom, opened his mouth and caviled at the Spirit of God (Jesus).

In the unsoundness of his reasoning, he failed to grasp the true significance of the sacred Scriptures, took exception to certain portions of the revealed Texts and dwelt on the difficulties involved.

This is strong criticism, all the more so because `Abdu’l-Bahá rarely criticizes. `Abdu’l-Bahá – most likely in the context of the discussion of the role of religion in the affairs of Iran in the later part of the 19th century – emphasizes that the failings of religious people and the institutions of religion are different from the failings of religion:

It is true that there are foolish individuals who have never properly examined the fundamentals of the Divine religions, who have taken as their criterion the behavior of a few religious hypocrites and measured all religious persons by that yardstick, and have on this account concluded that religions are an obstacle to progress, a divisive factor and a cause of malevolence and enmity among peoples.

They have not even observed this much, that the principles of the Divine religions can hardly be evaluated by the acts of those who only claim to follow them. For every excellent thing, peerless though it may be, can still be diverted to the wrong ends. A lighted lamp in the hands of an ignorant child or of the blind will not dispel the surrounding darkness nor light up the house — it will set both the bearer and the house on fire. Can we, in such an instance, blame the lamp? No, by the Lord God! To the seeing, a lamp is a guide and will show him his path; but it is a disaster to the blind.

Next

Next time, we examine Deism, the Enlightenment era rejection of revealed religion in favor of a deity who, as one wit put it, got things going in the universe and then took an extended vacation.

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This is the 12th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Jan 13, 2013. Isaac Newton – the architect of modern science – created an influential merger of science and religion that was incorporated into liberal British Protestantism and became a central support for growth in economic prosperity, entrepreneurship, innovation, democratic self-rule, and religious tolerance. The industrial revolution and the separation of church and state enshrined in the US constitution are heirs to Newton’s merger.

But his merger was not to last. Within a century, science no longer needed Newton’s conception of God – his “physico-theology” – and abandoned it as flawed and outmoded by scientific progress (see The Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion #10: The Decline of Newton’s Vision of the Oneness of Science and Religion).

In this blog, we explore another of the reason for the decline of the Newton’s vision of unity of science and religion – his confrontational approach to Leibniz, co-inventor of the calculus and author of a competing rationalist (as opposed to empiricist) vision of the unity of science and religion.

Newtonian Unity and Disunity

A basic Baha’i teaching is that religion should be the cause of unity:

Religion should unite all hearts and cause wars and disputes to vanish from the face of the earth, give birth to spirituality, and bring life and light to each heart. If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division, it were better to be without it… . Any religion which is not a cause of love and unity is no religion. (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 130)

Let’s use this teaching to analyze Newton’s merger of science and religion. Did he make his merger of science and religion a cause of love and unity? The answer is both yes and no.

Newtonian Unity

Newton’s vision created unity in several ways. First, the extraordinary range and success of Newton’s scientific accomplishment made his vision a powerful progressive force across Europe and into the Americas. European thought after Newton had to take into account both empiricism – the idea that you find things out by studying them rather than by hypothesizing about them – and the mathematical sciences. These two aspects of science are great unifiers. They provide something that people in all societies and all walks of life can use to come to agreement on. Even highly politicized discussions – consider, for example, global warming – can be resolved by clear and incontrovertible data.

Secondly, in many ways, Newton’s success demonstrated far and wide that the contentious discussions and the tumult that so often accompanied Enlightenment thought could be resolved. In many ways, the central topic of the Enlightenment was that of finding a new intellectual basis for religion to replace the ideological conflict over religion that had led to large-scale war, sectarian cleansing and mass-slaughter. Newton showed that progress could be made. And his system encouraged a step towards the religious toleration that – especially after it was embedded in the American constitution – became a core value of the modern world.

Newtonian Disunity

The unifying achievements of Newton’s mixture of science and religion were significant. But there were failures as well. Some – if not most – were due to the extraordinary contentiousness of Europeans in that age. People fought about everything, especially religion. Newton had a disputatious nature and he and his supporters fought unnecessary, long-running, and bitter battles with competing thinkers. The foremost of these battles was with the European supporters of Descartes and Leibniz over issues that were to eventually discredit Newton’s merger of science and religion.

The times when Newton lived – from 1642 to 1727 – were ones of continuous religious conflict. The British decapitated their king (Charles I) in 1649 – shortly after Newton was born – because of a civil war where religion played a major role. In 1688 when Newton was moving towards playing a role in British government, his compatriots removed James II, the second son of Charles I and the last of the Stuart kings, from the British throne because of his Catholicism. Beyond that, the whole of Europe was the battleground of Catholicism and Protestantism, or of Catholicism against Catholicism or of Protestantism against Protestantism. So any innovation in religion – and Newton’s was certainly that – had to fight for survival.

But, Newton’s feud with Leibniz was unnecessary and helped lead to a distrust of – and eventually dismissal – of his views about the central importance of God. Leibniz (1646 – 1716), whose genius was of second rank only to Newton’s, was the heir to the European idealism of Descartes and the author in his own right of a powerful rationalistic metaphysical system. He discovered calculus independently of Newton – his formulation is the one we use today – and he anticipated or initiated scientific developments that had to wait (sometimes hundreds of years) before his insight was widely recognized.

Newton, through proxy, accused Leibniz of deceit and theft and then worked to smear Leibniz’s reputation. The battle then moved to concepts in physics, an arena where Newton claimed the existence of absolute space and time (it was necessary for his conception of God). Leibniz claimed – very much in keeping with how we think today – that there was no such thing.

And Leibniz pointed out a major flaw in Newton’s “physico-theology.” Newton’s universe required God to intervene now and then to keep things on course. Leibniz wrote:

Natural religion itself seems to decay (in England) very much … . Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers [have a] very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.

Leibniz insisted that God’s world needed no such continual repair:

… the same force and vigour remains always in the world, and only passes from one part of matter to another, agreeably to the laws of nature, and the beautiful pre-established order.

Samuel Clarke, Newton’s proxy, replied that Leibniz was excluding God from the world:

The notion of the world’s being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God, as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker; is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends, (under pretense of making God a supramundane Intelligence,) to exclude providence and God’s government in reality out of the world.

Leibniz strongly responded by accusing Newton of making gravity into an occult quality – a mysterious force at a distance that made the continuing existence of the world a continuing miracle. Systems of science and religion – those of Newton and Leibniz – seemed also unable to come to agreement.

Newton’s Science and Religion “Physico-Theology” Undermined

The debates between two of the greatest intellectual giants of the scientific revolution made great reading when published in English in 1717 (and in French and German in 1720), but Leibniz had made two prescient charges.

One, which we discussed in last week’s blog, was that the extraordinary mathematical power of Newton’s law of gravity and calculus proved to most scientists that there was no requirement for God’s intervention to set things back on track. God did not – just as Leibniz had argued – have to wind up the watch of the universe. It went on fine by itself.

The second charge was that gravity – at least as Newton described it – seemed like an occult quantity. And indeed, gravity was indeed taken by many to be an occult-like quantity by the followers of the pantheism of Spinoza and the materialism and paganism of the atheists. For them, the idea that everything attracted everything else showed inanimate objects to be as if alive and self-propelled. It was no longer fashionable to talk of nature deities, but inanimate matter was suddenly seen to have some deity-like power. Again, God was not needed.

Margaret Jacobs, the well-known Newtonian scholar, puts it this way:

What happened to materialism after 1750, when it gradually became vitalistic or pantheistic, transformed the course of Western metaphysics. By postulating a law-like force within history or nature, every materialist from Toland to Diderot, d’Holbach and Marx made use of the remarkable possibilities such an intellectual move permitted. Newtonian science made it possible, as they knew and acknowledged. Because universal gravitation works on all bodies from their centres, it was easy to assert that motion is inherent in matter and that Newton’s science proved it.

The force of 18th-century vitalistic materialism, or what Toland and Rousset de Missy called pantheism, lay precisely in the ability of those who promoted it to champion Newtonian science while at the same time walking away from Newton’s own metaphysics – Newton himself always located the source of motion in immaterial forces of divine origin. Despite his deep religious convictions, Newton could be read by his contemporaries and subsequent generations as endorsing a world devoid of spiritual forces, composed solely of matter in motion, pulled by the force of attraction.

Thus, the “Newtonian” clockwork universe came into being, a universe unrecognizable to Newton.

How much of this is due to Newton’s famous irascibility and confrontationalism is hard to say. But the failure of two of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment – both of whom saw science and religion as being in deep agreement – to work out their differences and resolve their conflicts made them much easier targets for those who despised religion and wanted to hasten it demise. Newton’s mixture of science and religion was riddled with disputation and became a cause of disunity.

Next

Next time, Voltaire, Newton’s tireless and promoter and determined opponent of organized religion.

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This is the 11th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Jan 6, 2013. Isaac Newton – universally hailed as the Enlightenment’s greatest thinker – is the creator of modern science, of modern mathematical methods, and of an influential vision of the oneness of science and religion.

Three centuries after Newton’s death, educated Europeans generally reject belief in God, considering it a legacy of the past with little to offer. And they think it has much to reject, including fundamentalism, fanaticism, outdated morality, and terrorism. The New Atheist movement goes further, advocating religious intolerance and encouraging suppression of religious belief.

Newton’s contributions to science and technology are as celebrated now as they ever were. But his vision of the oneness of science and religion is ignored. Substituted in its place is a clockwork “Newtonian” worldview – sometimes touted as the scientific worldview – claiming that all things arise from the interactions of inanimate matter and denying purpose agency, intelligence, will, or the existence of God. The Principia Cybernetica Website describes this worldview thus:

The world view underlying traditional science may be called “mechanistic” or “Newtonian”. It is based in reductionism, determinism, materialism, and a reflection-correspondence view of knowledge. Although it is simple, coherent and intuitive, it ignores or denies human agency, values, creativity and evolution.

How did the Newton’s synthesis of science and religion, once thought to resolve the greatest issues facing philosophy and Christianity in Europe, come to be seen as a reductionist denial of human and divine agency? And what lessons are there in this for those – such as the modern Bahá’ís – who see science and religion working together as a necessary part of the solution?

The Decline of the Newton Synthesis of Science and Religion

I see at least six major factors as leading to the decline of Newton’s vision of the oneness of science. They are

1. Flaws and inadequacies in Newton’s vision,
2. Confrontation, polemicism, and unnecessary conflict with other thinkers, even like-minded thinkers (the Newton-Liebniz conflict, for example),
3. Historical change, especially those leading to the French revolution, to the rise of materialism, and to the widespread rejection of religion,
4. Rapid advances in science and the new challenges of new topics to be explored (geology, evolution)
5. A predominantly intellectual and philosophical cast to the arguments, giving rise to deism and the rejection of revealed religion, and
6. The lack of powerful religious arguments balancing the strong scientific arguments.

Despite these flaws, the Newtonian synthesis was widely influential in Europe and even in the United States. For the educated, it came to be seen as the way to logically prove the existence of the God in an age that demand logical proof and rejected appeal to “throne, altar, and aristocracy.”

But its most fatal flaw was its extraordinary success in explaining natural phenomena, a success that meant that it wasn’t necessary to take into account the existence of God. When that success became clear, appeal to the existence of God became superfluous and many took that to mean that belief in God was superfluous. Newton’s vision of the oneness of science and religion was undermined by the extraordinary gift of his scientific genius.

I Had No Need of That Hypothesis

There is apocryphal story about Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, the gifted French mathematician and astronomer who did more than anybody to confirm the correctness and power of Newton’s physics. Although it likely didn’t happen, it illustrates a larger truth – conceptions about God were not needed for scientific explanation. The story is quoted in Wikipedia here:

Laplace went in state to Napoleon to present a copy of his work … . Someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God; Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.’ Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”) Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, Ah! c’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses. (“Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.”)

It is Newton’s science – minus the animating forces of God’s power that Newton believed necessary – that is the cold, reductionist, rationalistic “Newtonian” worldview. It is a worldview that he would have in no way recognized.

Flaws and Inadequacies in Newton’s Vision

Newton argued that science proved the existence of God. Jonathan Israel, in his magisterial Enlightenment Contested, describes Newton’s views:

The regularity, purposeful intricacy, and coherence of the universe, held Newton, are in themselves proof of supernatural agency in its design: “this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” “All that diversity of natural things which we find”, he argued, “suited to different times and places, could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.”

Newton and the thinkers of his generation didn’t realize how effective his laws of motion, gravity, and mathematical methods would turn out to be. Rather, they believed that their laws showed that God would have to be actively involved in all aspects of the universe, even to maintain the planets in their orbits. Peter Gay, in the The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, summarizes Newton’s thinking thus:

For Newton, God was an active being: he is Creator and watchful master, wise, just, good, and holy. This “Being,” Newton argued, “governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all”; he is a “powerful, ever-living Agent” who prevents the fixed stars from falling upon one another—perhaps by natural, perhaps by miraculous, means—and occasionally corrects the irregularities introduced into the solar system by the eccentric orbits of the planets and the incursions of comets.

Even gravity caused problems. Left to itself, it would cause everything to collapse. Israel again:

Man then, held the Newtonians, dwells in a divinely ordered universe relying on perpetual divine supervision to avoid collapsing into chaos, a structurally unified system which can only be rightly comprehended by a ‘philosophy’—in fact, a ‘system’ which is simultaneously mathematical, ethical, historical, and theological. Newton held that ‘a continual miracle is needed to prevent the sun and fixed stars from rushing together through gravity’, the constant intervention of the manus emendatrix [amending hand] of God.

Newton sees a universe controlled by God’s laws, regulated by God’s mathematics, and maintained by God’s intervention (the analogy with the Britain of Newton’s time has not gone unnoticed). God is everywhere – and must be so – to maintain His universe. This is Newton’s proof of the existence of God and the essence of his vision of the oneness of science and religion.

The God of the Gaps – a Flaw

Newton’s vision of the oneness of science and religion is plagued by at least two major flaws. One is what is now called the “God of the Gaps” problem.

Basically, a God-of-the-Gaps argument uses the existence of gaps in current scientific explanation to argue for the existence of God’s divinity to bridge that gap. For example, Newton explained that deviations of the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn from Kepler’s ideal orbits as problems that God would fix by active intervention. The need for God to do so was part of Newton’s explanation of why God was known to exist. By the end of the 18th century, Laplace and others had conclusively shown, using Newton’s own theories, that perturbations of the orbits of the two planets were consistent with the influence on each other of the two planet’s gravities. The existence of God was no longer required.

God as Source of Order – a Flaw

Another flaw – one that is frequently discussed in the context of Darwinian evolution and its supposed defeat of religious views about creation – is God as the designer and maintainer of order, a problem closely related to the modern concept of intelligent design and the ancient teleological argument for the existence of God.

Newton’s argument is conceptually similar to the intelligent design argument, which holds that God had to intervene to create the complexity necessary to maintain life. Newton held that order in universe was maintained by God’s active intervention. For example, Newton believed that all the planets had to be given an initial impetus – and one of them lighted to act as the sun – to create the solar system we see now. If God didn’t do so, no solar system and no life. Order, and an environment suitable for life, thus requires God’s active creative in the affairs of the universe.

This requirement also shows that God exist, or so maintained Newton. But, when geological, planetary, and especially evolutionary theories developed that showed the immense lifetime of the earth and the slow geological processes involved, Newton’s creating/intervening model was no longer seen to hold true, dealing what many thought a death-blow to belief in God.

Of course, what it actually showed was a flaw in Newton’s vision of the oneness of science and religion. Newton’s influence was so great a failure of a major component of his argument was viewed as showing that God didn’t exist.

Next

We’ve only addressed one of the six major factors leading to the eclipse of Newton’s vision of the oneness of science. In the next one or two blogs, we will address the remaining five. Following that, we will consider how to update Newton’s vision of the oneness of science and religion in keeping with the Baha’i teachings of the unity of science and religion.

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This is the 10th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Dec 30, 2012. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (also see Wikipedia) was the leading thinker of the Enlightenment. His extraordinary genius and incomparable scientific accomplishment make us all his heirs.

The laws of motion and the theory of gravity that Newton outlined in the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica not only established the modern science of physics, but serve as the template for the modern mathematical sciences. The empirical methods he outlined in the Optiks are those of modern science, engineering, development, and business. His mathematical methodologies – especially the calculus – make modern engineering possible.

Newton’s Tomb

Newton was a devoutly religious man, like most of thinkers who created the scientific revolution. Also, like most of them, he was a rationalist who distrusted the vague and muddled explanations he saw in Christian dogma. Because of the clarity and power of his science, and because he embraced clear thinking and analysis with respect to religion, he bequethed a powerful vision of the unity of science and religion to the modern world.

In 18th century Britain, his perspectives were incorporated into liberal Anglicism and the views of the British entrepreneuers, businessmen, bankers and engineers who created modern capitalism, the industrial revolution, and business-oriented democracy. Modern thinkers that embrace both science and religion are heirs to his thinking. The Bahá’í vision of the unity of science and religion – the view that both true religion and true science are equally necessary if mankind is to advance – are presaged in his vision.

Newton’s Religious Views

For Newton, belief in God was central, and his studies of theology were as important to him as were his studies in science. In the last twenty years, scholars have re-evaluated Newton’s interest in religion, drawing on a vast, newly available database of previously unpublished work. Snobelen (see here) evaluates the new findings thus:

In addition to being the preeminent natural philosopher in the West in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Newton was a theologian and prophetic exegete in his own right. It is also now known that he left behind one of the largest corpora of theological writings in the early modern period (totalling some four million words). In his zeal to plumb the depths of biblical theology and comb the records of the early church, Newton far out-stripped all but a few of his contemporaries, including those who are known as divines or religious figures in the first instance.

His belief in God is famously summarized in the General Scholium of the Principia:

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being … He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done …

To Newton, all things have a cause, and their cause is God. The proof of existence of God is to be found in the excellence of creation. For Newton, nature is proof that there is an Intelligent Designer. Again, the Scholium:

We know him only by most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion … . Blind metaphysical necessity which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and Will of a Being necessarily existing.

Newton, Snobelen writes, believed in “a God of absolute power and dominion who intervenes directly in the human and natural worlds.” It is God, according to Newton, who maintain the gravitational force that holds the planet and the earth in their orbits, rather than some property of inert matter.

Newton brought the same rational approach to belief in God that he brought to natural philosophy and science. Again, Snobelen:

Newton fashioned himself as a priest of nature and committed himself to the reformations of natural philosophy and religion. Both these reformations involved the rejection of vain hypothesizing and the a priori introduction of metaphysics. For Newton, God was to be found through the humble and inductive study of both God’s Word and His Works.

Canterbury Cathedral

In late 17th and early 18th century England, Newton’s prestige as a scientist gave his theological views considerable power. He used them to buttress the then emerging liberal Anglicism of English protestantism. Margaret Jacob, a leading Newtonian scholar, sets the scene:

The interplay between science and religion in seventeenth-century England served to transform both. Far from being in conflict, as historians used to suppose, science and religion (as systems of ideas) modified each other in the course of the century. Mainstream English Protestants gradually embraced a version of the new science that supported traditional Christian metaphysics, while scientists responded to the necessity of protecting an established church and religiosity by significantly modifying the mechanical philosophy of nature and purging it of its materialistic tendencies.

Today we use words like capitalism and revolution to describe these forces; in the seventeenth century, men (and some women) spoke of nature and God, of laws spiritual and natural, of self-interest or greed, of business, and of the necessity for order and harmony.

Newton was an important contributor to this transformation of Anglicism, both directly as a member of parliament for Cambridge University, as Master of the Mint, as the first scientist to be knighted, and as head of the prestigious Royal Society, and indirectly as a behind-the-scenes player wielding influence and directing activities.

Newton’s Non-orthodox views of Christianity

In public, Newton was the epitome of a respectable progressive Christian. In private, he was radical, even heretical (although his “heresy” was along the lines of applying his famed powers of concentration to both Christian and Jewish scripture and coming up with his own conclusions).

Newton privately rejected Trinitarianism, the Christian dogma that God exists as three persons (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit) and embraced Arianism. Both views, if widely known, would have led to Newton being branded a heretic, i.e., a non-believer. Arianism – widely and divisively persecuted 1600 years – held that Christ was created by God and therefore not God’s equal. Therefore, you should worship God, not Christ. To Newton, the illogic of Trinitarianism was evidence that Christianity had been corrupted by man-made doctrines and that it needed further reformation – the rise of protestantism was not enough. And he rejected evil spirits. They were just “distempers of the mind.” The Devil didn’t exist – he was merely “a symbol for human lust”.

Newton also thought that true and pure religion was of ancient vintage and not just a possession of Christianity. The role of Christ, he came to believe, was to restore the ancient belief in God to its true station. And because of the corruption of Christianity, the restoration of true belief would have to happen again. The Jews would return to Israel, the end of the world would come, and Christ would return. Snobelen characterizes this side of Newton’s religiousity thus:

He believed in the return of Christ, the restoration of the Jews to Israel, the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple and the coming Kingdom of God on earth—for which Newton believed one should pray every day….

Newton was unhappy with those who set prophetic dates and thereby brought discredit on Christianity when they failed. This did not stop Newton himself from making prophetic calculations, from which his own dates can be extrapolated. These show that he put the parousia [the second coming of Christ] off well beyond his own lifetime to the nineteenth or twentieth centuries at the earliest. Newton also believed that the final reformation of Christianity would not happen until around this time …

For Baha’is, of course, this means that Newton foresaw the playing out of prophecy that is fulfilled by the emergence of the Bahá’í Faith in the 19th and 20th centuries as the return of Christ in the person of Bahá’u'llah.

Newton in the Context of The Enlightenment and Collapse of Religious Certainty

Newton’s view of the unity of science and religion was extraordinarily powerful and held sway in Britain, in Germany, and in the Americas for more than a hundred years. It was also strongly influential in Catholic France where it was adopted, with Christianity subtracted off, by Voltaire as a kind of subversive weapon with which to attack Catholicism. It continues to be the view of many scientists and liberal religionists the world over.

But its picture of a universe maintained by God’s bounty rapidly fell away in influence, because of the attacks of the anti-Christian philosophes, because of the rise of deism and atheism, because of the rapid growth of highly technical and specialist disciplines in science, but mainly because it worked perfectly well as a description of the universe even without God.

Richard Westfall, one of the best known chroniclers of Newton’s life, summarizes his view of Enlightentment thought about religion, including Newton’s, in the folllowing way:

The new natural-philosophy found evidence of God in nature. … Inevitably, natural philosophers concentrated on what alone natural philosophy could reveal, God the Creator, and they did so increasingly as the scientific revolution progressed. Just as inevitably, given the thrust of the new conception of nature, they found a God who revealed Himself in immutable laws and not in the watchful care of personal providence or in miraculous acts. Rationalism, a probing of the grounds of assent, was a necessary aspect of a philosophical movement founded on the rejection of a tradition as old as Western man; such rationalism was bound in the end to question affirmations of Christianity once held to be above reason. …

During the seventeenth century, in the eyes of the leaders of thought, the enchanted world of the medieval church dissolved right away. Responsible thinkers could not ignore the fact. Newton tried to salvage Christianity by purging it of irrationalities.

Next

We study the fate of Newton’s vision of the unity of science and religion – how it turned into the clockwork picture of the universe – in the next blog.

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This is the 9th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Dec 23, 2012. After the first World War, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, leader of the Baha’i Faith, wrote a letter to the Central Organization for a Durable Peace (see Tablet to the Hague). In the letter, sent in 1919, he outlined the central teachings of the Baha’i Faith, including the independent investigation of reality:

Among these teachings was the independent investigation of reality so that the world of humanity may be saved from the darkness of imitation and attain to the truth; may tear off and cast away this ragged and outgrown garment of 1,000 years ago and may put on the robe woven in the utmost purity and holiness in the loom of reality. As reality is one and cannot admit of multiplicity, therefore different opinions must ultimately become fused into one.

Newton (1642–1727) (also see Wikipedia) – whose extraordinary scientific accomplishments gave him unparallelled influence in the Enlightenment – held the independent investigation of reality as central to the scientific method. It was, he said, the key to doing science correctly; the key to freeing the mind from the influence of metaphysical presumptions, irrationality and superstition; and the key to understanding Christianity (where his conclusions presaged some of the basic teachings of the Baha’i Faith.)

In the following, we outline some of Newton’s views about the proper way to investigate reality.

The Independent Investigation of Reality

The independent investigation of reality can mean several things. According to the Baha’i teachings:

It means that man must forget all hearsay and examine truth himself, for he does not know whether statements he hears are in accordance with reality or not. Wherever he finds truth or reality, he must hold to it, forsaking, discarding all else; for outside of reality there is naught but superstition and imagination.

Or it can mean – not dissimilarly – what Newton promoted as the correct way of doing science. His recommendations have become an unassailable part of the modern scientific method.

The most famous of the statements of Newton’s views in these regards is in an essay called the General Scholium at the end of the second and third editions of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. “I do not feign hypotheses,” he writes (sometimes this is translated as “I do not frame hypotheses”) in clarifying why he doesn’t attempt to explain the causes of gravity:

I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses.

For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this experimental philosophy, propositions are deduced from the phenomena and are made general by induction.

Newton is saying that “experimental philosophy” (i.e., science) must proceed by being free from metaphysical or occult assumptions, from untested and arbitrary physical assumptions, and from preconceived ideas and assumptions in general. Explanations must rely on the facts of what is being investigated, not preconceptions. The Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Newton elaborates:

[T]wo very different “Newtonian” traditions in physics arose from Newton’s Opticks and Principia: from his Opticks a tradition centered on meticulous experimentation and from his Principia a tradition centered on mathematical theory. The most important element common to these two was Newton’s deep commitment to having the empirical world serve not only as the ultimate arbiter, but also as the sole basis for adopting provisional theory.

Throughout all of this work he displayed distrust of what was then known as the method of hypotheses – putting forward hypotheses that reach beyond all known phenomena and then testing them by deducing observable conclusions from them. Newton insisted instead on having specific phenomena decide each element of theory, with the goal of limiting the provisional aspect of theory as much as possible to the step of inductively generalizing from the specific phenomena.

Much of what Newton is doing is building on the empirical tradition of Islamic science; the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo and others, and the British empirical tradition of Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke. But Newton’s modifications to those traditions, combined with the extraordinary success and impact of his science, transforms the “natural philosophy” of his predecessors to the modern science of today, a science whose hallmark is “objective” investigation into the truth of things unimpeded by metaphysical, political, social or other assumptions:

Such a commitment to empirically driven science was a hallmark of the … the research of Kepler, Galileo, Huygens … . Newton, however, carried this commitment further first by eschewing the method of hypotheses and second by displaying in his Principia and Opticks how rich a set of theoretical results can be secured through well-designed experiments and mathematical theory designed to allow inferences from phenomena.

The success of those after him in building on these theoretical results completed the process of transforming natural philosophy into modern empirical science.

Thus was modern science born, with “objective” and independent investigation of reality as its core value. By the middle of the 18th century, Newton was universally lauded as the greatest of all Enlightenment thinkers and the methods he promoted became the basic principles of a scientific tradition that is continually growing in power, capacity, capabilities, and impact.

Next

Newton was not only a scientist of unrivaled capacity, but also deeply religious in a way that valued the same principles of rationality that he applied to science. Next week, we review aspects of his religious thought, their impact on liberal Anglican thought and practice, and their eventual loss of influence.

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This is the 8th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

Continue reading »]]> God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Dec 10, 2012. The core teachings of Bahá’u'lláh – and the Bahá’í Faith – seem almost as if they were an Enlightenment manifesto, although they are of vastly wider range and of more universal scope. According to `Abdu’l-Bahá, they

lay the foundation of the oneness of the world of humanity and promulgate universal brotherhood. They are founded upon the unity of science and religion and upon investigation of truth.

They uphold the principle that religion must be the cause of amity, union and harmony among men. They establish the equality of both sexes and propound economic principles which are for the happiness of individuals. They diffuse universal education, that every soul may as much as possible have a share of knowledge. They abrogate and nullify religious, racial, political, patriotic and economic prejudices and the like.

Few more epitomize the “unity of science and religion” and the “investigation of truth” than Isaac Newton, the founding father of modern science and the greatest of the great Enlightenment thinkers.

Alexander Pope capture his significance in his famous epitaph:

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.

Isaac Newton – Scientist

Newton (1642–1727) (also see Wikipedia) was an immensely gifted scientist, mathematician, and scholar. The impact of his thought is so great that all of modern science is under its spell. Even the sciences of the 20th century – quantum mechanics and relativity theory – are built on Newtonian foundations.

Newton’s many contributions include major discoveries in optics, the invention of calculus, the discovery of the universal laws of motion (“Newton’s” three laws of mechanics), and the discovery of the universal inverse square law of gravitation. Any one of these on its own would have marked him out as one of the world’s greatest scientists. That he produce all of them is simply astonishing.

Optics

Newton’s work in optics, carried out at the beginning of his career, drew on the English empirical tradition of Bacon. He engaged in a precisely controlled series of experiments with light – usually sunlight in a darkened room – and invented much of modern optics in the process. Among his discoveries was the dispersion of light into colors, illustrated on the left by white light being split into colors by a prism. This showed that white light was composed of many colors. He also showed that colored light kept its color.

He proposed that light was made from “corpuscles” – now called photons – of light, although he admitted that experimental proof was not yet available. This proposal presaged the modern understanding of light by 250 years.

The systematic investigation of light that he deployed has become the model of how empirical science is to be done.

Gravity

Newton’s law of universal gravitation, learned by heart by almost every high school student in the world, states that:

… every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Separately it was shown that large spherically symmetrical masses attract and are attracted as if all their mass were concentrated at their centers.

Newton formulated this in 1666, age 24, shortly after finishing his university courses. He published it in 1687 in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – the Principia – where he also stated his three universal laws of motion:

1st law: If an object experiences no net force, then its velocity is constant: the object is either at rest (if its velocity is zero), or it moves in a straight line with constant speed (if its velocity is nonzero).

2nd law: The acceleration a of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the net force F acting on the body, is in the direction of the net force, and is inversely proportional to the mass m of the body, i.e., F = ma.

3rd law: When a first body exerts a force F1 on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force F2 = −F1 on the first body. This means that F1 and F2 are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

These simple statements – which Newton then used to explain Kepler’s laws of planetary motion – became the basis of the science of physics and many of the laws of engineerin. Formulated as mathematical statements extraordinary in their compactness and simplicity, and used with calculus and other powerful mathematical tools, they gave mathematical form and power to a wide range of modern science and engineering techonologies. These in turn, gave rise to continually expanding success, not only explaning the motions of the planets, but also explaining a multitude of previously unexplained problems and providing a method to explain a continually expanding realm of new problems.

Newton’s laws made it possible to understand – and to predict – the behaviour of the material universe. Later, they were copied to model electrical forces, and then many of the other forces we know exerted by matter on matter.

The Calculus

Newton also developed calculus – the mathematics of change – to explain the dynamics of systems. Calculus, according to an MIT website on the topic, works by

giving engineers and you the ability to model and control systems, [thus giving] them (and potentially you) extraordinary power over the material world. The development of calculus and its applications to physics and engineering is probably the most significant factor in the development of modern science beyond where it was in the days of Archimedes. And this was responsible for the industrial revolution and everything that has followed from it including almost all the major advances of the last few centuries.

Without his invention of calculus, Newton’s laws of motion would have only applied to a limited set of behaviors (i.e., static systems).

Isaac Newton – Empiricism and Mathematical Law

Newton worked in two different ways. One – epitomized by his studies in optics – was to carry out careful and rigorous empirical investigations of phenomena, scrupulously rejecting hyphotheses as to the cause of things excepting those that emerged from his experiments. The other – epitomized by his famous laws – was based on mathematical theory derived from empirically observed phenomena. Both are central to all aspects of modern science and engineering.

Newton saw empirical reality as driving the development of science, in contrast to Leibnitz, his great European rival (and co-inventor of calculus). Here is how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Newton’s approach:

The most important element … was Newton’s deep commitment to having the empirical world serve not only as the ultimate arbiter, but also as the sole basis for adopting provisional theory. Throughout all of this work he displayed distrust of what was then known as the method of hypotheses – putting forward hypotheses that reach beyond all known phenomena and then testing them by deducing observable conclusions from them. Newton insisted instead on having specific phenomena decide each element of theory, with the goal of limiting the provisional aspect of theory as much as possible to the step of inductively generalizing from the specific phenomena. …

Newton’s commitment to having phenomena decide the elements of theory required questions to be left open when no available phenomena could decide them.

Newton himself contrasted his style with Leibnitz’s. He saw himself as proceeding “upon the Evidence arising from Experiments and Phenomena, and stops where such Evidence is wanting.” Leibnitz, he saw, was “taken up with Hypotheses, and propounds them, not to be examined by Experiments, but to be believed without Examination.”

Next Week:

Next week, we will look at the Enlightments reception – and sometimes glorification – of Newton’s thought, as well as its later appropriation of it as a decidedly “materialistic,” “mechanistic,” or “reductionistic” approach frequently called the “the Newtonian world view.” {This despite its foreignness to the deeply religious Newton.)

The excellent Principia Cybernetica Website describes the “Newtonian World View” thus:

The world view underlying traditional science may be called “mechanistic” or “Newtonian”. It is based in reductionism, determinism, materialism, and a reflection-correspondence view of knowledge. Although it is simple, coherent and intuitive, it ignores or denies human agency, values, creativity and evolution.

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This is the 7th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.