Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief

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ATHEISM A ROUGH HISTORY OF DISBELIEF

Jonathan Miller BBC Four, 2004

Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief Jonathan Miller

The 2004 BBC program of the same title, written by Jonathan Miller, has been transcribed and edited, and interviews are disentangled by Tolga Yalur in 2023. This text has no commercial value, and is for disbelievers and atheists of interest.

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Atheism A Rough History of Disbelief

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This series is about the disappearance of something. Religious faith. It's the story of what is often referred to as atheism. The history of the growing conviction that God doesn't exist. Given the fact that so many recent history programs have all the resources of dramatic reconstruction, not to mention computer generated animations, I should perhaps warn you that what you're not going to see is anything that you might be tempted to think of as walking with atheists. I will not be seen leaning over a balcony like this, watching René Descartes nibbling his quill while he struggles with the problem of mind-brain duality. And there will be no blurred, slow-motion shots of people making leaps of faith or failing to do so. Well, first of all, because I think such dramatizations are somewhat vulgar and they're inappropriate. And, in any case, I think such an approach supposes that from the vantage point of a time machine, I'd be able to look down fondly upon individuals who are clearly antecedents of people like myself who had to go through the penalties, dangers and risks of atheism, whilst I could luxuriate in the achievements which they won unknowingly on my behalf. Now, in looking backwards, we will not find people who are the counterparts of those of us today who enjoy the luxury of thoughtless disbelief. All the same, while these series may reveal how the doctrines and dogmas of religious faith have been called into question, I suppose that the doctrines and dogmas of modern television require me to present you with a trailer of what you have in store. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

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Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. In making this series, I've inevitably discovered that the history of faith and doubt is a great deal more complicated than it might seem. Is God both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? My inquiry has been helped by conversations I've had with historians, writers, scientists and philosophers.

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Contents Chapter I. Shadows of Doubt Chapter II. Noughts and Crosses Chapter III. The Final Hour

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I Shadows of Doubt

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I think most people who say they believe in God, most people in the West who say they believe in God, actually believe in belief in God. Well, I tried to be a religious person when I was 12, 13, 14. It lasted about two years. People say they are used to the idea that complicated things in our human world are indeed designed and made. But when you've said, oh, it was designed by God, you've explained absolutely nothing. A week, maybe, or a few days after the September 11 disaster, there was a huge service here in New York City and I watched it on television and people were singing, the Lord is my shepherd. And the friend was watching the same program, Tommy, wow, some shepherd. In some years since I was on the Staten Island ferry, and when I last looked back at it from here, the skyline was dominated by the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It seems quite odd to think of it in the light of religion, but its absence now reminds me of the religious implications of what one saw on television on that hideous day. And although when it happened, many people said it was a cowardly act, atrocious, it certainly was. It really is quite hard to see it as cowardly, exactly, since it was perpetrated by people who sacrificed themselves in the certain knowledge of their forthcoming death. It's inconceivable that it could have been done without religion, for it's only in the name of some sort of absolute assurance of a permanent life after death that someone would be willing to undertake such an act. And we know that the men who did so did it in the name of a religion which they upheld against a society whose lack of religion as they saw it, they deplored and whose support of Jewish claims in what is called the Holy Land, they were implacably opposed to. Therefore, the conspicuous absence of the twin towers involving as it does the inherent conflicts 8

between Christianity, Islam and Judaism is, I think, one of the most powerful expressions of religious fanaticism in the late 20s and early 21st centuries. Understandably for Americans, the events of September the 11th aroused tremendous feelings of hostility towards the religion in whose name the Terrorist Act had apparently been performed. We drew attention to the difference between them, the Americans on the one hand, and the Muslim world. But it's important to remember that you only have to travel a few miles from New York City to find yourself in the middle of a country which, far from being the secular world which was deplored and attacked by the Islamic fundamentalists, is in fact intensely Christian and therefore in its own way of course, just as religious as the Muslim world that attacked it. But for someone like myself who has nothing that you could possibly call a religious belief or even feeling, the spectacle of September the 11th is a forceful reminder of the potentially destructive power of the three great monotheistic religions that have dominated the world in one way or another for nearly 2,000 years. I wouldn't want to say, and I think it would be entirely inaccurate to say that my interest in or my objections to these religions was actually provoked by the events of the last two years. All the same, these events do bring one face to face with the consequences, both social and political, of beliefs in the divine, the supernatural, the holy, the sacred and the transcendent, ideas which I, like many others, find alien, un-congregional, and to be frank, almost unintelligible. I don't believe in God. Because I don't think there's enough evidence to prove if there was 9

such a guy up there, say in the sky, whatever, whatever he is in, in heavens above, then why is there so much? There's people starving all over the world, there's wars, there's everything, why would they stand by like that to happen? I've never believed in God, sent to Sunday school as a child, but that was to me just to get out of the way. I partly won't believe this until I had a three-year-old granddaughter die. Now why should I believe in God? Take a child away from the family, three years and eight months. Why? I'm sorry. I don't believe. I was actually brought up to believe in God, but I don't believe in Him. I've found my own ways now.

Atheism and Disbelief I've undertaken this series, partly because I want to investigate the antecedent, if you like, of my own disbelief, and to consider the history of what I'm doing. I'm reluctant to call it atheism. In fact, I'm rather reluctant to call myself an atheist. And that's not because I'm embarrassed or ashamed of it or because I fear for my life as I might have done in the olden days if I had announced that I was. Nor have I any reason to think that I might be socially disabled in a way that I once might have been. No, no, no. The reason I'm so reluctant is that atheism itself has acquired almost sectarian connotations, and it hardly, as far as I can see, seems worthwhile having a name for something which scarcely enters my thoughts at all. For myself, as for many people, it's only in the light of such current controversies with regard to belief that I've found myself willing to explicitly articulate my disbelief.

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I think it's important to make a series like this because at a moment when intense commitments to different forms of monotheistic religion have now acquired or rather reacquired such an intense political connotation, it's important to indicate that the widespread suspicion of disbelief is becoming a real threat to free thought. It isn't as if atheism were a small religious sect. In fact, it's not another form of religious belief at all. And it's important to understand that disbelievers constitute a much larger percentage of the population than religious people and especially politically motivated religious people would like to think. I haven't believed in Christianity. I haven't believed in any religious doctrine for, well, since I was 17 or 18. I never really believed it, and I always thought that all of the religious services at school would ludicrous love the hymns, but the content of the hymns were so absurd, dense theology, weird stuff. I am one god, and if you don't worship me, you will burn forever. I always thought that was ugly. They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it. And damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too. I remember trying hard to keep up with it and going to some sort of religious meeting, and I just was sitting listening to it. I thought, this is a load of rubbish. I just don't think this is true anymore. I was born in England, but my grandparents came here from Lithuania as Jewish refugees. And for Jews, spread as they are across the world, their religion has always seemed an essential part of their cultural identity. This is the first time in almost 60 years that I have visited a place of worship for anything other than sightseeing. When I first came here, it was in the name 11

of religion, though not with any religious motive on my part. The fact is, I was sent here by a Jewish father, sent here because he thought that I owed it to what he called my people. The reason is that quite suddenly, because he had been so appalled about what had happened in the Holocaust and guilty about having escaped it, that he felt that he and I owed some sort of identification with the group. Throughout the war from 1940, at which time I was 6, until 1945 or 1946, I don't really think that I knew or really understood that I was Jewish. When my father said that I was, I didn't really know what he meant. I came here to several services when I was about 11 or 12, and what were called the High Holidays. But I came here without knowing what I was participating in. It was conducted in a foreign language, which I didn't understand, written into text I couldn't even read. There was singing, but the singing was completely different to the singing with which I had grown much more familiar. I've heard the fact that I was a prep school boy and attended Christian prayers. So I found myself sitting right at the very back here as far as I could from the main action amongst a group of people with whom I felt no particular identity, in spite of what my father told me about my identity. And I stuck it out here during the services as long as I could, wondering just how long I'd have to stay before I could return and satisfy my father that I had in fact attended. Well, my atheism, if that's what one insists on calling it, was not at any point a rejection of anything. What I was being introduced to scarcely seemed to be something against which I had to rebel. This all happened at a time when I simply felt myself to be an English school boy. The only 12

thing that I was rebelling against was what certainly wasn't the dogma or the doctrine, because that was completely inaccessible to me, and I hadn't been introduced to it earlier. It was simply that coming here on those occasions took up time when I might otherwise be enjoying myself playing cricket. And to be honest, I didn't feel alone in this. I suppose there were lots of boys for whom religion, Christian, or Jewish must have meant something, but my closer friends and I spent no time at all thinking about gods of any kind. Perhaps I was too dumb, or just too interested in cricket or in girls to ask myself any questions about religion. If I had not been, I might have inevitably asked myself questions that have troubled skeptics and unbelievers for as long as men and women have been skeptical or have lacked belief.

Sources of Disbelief Is there really no God? And if there really is no supernatural dimension to the universe, why have so many people throughout history and in so many different cultures thought there was? The problem, as I've already said, is that there are so many different forms of skepticism, disbelief and free thought, that it's quite hard to do a straightforward history of it, as if it was something that simply grew to become the fully formed thing we know today. In any case, what it is to be an atheist is itself very complex and very questionable. The word is atypical or asymmetrical. The word atheist simply means not really theist, and that of course begs the question, well, what is a theist? Oddly enough, it's quite difficult to find a simple, straightforward history of atheism on the religious shelves of your local 13

bookshop. Although the subject is dealt with at considerable length and some of the more scholarly works, it soon becomes apparent that in contrast to each of the three monotheistic religions whose articles of faith are explicitly affirmed from the outset and continue to be expressed throughout their subsequent development, it's quite difficult to identify our correspondingly explicit current of denial. In the case of Christianity, for example, for more than a thousand years after its establishment, you'd be hard put to recognize an openly skeptical rebuttal of its supernatural claims, and that's hardly surprising when you consider the cruel penalties which were often inflicted upon anyone convicted of subversive disbelief. Paradoxically, some of the sources of disbelief are to be found amongst the arguments of believers. It's important to understand that Christianity was constantly redesigning its own dogma, and theologians often formulated the most dangerously skeptical arguments in their effort to test the impregnability of their own faith, and in doing so, they unknowingly furnished atheists with ready-made weapons. Now, what we're talking about here is disbelief, and that's a notion which presupposes something which it contradicts, in other words, belief, because, well, in the absence of belief, the whole idea of disbelief would be unintelligible. So, if we're going to trace a history of the various things that we call atheism, we have to understand what we mean when we use the word belief. So, I'd like to jump into what you might regard as the shallow end, and consider simply some of the ways in which we talk about

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belief.

Religion and politics Now I'm sure that Colin McGinn would agree with me that it's important to recognize the different implications which the notion of belief has in the case of religion on the one hand and politics on the other: “You see, when it comes to politics and for that matter ethics, belief refers to how things ought to be. I believe in equal rights. I believe in democracy… Whereas in the case of religion, although there are, of course, beliefs which refer to how things ought to be, the main body of religious belief consists of assertions as to the existence of this, that or the other. Well, even at this point you can begin to see that belief is rather a complicated idea. And what makes it even more complicated is the extent to which it can be brought about voluntarily, if at all. And yet the states of mind associated with belief can seem so enviable that you might conceivably wish to believe.” And in fact Colin McGinn says, indeed, that he would quite like to believe: “I would like religion to be true. I'd like it to be true. Because I'd like there to be immortality. I'd like there to be rewards for those who've been virtuous and punishments for those who've not been virtuous, especially the punishments would be good.” So what's the problem? Or to put it another way, is there anything that Colin could do to convince himself that he was, after all, immortal and that he would in some way or other, survive 15

his own death? Well, the fact is that those who do believe in such things often encourage those who don't to make some sort of effort. It's a question, they say, of making a leap of faith. Well, the problem is that it's quite hard to imagine the sort of exercises that one would have to undertake in order to make such a leap if indeed it was a leap. The best one can do is to visualize the sort of experiences, misfortunes, say, or even revelations which might bring about a change of mind. But that's hardly a leap and some people might simply regard it as a lapse. Now, admittedly, there are things that I believe in without being directly acquainted with them. For example, I've never actually seen a sealer can't with my own eyes, but I believe in them. Also, I believe that the earth goes round the sun, although it certainly doesn't look as if it does. I take these things on trust. For the simple reason that I recognize the authority of the people who say that they do. But then, on the other hand, you get a whole range of dubious entities such as ghosts, witches, spirits, and immortal souls which I don't believe in at all. But the people who do believe in them don't necessarily do so on the basis of trust or authority. The psychological origins of such beliefs can be traced back to certain predispositions that we all share simply as human beings. The anthropologist Pascale Boye has written at considerable length about the origins of the religious impulse in human beings. I think there are major themes that you will find in most religions in the world, but those things are not the things we're familiar with. So a concern for who created the world, for example, is not one of them. A concern for 16

mortality, what's happening to me after death, is not one of them in a surprising way. But the presence of unseen agents in the environment is one thing that you'll find everywhere. You'll find that there is some notion that there are spirits, ghosts, ancestors. Agents of that kind are sort of what I call counterintuitive because they're not like you and me or animals. They don't have a physical body. But they have all the characteristics of agents like in mind, intentions, and so on.

The Unseen Agents According to Pascale Boyer, this notion of unseen agents is not quite as counterintuitive as it might seem. It may actually be hardwired into our brains. In a primitive community, the accidents and misfortunes that inevitably happen make more sense if it's assumed that somebody or something actually intended them to happen. And strange coincidences, which are often genuinely hard to explain, make more sense if it's assumed that there is some hidden intention behind them. And those assumptions are often still made today. It may seem strange to suggest that we are hardwired to suspect that we're threatened by potentially malign, as opposed to merely harmful forces. But there may be a good selective advantage to this tendency in a world in which you're surrounded by predators. Although there's always the possibility of making embarrassing mistakes and over-attributing agency, seeing intention where there's none at all, it's worth making the 17

occasionally embarrassing false positive when the alternative is the catastrophic false negative, that was when you land up being lunch. And it's only one short step from avoiding genuine threats to believing that other misfortunes may also be the result of malign intentional forces, that they may be the result of hidden, even invisible intentions directed against you. Now, what is it that makes that religious as opposed to what one might call, or some people might call, pejoratively superstitious? “Well, it's your choice of terms. And I think it's just a human phenomenon that corresponds to what we generally call religion. I mean, what we tend to call religion is more this sort of institutional framework that uses those beliefs or that fosters those beliefs. But really those beliefs are there, institutional or not. And they're there in very simple societies where you don't have a church. But that's just one of the features. Another one you'll find is a propensity to organize rituals, to get together and do a whole set of things that are directed at those on-scene agents in an organized way with a script that has to be rigidly followed.” Pascale Boyer So if rituals based upon beliefs in spirits and witches represent the origins of religion, can we find the origins of atheism in these primitive communities? In these pre-literate communities, would there be anything which corresponded to what in literate communities would be the village atheist? Is there a village skeptic or atheist? Even in very simple pre-literate communities, with relatively simple social 18

structures, there is a close relationship between village authority and village belief. One of the problems we have in telling the story of disbelief is that even in the most elementary social arrangements, religious belief became almost inevitably associated with authority and power. And as those social arrangements became more complex with patriotism. Thousands of years later, nowhere is this association more obvious in the western world today than it is in the United States of America.

Atheism in the United States of America Few commentators have observed the phenomenon with more skepticism than the American playwright Arthur Miller: “Certainly the religious overlay of patriotism has come into fashion. It's always there, of course, in this country. More people go to church here than I think anywhere. But it's gotten heavier now. It was always here, but it's gotten thicker. It's gotten heavier because it's such an easy way to... to cuddle up to what they think the majority is about. I mean, they've convinced a lot of people to forget that this country was founded by people who were really escaping the domination of a governmental religion. And who breathes freely here with great... with gratitude that they didn't have to obey a church.” And I'm always getting the impression that the enterprise in Iraq had a sort of faith-based patriotism. It wasn't just patriotic. It was Christian patriotic: “Of course, in wartime, I suppose we did that in the Second World War of 19

the Degree, but it was never laid on with a trowel this way. This is now being used as a means of persuasion. It's patent. It's obvious. They call upon God to initiate a program, whatever it may be. They larded over with some religious verbiage to make it seem as though if you pose this, you oppose the Lord. There are a lot of Americans, I think they're a minority, but they're very vocal. They're really aching for an Ayatollah.” And what Americans are aching for, certain American presidents are tempted to supply. Certainly in 1987, President George Bush, Sr., stated that people who did not believe in God might have, at best, questionable rights to American citizenship: “I don't know that atheists should be considered as patriots. Nor should they be considered as citizens.” So in the United States, no public figure, and certainly no one who wished to enjoy popularity as a politician, could risk it being said that he or she was a disbeliever. And yet there's a substantial minority in the United States who hold no religious beliefs of any sort at all. It's interesting, as Arthur Miller has just pointed out, that the Christian faith is such a significant theme in American public life today. Because when this country declared its independence in 1776, it also enshrined in law that the church and state should be completely separate. The very first president of the United States, George Washington, for example, was a very unenthusiastic church-goer who always walked out of the service before the congregation took the sacraments. And when the rector of the church had admonished him for this, Washington accepted that his sudden departure might after all seem to be a bad example, and so he subsequently never bothered to attend the church at all. And the presidents who closely 20

followed him in that office were often on record as being considerably less than devout Christians. “God is an essence we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy has got rid of, there will never be any liberal science in the world.” John Adams “The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly.” Thomas Jefferson “I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.” James Buchanan “My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation have become clearer and stronger with advancing years.” Abraham Lincoln Judging by the standards set by George Bush Sr., it seems doubtful if any of these great American presidents would have been considered for, let alone voted into office today. All the same. It would be wrong to suggest that the United States is now an uncomfortable place for atheists. I feel entirely at home here, and I'm more often than not in the company of people who have no faith and no time for the officially sanctioned sacred patriotism. For them, as for me, the tenets of and the conflicts between the great faiths, even at their most frightening, are still faintly ridiculous. I just feel Jews and Christians, because they both take origin from the same crackpot sandstorm experience, are shackled together like Tony 21

Curtis and Sidney Poitier in that movie. But not nearly as good looking either, I feel that anti-Semitism, which I deplore, is the result of the fact that there are two loony notions, Judaism and Christianity. But once you get religions hatched in a sandstorm, that holy land, which I always felt whenever I visited, was simply the largest outdoor lunatic asylum in the world [a friend of Miller in America says]: “There's a wonderful Randy Newman line, and I think it's called the God Song, which goes, there are a bunch of fools in the desert with nothing else to do, so they invented me and they invented you, and it's sung by God.” I mean, I always feel when I look at Christianity in England, the reason why I feel relatively indifferent to it is lost is power. I mean, it's so desperately keen to solicit support that they're willing to throw God out of the window in order to retain it, and God, for the many of the Anglicans, is nothing more than a sort of awkward, geriatric, relative, kept upstairs, and might be embarrassingly come downstairs, incontinently, and cause trouble.

Atheism in Europe “The Whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum.” Havelock Ellis The Anglican Church in England is astoundingly moderate and accommodating. All the same, there's still a faint feeling that atheism is best kept under wraps. There's a kind of fastidious distaste about admitting

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it, for reasons which are really quite hard to identify. In Cambridge, I became an undergraduate more than 50 years ago, and I was surrounded by the architectural symbols of the Christian heritage. By the time I came here, I had already decided to study medicine, and although it's difficult, I think, rather misleading to make a simple equation between science and disbelief. The biological sciences with which I was already acquainted left very little room for religious considerations. All the same when you walk around the ancient buildings, the images and architecture of Christianity are inescapable and undeniably beautiful. Obviously, we have the crucifixion as the climax, all the events leading up to the crucifixion on the left-hand side, and then the events after the crucifixion start here. The Entombment. And then this is a sequence of courses not mentioned in the Gospels, but this is the harrowing of hell, the Anastasis, when Jesus goes down into hell, breaks open the doors, and he brings Adam and Eve out from hell. So we move on, and there, of course, is his appearance in front of doubting Thomas, and Jesus offers him his wounded side and invites the skeptical disciple to place his hands in the wound. This whole sequence here is concerned with the events leading up to and after the resurrection. This culminates, of course, in the ascension, and you would just see the disappearing feet of Christ at the top of the window there as he vanishes into the heavens. So, stories and events which are deeply buried inside the imagination of any literate European. I don't believe a word of it. I don't believe in the divinity of any of this, but I would be very impoverished if I didn't have these in my imagination. We're a very thin form of life which didn't have 23

these images. It would be a mistake to think that my scientific training as an undergraduate confirmed my pre-existing disbelief in the existence of God. Many of my medical colleagues, after all, were pious Christians. No, the fact is that it was my exposure to modern linguistic philosophy which helped me to distinguish between my belief in genes or atoms, things which you never see directly, and my disbelief in supernatural entities such as gods or spirits. The point is that philosophy, right from the outset, has concerned itself with the nature of existence itself with what might or might not exist. With thoughtfulness and above all with literacy, thoughts themselves become subjects of discussion in a way that they wouldn't have been before they were written down. It's not until they're written down that they become stable enough to bear examination in the same way that physical objects themselves can bear examination. And indeed philosophy as such doesn't really emerge until literacy occurs and even then not conspicuously until the Greeks who start to question the nature of reality itself. And it's with the philosophy of the ancient Greeks that we finally get to what you might call the deep end in our examination of the history of disbelief. Well, here we are in the midst of the Elgin marbles of the British Museum. It's an hour or two before the public floods in and I find myself wondering what they'll make of these artifacts, retrieved as they've been from a civilization with which we really have no contact at all. The objects you can see here are the ruined fragments of effigies which were defaced some years after the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine, because they were seen as idolatrous threats to the new 24

religion. Now, although idolatry was seen as the principal threat to Christianity, the culture represented by these statues also contained unillustrated themes which would later be recognized as a much greater danger. So there were certain Greek philosophers who expressed what was seen as subversive doubts about the role of supernatural beings in the natural world. What we discover in looking for the first atheists is that more than 2,000 years ago there were men whose names may not be as familiar as Aristotle or Plato, who began to make extraordinary claims about the origin and nature of the universe. Men such as Democritus. As far as we can tell, Democritus was an amiable man who felt that the greatest good was happiness and contentment. In spite of the fact that living 400 years before Christ, he had absolutely no scientific reason for thinking so, he believed that all matter was made of atoms or indivisible particles, and that included the soul, if indeed the soul existed. He was also convinced that everything that existed had existed forever, and that therefore the earth had never been created. The question that arises is whether or not this really is the beginning of atheism. The historian Sir Geoffrey Lloyd has studied these early Greek philosophers: “What I think to be a fundamental question is what atheism means in different societies, with the background of different religious institutions, because atheism in a polytheistic society is going to be very different from atheism in a monotheistic society. And most of the talk of atheism seems to me to be related to the religious 25

institutions that we associate with Christianity. A fundamental question is who felt threatened by atheism, and what sanctions were available to get the deviance back into line? And, if there isn't a church, as there wasn't in pagan antiquity after all, then the whole thing looks very different. To be an unbeliever in the ancient world was much easier. I'm not underestimating the originality of the philosophers, because they produced new ideas and new arguments, and the arguments, of course, are extremely impressive, and they have quite a life. I wouldn't like to pronounce, on which were the most important influences, but go back to the original writings. It's certainly true that Lucretius devotes considerable arguments to say death is nothing to us and considerable arguments to show that of course the gods have no role in the world. Now, the question then is, did they leave any room for gods at all?” The first Greek philosopher to address himself explicitly to the question of the existence of God, or of the gods, was a follower of Democritus, namely Epicurus. And his argument is as vivid and powerful today as it was when it was first expressed 2,300 years ago: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able, then he is not omnipotent? Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent? Is God both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” In addition to his doubts about the existence of the gods, Epicurus clearly did not believe in a life after death: “Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?” 26

The importance of this early Greek philosophy is revealed by the way in which it was preserved and still celebrated 400 years later by the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius: “Long time, men lay oppressed with slavish fear. Religion's tyranny did domineer at length a mighty one of Greece began to assert the liberty of man.” And those are the people who seemed to survive and then encourage what later became explicitly called atheism in Christian Europe. “Fear is the mother of all gods. Nature does all things spontaneously by herself without their meddling.” Lucretius So, throughout the ancient world, we come across thoughtful people beginning to express doubts about the existence of deities and also about those who for whatever reasons chose to believe in them, or at least who said that they did. “A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.” Aristotle “In this subject of the nature of the gods, the first question is, do the gods exist or do they not? It is difficult, you will say, to deny that they exist. I would agree. If we were arguing the matter in a public assembly, but in a private discussion of this kind, it is perfectly easy to do so.” Cicero “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise, as 27

false, and by rulers, as useful.” Seneca Once the Roman Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the empire, pagan philosophy as a whole became somewhat suspect. In fact, in the sixth century, the Parthenan itself was partly demolished, and what remained became one of the earliest churches devoted to the Virgin Mary. And at the same time, on the orders of the Emperor Justinian, the Greek philosophical academies were abolished. The thousand years that followed the closing of the Greek philosophical schools has come to be known as the Dark Ages. Like all such labels, it's not much more than a cliche. It's never possible completely to eradicate free thought. But as we shall see, it was the work of Muslim scholars that enabled the early radical materialism of Greek and Roman philosophy to re-emerge. The materialist ideas were understandably inconsistent, both with Christianity and with Islam. It became very dangerous to express them openly.

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II Noughts and Crosses

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The skeptical philosophies that had emerged in ancient Greece and in Rome were by 500 AD facing a serious challenge. Christianity had taken over as the official religion of the Roman Empire and was to become the Roman Catholic Church. It had closed down the Greek schools of philosophy that had encouraged a rational materialist view of the universe and Christianity was to dominate Western thought and to some extent politics too for more than a thousand years. It was an extraordinary success story and in such a world there didn't seem much place for disbelief. In spite of the continuing success of Christianity it's not hard to find in Europe today the unused ruins of this once all powerful church. So what happened exactly? It's very hard in the 21st century to get a real sense of the mentality of the past especially when it comes to attitudes towards religion. Given the fact that we now live in a literate society, in which almost everyone can read and write, it may not be too difficult for the historians of the future to uncover the opinions and beliefs of so-called ordinary people. But when we look back to say the 13th century when Netley Abbey was founded the thoughts of the mass of the blameless illiterate have left no mark on the historical record. But to uncover the story of disbelief we have to understand the background of belief against which any skeptical thoughts had to compete. In order to get some insight into the religious mentality we have to look at the way in which such ideas were communicated to those who are unable to read by looking at religious pictures.

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Pictorial Representation This of course is the Scravagny Chapel in Padua where Giotto, one of the great pioneers of European art, painted a series of frescoes at the beginning of the 14th century. Pictures offer an accessible almost comic strip version of the life and death of Christ. With the astonishingly rapid onset of Christianity religious belief in Europe underwent a far reaching and irreversible change in its character. Although it took some time for the creed, the sacraments and the liturgy to settle down into their canonical form, they soon began to emerge a sacred text supervised, maintained and interpreted by a centralised dogmatic authority. And instead of the loose and somewhat unauthorised folklore of pagan antiquity, they began to emerge articles of faith. The most important of which, inherited from the Jews, was the idea that there was one and only one God who had created the world with the express purpose of giving his most favoured creature the awesome privilege of exercising moral choice. The other distinctive feature of this story is the fact that in contrast to the weightless undated episodes of pagan mythology, the events described in the New Testament took place in what seems to be a relatively recent past. Background like these [pictorial representations as Giotto’s in the Scravagny Chapel] subtly alternates between the mundane and the miraculous, and in which the extraordinary events of the New Testament were given a curious sort of documentary credibility, disbelief would have been almost inconceivable. Looking up at the 700-year-old pictures, I'm struck by the way in which they and what they represented must have 31

dominated the mentality of their 14th century observers. In contrast to Judaism and Islam, which prohibited pictorial representation, Christianity virtually reveled in it, the result was that the Christian imagination was more or less surrounded by an impenetrable cyclorama of sacred imagery. But even in a secular building such as this, this is the Palace of Justice. Although this vast array of frescoes includes many subjects which are not strictly religious, you still get an overwhelming impression of how closed the medieval mind really was. But things were about to change. Although you don't get the slightest intimation of it in panels such as these, by the time they were being painted in the middle of the 15th century, there were philosophical stirrings within the academic community here in Padua which represented hidden currents of skepticism and disbelief. Actually, it occurs to me that there are two unacknowledged streams of thought which orthodox people are beginning to refer to as atheist. And they come from two sources that work in a sense at right angles to one another. One, if you like, is a horizontal influence arising from the effects of increasing worldwide travel, with the discovery that people don't necessarily share the same beliefs. It became clear that there were other worlds that were not even Christian in previously unvisited parts in which people were quite unaware of Christianity. In the 17th century Jesuit missionaries had come back from China and had to reconcile themselves with the fact that there were civilizations in which Christianity had no place whatsoever. But their philosophy, nevertheless satisfied and

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sustained a moral world for at least 300 million people. And then a little later you have a vertical influence bubbling up from the past in various forms of Greco-Roman pagan skepticism and materialism. It's a sort of Artesian well bringing up pre-Christian ideas from Epicurus, Lucretius and Democritus. “Fear is the mother of all gods. Nature does all things spontaneously by herself without their meddling.” Lucretius Having closed down the philosophical schools in Athens, the newly converted Christian Roman empire made strenuous efforts to Christianise some of the earlier pagan philosophies. One or two of the works of Aristotle and Plato had survived and were known. But the only ones which were valued in the early Middle Ages were those remnants which conveniently supported the new Christian theology. And the unequivocally materialist philosophers such as Epicurus, Democritus and Lucretius were simply dismissed as disbelieving villains and their work discarded. Arabic scholars in the Middle East and later in Spain had preserved the entire body of Aristotle's work. And writers such as Avaros in the 12th century to later had begun to recognise in Aristotle aspects of his thoughts which were not so conveniently consistent with any religious thought at all. Aristotle's idea that the world had always existed and that there might after all not be an immortal soul were obviously inconsistent with Christian and in fact with Muslim thought. Avaros versions of Aristotle were soon translated into the international language of Latin and made their way throughout Christian Europe, especially to Padua, the very city 33

where the Scravagny Chapel and the Palace of Reason stood as mute but articulate witnesses to the pervasiveness of Christian faith. There and in fact throughout Europe over the next 500 years thoughtful men, very few of whom are now household names, transformed these ancient ideas into what would eventually emerge as confident modern atheism. All of this had already begun to happen by the time the medieval frescoes were being painted onto the walls we were looking at in Padua's Palace of Justice. Well as you might expect this huge municipal hall is now used to house modern exhibitions. And in fact it's quite difficult to visualize the intervening transformations of thought which link the emblematic piety of these medieval frescoes with the profane secularism of the exhibition here dedicated to the art and technology of the 1960s. The advent of new science and technology in the Renaissance would also have a role to play in the gradual erosion and undermining of the monolithic confidence of the Christian world. In fact the conventional view is that science by mechanizing the world picture was the most significant factor in undermining religious faith. But although this sounds quite reasonable, it's far from being the truth. “I don’t see any God up here.” Yuri Gagarin It's true that Christianity had inherited the thalamic picture of the universe in which the earth stood at the very center of everything and everything else revolved around it, the moon, the planets and the stars in concentric spheres and all this of course was the work of an omnipotent god. It's not hard to see why people had believed the earth to be the center of the 34

universe around which everything else revolved after all you could see it happening. The sun went around the earth every day, you could see it. The moon went around the earth at night and you could actually see it. Even the stars revolved around the earth at least if you were patient enough to notice them. And if man lived as the supreme creature on a world that was at the center of everything, well it wasn't hard to think of himself as the very special creation of one god. This reassuring view of the universe and of man's privileged place within it was about to be modified. With Copernicus, Galileo and then Kepler, it soon became apparent that the earth and all the planets revolved around the sun which was itself just one star amongst millions of others. It's quite hard for us today to imagine how disconcerting Copernicus' ideas must have been when they were published in 1543. Before Copernicus knew the picture of the universe had time to be accepted, science was also about to change man's representation of his own body. I don't think it's altogether a coincidence that the work which the Belgian anatomists Vesalius did in Padua accurately dissecting and illustrating the human body was published in the very same year that Copernicus published his work on the physical structure of the universe. In fact I'm often struck looking at this conical anatomical theatre, the way in which it looks down at the microcosm of the accurately dissected human body and at the same time metaphorically at least it stares up like a telescope at the heliocentric universe described in the very same year by Copernicus. Although the Christian authorities had suspicions, it's quite difficult to 35

identify any religious misgivings on the part of either of these two scientists Vesalius on the one hand and Copernicus on the other. Since the human body was unarguably God's handiwork then the anatomical details revealed by dissection simply confirmed the ingenuity of his design and the same principle held for the universe at large. But even if these scientific initiatives, if one can call them that had no effect upon the authority of scripture, one can still recognize in them the almost imperceptible hairline cracks in the rigid crust of religious creed. One of the reasons why these fracture lines were so imperceptible was the fact that the people most conspicuously responsible for the new sciences were pious Christians for whom the very fact that it was also sublimely mechanical and obeyed such extraordinarily inflexible and unvarying laws was itself a sign of the truth of their prior commitment to the idea of God as the divine designer and creator. For a long time what was described as the mechanization of the world picture could coexist quite comfortably with the belief in God.

New Science “There is in every village a torch: the schoolteacher. And an extinguisher: the priest.” Victor Hugo You consider the piety of men such as Copernicus and Vesalius and Galileo it's somewhat surprising that the official church was so disconcerted by the emergence of this new science. There may have been popes and cardinals who were too stupid or too prejudiced to see that 36

science could actually reinforce belief in the omniscience and omnipotence of the creator. They were after all largely unacquainted with the actual science but they suspected that there was something odd about it, something which didn't seem quite worshipful. It was too dominated by secular curiosity rather than by respect and awe. Anyway the religious status quo was very elaborately connected to social and political power and science was perhaps too curious for its own good. Curiosity was thought might breed contempt. Now Galileo, for example, was unimpressed and unmoved by the fact that Copernicus' view of the structure of the universe was rejected by the church authorities. “In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” Galileo Galilei For these early scientists observation was more credible than revelation. “To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.” Galileo Galilei As everyone knows Galileo was arrested by the Catholic Inquisition and having refused to recant his views about the universe he was confined to house arrest for the rest of his life. One of his most enthusiastic followers was Giudano Bruno who was imprisoned and tortured for nearly eight years and despite denying that he held heretical views he was burned in a Roman flower market in 1600. What remained of his body after burning was smashed to powder by hammers and cast to the wind. The fact is that these scientists had no difficulty in reconciling their faith with their 37

knowledge. It was oddly enough that the church behaved as if there was an inevitable conflict between religion and science. But perhaps we ought to pause here for a moment because something else had been going on which begs a whole series of questions that we haven't even begun to address because even as all these men of science were redrawing the image of the universe and being persecuted for it by the church something else had happened. Something within Christianity itself which would help to pave the way towards atheism. Well I'm referring of course to what every schoolboy knows as the reformation. But the important point is that with people such as Luther, Calvin, Swingly and many others the fabric of Christian faith and dogma was torn in pieces and continued to undergo even further schisms. For the first time in its history Christianity starts to come apart. It's no longer one Catholic church. And for potential disbelievers these disagreements, this sectarianism was seen as evidence that perhaps none of the dogma might be true. And this is what the church had feared might happen. “With our contention their irreligious humour is much strengthened. Nothing pleaser them better than these manifold oppositions upon the matter of religion.” Richard Hooker Some of the new sects introduced ideas which the Christian authorities regarded as little short of atheism. The Anabaptists, for example, were a group who in spite of their protestations to the contrary were widely regarded as atheists. And this brings us to another group, the Unitarians, who were also viewed as atheistical. Not surprisingly since those who were burned for confirming it insisted: “Christ is not God, not the saviour 38

of the world, but a mere man, a sinful man and an abominable idol. All who worship him are abominable idolaters. And Christ did not rise again from death to life nor did he ascend into heaven.” For rationally expressing this Matthew Hammond was burned at the stake by the Bishop of Norwich in 1579. What is hardly surprising under these circumstances is that it is extremely hard to find anyone who explicitly questions the existence of the supernatural. Nor for that matter come one fine people actually prepared to call themselves atheists, even though plenty are recused of it. In fact we are entering a very strange period full of accusations of and denials. And confusingly some of those who are denying the existence of atheism are the very people who are spending most of their time trying to eradicate the very thing which they say doesn't exist. This confusing period which was to last almost two centuries was full of accusations, denials and curious contradictions and has been studied by the Cambridge historian Simon Shaffer: “There's this extraordinarily interesting ambiguity in which some of the most ferocious atheism hunters of the 16th, 17th and 18th century can simultaneously be found saying that there's no such thing because one of the best arguments that the enemies of any denial of God's existence have going for them is that it's impossible so to do and therefore a very good argument against atheists is that there aren't any.” “Many people have pretended to atheism or have been reckoned atheists by the world but it is just the question whether any man seriously adopted such a principle.” Encyclopedia Britannica on 39

atheism “You're arguing against unicorns, you're arguing against chimeras, you're arguing against the monsters that have inhabited our minds.” Simon Shaffer “It is very questionable there ever was such a monster in nature as a serious atheist who lived and died so in a clear exercise of his reason and senses.” Thomas Courteis Dissertation on Atheism “So that the high stakes for which the game is played lead to this absolutely fascinating logical problem that one is denying the existence of the position against one against which one is arguing.” Simon Shaffer “An atheist is, I think, impossible. Most who would be thought atheists are so out of indolence because they will not give themselves time to reason.” London Magazine 1774 “Atheism I think is a label lots of very clever people try to escape and for that reason we have this problem looking back at the history of atheism that even folk who surely by any standards should be judged atheist do an enormous amount of work to make sure they can't be accused of such.” Simon Shaffer So are there any atheists at this time? Well so many sermons are being preached, so many books written in the laws passed to combat atheism that it seems quite clear that something's going on. The convictions and doubts of the unleaded masses may not be 40

available for academic scrutiny but we are entering a phase during which something we can recognise as atheism is just beginning to emerge. All the same the people who are most obviously involved in its development consistently deny that they are in any way disbelievers. “I think the word ‘atheist’ stays a boo word, a word you don't want to have yourself associated with right up to the end of the 18th century and in many cases beyond. The word ‘atheist’ is not a word you wear on your t-shirt and it's what the enemy will always attribute to you.” Simon Shaffer The confusion and ambiguity of this whole period is epitomised by the fact that as early as 1600 a popular French Catholic theologian and preacher Pierre Chiron could write in his book on wisdom: “All religions have this in common that they are an outrage to common sense for they are pieced together out of a variety of elements some of which seem so unworthy, sordid and at odds with man's reason that any strong and vigorous intelligence laughs at them.”

Deism The point is that from the Reformation onwards Christianity had been undergoing an internal reconstruction at the hands of other Christians it had nothing to do with science and one of the most significant trends in this process was the emergence of a group to whom we generally give the name of the deists. The deists were a largely upper class group and as the name suggests they certainly did believe in a deity but they were 41

dissatisfied with the state of Christianity and especially with the atrocious behaviour of the religious authorities of the time. So while deists accepted that there was some kind of supreme being at the dawn of creation they often accepted little or nothing else. There were several factors which favoured the development of deism. In England, there was a more tolerant atmosphere which allowed people as long as they were members of a certain privileged class and didn't publish too widely to speculate about the nature of Christianity. The deists insisted that all human beings shared an indelible sense of the sacred and that beneath the surface varieties are irrational superstition and corrupt rituals one could identify a universal monotheism that was common to all human societies. Well, initially, there was a genuine desire to redesign a new and more tolerant and humanistic form of Christianity one that didn't put such emphasis upon miracles which was open to reason and was more humane but which still nevertheless supported the divinity of Christ and certainly the presence of an intelligent being. There are a large number of English writers and scholars who developed these ideas starting in the early part of the 17th century with the person seen as the father of deism Lord Herbert of Cherburry. Lord Herbert who was born in 1582 was an aristocratic writer of metaphysical poetry, a man who was incontinently amorous. He claimed that some of society's greatest beauties kept their secret portraits of him tucked into their cleavages but when he was not distributing these miniature self-portraits he wrote: “Religion is a common notion for there has never been a century nor any nation without religion we must therefore discover what universal consent 42

has brought to light in religion and compare all that we find on this subject.” For Herbert there were crucial non-negotiables but he believed that all Christians and many non-Christians would be able to subscribe to these: “There is a supreme being. This sovereign power is to be worshiped. Common consent ordains this though men differ as to the means and this has always been believed that all vices and crimes should be expiated and effaced by repentance.” Although the deist movement developed quite rapidly in the 17th and especially in the 18th century it's still quite difficult to identify anyone you could call an explicit atheist. All the same in the middle of the 17th century we come face to face with someone who is perilously close to it.

The ground for atheism Thomas Hobbes, the son of a Wiltshire vicar who spent much of his life as a tutor to the children of aristocracy including at one time the young boy who had become King Charles II. His philosophy was completely materialist or monist not unlike the classical philosophers he'd studied Epicurus, Democritus and Lucretius. Hobbes denied any idea of the immaterial. His target was conventional religion. “The universe the whole mass of all things that are is corporeal that is to say body and have the dimensions of magnitude length breadth, and depth every part of the universe is body and that which is not body is no part of the universe and because the universe is all that which is no part of it is nothing and consequently nowhere.” 43

Thomas Hobbes He is in fact echoing something which had already been expressed earlier on in pagan antiquity. “What is so fascinating about Hobbes' criticisms is that he uses a lot of the arguments the most conservative apologists for establishment religion use and then ingeniously reverses them. So conservative apologists for religion often say ‘look at all the sects, don't you see how bad and dangerous it is to leave the path of the one true faith.’ Hobbes simply turns the argument round and says ‘don't you see that the appalling history of sectarianism, persecution, heresy hunting shows you that this way of thinking about the world is intrinsically unsound.’ Hobbes lays the ground for atheism partly because he is what philosophers call a monist. There is only one kind of stuff in the world which is material, which is matter and it's the matter that we see and feel and sense and touch and there's nothing else. What I take to be decisive about Hobbes is intervention in the middle of the 17th century is that he manages brilliantly to pull together a whole series of arguments that are distributed in the pagan philosophical tradition in classical antiquity of their systematized they're turned into a coherent philosophical program and what that meant was, perhaps more than anything else in the English tradition, that you rarely get an argument against a theological philosophy that as it were it's not systematic. You can't say that any more you can say that it's an evil system or that it's based on a profound logical error but it's very difficult to say that it's not been systematized, that it's 44

not as it were on the table. What I think matters both historically and philosophically about Hobbes's work is that it provides most of the important philosophical resources for atheism afterwards.” Simon Shaffer So have we found our first outright atheist? Well as you might suspect there's not much room for the immaterial soul in Hobbes' materialistic picture of the universe. On the contrary, for Hobbes the scholastic notion of the immaterial soul was as self-contradictory and meaningless as a circular rectangle. You might assume therefore that Hobbes was reluctant to accept the immortality of the soul but although he frequently makes indirect hints to that effect he prudently hedges his bets. He even concedes the idea of resurrection on the day of judgment and by the same token he reluctantly recognizes that there was after all a divine origin to the universe, a prime mover that set it all going. Considering the overall tone of his discourse and its otherwise radically materialist attitude it's quite startling to find Hobbes’ tomb displayed in his local church in Derbyshire. After all, many people did think that Hobbes was an atheist or at least the encourager of atheists.

Combating atheism “Not one English infidel in a hundred is any other than a hobbyist, which I know to be rank atheism.” Richard Bentley, Biblical Scholar Throughout the last part of the 17th century, the members of parliament 45

hotly debated bills designed to combat what many thought was the blasphemy of disbelief. In fact the 1697 blasphemy act, when finally became law, made no specific mention of atheism. This then is the first actual act in part. Although it's clear when you look at the original wording of these three hundred documents that atheists would have been caught in their net. “Any person having been educated in or at any time having made a profession of the Christian religion within this realm shall by writing, printing or advising, speaking, deny any of the persons of the holy trinity to be God. And then this is sort of hastily put in the thing.” Incidentally, there is more than one God. I mean, I love the idea of two parliamentary clocks sitting side by side. They do mention polytheres and otherwise they may get in under the wire: “Denying the Christian religion to be true or the holy scriptures of the old and new testament to be of divine authority and shall upon indictment or information.” However, the debates and the bills that preceded the passing of the final blasphemy act did specify atheism which shows how seriously the subject was taken. In January 1677, “Act for the punishing of Atheism & Blasphemy”, they're talking about: “The crying sin of atheism and blasphemy. That if any person being the age of 16 years or more, not being visibly and apparently distracted and out of his wits by sickness or natural infidelity or not, and being a natural fool void of common sense, shall, after this act by word or writing deny that there is a God [and then all the stuff 46

about our Lord the Savior. What do they say are they going to do to the poor son? Somewhat terminal.].” I noticed the benefit of the clergy and shall be judgment of death passed upon him and execution shall follow without pardon or reprieve. As soon as I get to this stuff and see what people were doing, I feel my pulse racing and a sort of an atheist virtuous indignation beginning to spurt out.

Science and Disbelief “Civilisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.” Emile Zola While the early deists were busy reconstructing Christianity at the same time being very careful to avoid the accusation of atheism the world of science had been steadily progressing. The Copernican view of the universe may have convinced the freest thinkers but even with the sport of Kepler and Galileo it seemed mathematically flawed and no one really knew how it was supposed to work exactly until as Alexander Pope famously said: “Nature and nature's laws lay hid by night. God said that Newton thee, and all was light.” As with so many slogans of this sort, Pope's famous couplet of course is an oversimplification but Isaac Newton's theories about gravity and about the laws of motion certainly made it impossible now for intelligent men to adhere to the earth-centered universe that the Catholic Church was still so insistent about. Whatever man's role was in the great scheme of things it 47

was now impossible to think of it as being well literally center stage. Now the extent to which Newton's Christianity differed from Anglican orthodoxy didn't become fully apparent until his previously unknown religious writings were discovered in the last century. But it's now quite clear that his scientific achievements were closely related to his religious convictions and that he was convinced that God revealed himself in words just as much as he did in creative acts. It seems that two patterns are emerging when it comes to the role of science in the history of disbelief, one which we've already seen when we were looking at Copernicus and Galileo. It's that most of the scientists involved and that included Newton remained firm believers either in spite of or in most cases actually because of their science. Well the second pattern is to be seen amongst people who are not actually scientists, intellectuals and in some cases theologians who found it quite easy to reconcile the new scientific discoveries with their belief in the existence of an omnipotent being. The Reverend Samuel Clark for example arrived in Trinity College, Cambridge shortly after the publication of Newton's Principia. In 1704 he was invited to deliver one of a set of lectures which Robert Boyle, one of Newton's most distinguished colleagues in the Royal Society, had instituted to establish the truth of the Christian religion against infidels. Clark's first series of lectures were entitled A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God more particularly in answer to Mr. Hobbes, Spinoza and their followers. Like many of his 16th century predecessors Clark 48

identified three distinct classes of atheists. There were those, as he said, “the stupid and ignorant who have never made any just use of their natural reason to discover even the plainest and most obvious truths,” then there were those who “by vicious and degenerate life corrupt the principles of their nature and are resolved not to harken to any reasoning; and finally there were those who were both moral and reasonable whose own speculations had convinced them that the atheist position is more strong and conclusive and it's the third group that contains as Clark says: “The only atheistical persons to whom the present discourse can be supposed to be directed or who are indeed capable of being reasoned with at all.” The Reverend Samuel Clark Now in contrast to Descartes out the French philosopher of the previous century for whom the most significant argument in favor of God's existence was the fact that he was to be found as one of the indubitable ideas in our mind in other words that we simply knew of his existence and since we had that knowledge it must be God given, Clark, like Newton, referred to the objective evidence of celestial mechanics and like many authors before and after Clark also invoked biology as evidence of intelligent design. “The late discoveries in anatomy and physics, the circulation of the blood and the exact structure of the heart and brain, their insensible marks of conscious contrivance.” The Reverend Samuel Clark Well in spite of its apparently rigid logic the religious conclusions which Clark arrived at don't necessarily follow from the mechanical evidence 49

which he cites. Like Newton, after all, he was a pious Christian predisposed to visualize nature as the expression of omnipotent intelligence so that in an important unavoidable sense the arguments which he develops are in the service of a foregone conclusion. All the same, the fact that a mathematically literate clergyman had so little difficulty in reconciling Newtonian mechanics with the notion of a supreme being goes to show that the conflict between religion and the increasingly mechanized picture of the natural world has been seriously exaggerated. “So far as I can remember, there’s not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.” Bertrand Russel As we've already seen ever since the Reformation there's a sense in which the road to atheism was paved not with science but with religious intentions. The efforts of days such as Hobbes to create a more reasonable form of religion had unknowingly helped to forge the very weapons that would eventually be turned against the whole idea of religion. Hobbes lived out the last years of his life in the elegant home of the Devonshire family whose children he had tutored. But there were a great many of these so-called deists in England which incidentally was sufficiently tolerant to allow these gentlemen and it's very important to realize that most of them were gentlemen to freely express these ideas.

David Hume

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If I were to do justice to names all of whom, in their various ways, were trying to identify something that was common to all religions, some primeval origin of them, one is perhaps the most significant philosopher in the English language to have expressed these notions, and who, in fact, although he never admitted himself to be an atheist as such, was clearly and unarguably the most vividly elegant and eloquent skeptic of them all. I'm referring, of course, to the great Scottish philosopher David Hume. “I have always considered David Hume as approaching the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.” Adam Smith David Hume was born in 1711, 32 years after the death of Hobbes. He went up to university in Edinburgh at the age of 12 to study a degree of his own devising. By the age of 20, he had already travelled to France and had begun to write his treatise on human nature. Whereas Hobbes assumed that man in what he referred to as the state of nature was a dangerous creature who therefore needed some sort of social structure possibly supported by religion to restrain his selfishness, his violence and his greed, Hume was something less of a pessimist but his own skepticism about religion nevertheless handicapped his academic career: “Generally speaking, errors in religion are dangerous. Those in philosophy are only ridiculous.” Thought to be too subversively atheistic, he was actually denied the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University by the clerics who still decided upon such appointments. After all, at that time all universities 51

were religious foundations. Certainly, in his dialogues concerning natural religion, a work which his friends considered so provocative that it was not published until after his death, Hume does deliver a devastating criticism of conventional belief: “God's power is infinite. Whatever he wills, he's executed, but neither man nor any other animal is happy. Therefore, he does not will there happiness. Epicurus has old questions that are yet unanswered. Is he both able and willing to prevent evil then whence cometh evil?” David Hume Hume, like the other deists, had an understandable compunction when it came to eliminating any sort of divine authority. Perhaps, this was simply the result of the fear of getting that dangerous and socially unacceptable label of atheist: “No one, I am confident will mistake my intentions. No one has a deeper sense of religion or pays more profound admiration to the supreme being.” At the same time I think it would be wrong to regard deism as an undivided constituency because within the group that now bears that title, there's a broad spectrum of religious opinion extending from pantheism on the one hand to an admittedly unconventional form of Anglicanism on the other. But in spite of the energy with which all these issues were being discussed, it's impossible to find, in England at least, anyone who was prepared to come out and wholeheartedly deny the existence of God. Looking back over this period and the history of human thought, I'm intrigued and slightly depressed by the extent to which the religious 52

environment inhibited the open expression of skepticism. It obviously and quite understandably and forgivably has something to do with prudence and self-protection. But there again there's more to it than that. Even some of the most skeptical that we've mentioned seem to have the lingering conviction that there must be some intention in the universe. By the end of the 18th century, English days may have begun to flag and weaken. Although David Hume may have been working earlier in Paris's diplomat, dazed ideas were actually conveyed to Europe by the French philosopher Voltaire where despite France's Catholicism her philosophers such as Pierre Beil, Condière, Calametri, Diderot and others were reaching conclusions which their English counterparts were still resisting.

Atheism in France One way or the other by the end of the 18th century atheism in France unlike in England had become quite literally a burning issue. In fact on August the 18th 1770 seven books were torn to pieces and burned publicly by the official execution. Of these seven books three of them were published under a pseudonym the name of someone who had died in fact ten years earlier. Well we now know that the author was Baron Pierre Henri d’Holbach. It's now generally accepted that d’Holbach was the first to write an unarguably atheist book. He did not like Hobbes hedge his bets on the immortality of the soul nor like Hume did he accept that there might be a supernatural first cause to the universe. “If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear 53

created the gods. That fancy enthusiasm or deceit adorned them, that weakness worships them, that credulity preserves them and that custom respect, and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.” Baron d’Holbach The Baron lived here in the Rue Royale and his salon was a famous meeting place. His dinners attracted the leading French intellectuals but also men of similar outlook who came from abroad Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, David Garrick, Lawrence Stern, Adam Smith and many others. When the Scottish philosopher David Hume attended his first dinner, he actually declared to his host that he had never met an atheist and Diderot reports his host d’Holbach as having swept his hand around the table and said well here you have 18 atheists that I must admit three of them have not yet made up their minds. The fact is that Paul Henri Thierry the Baron d'Holbach was the first person since classical times, at least to insist without any hesitation that there was no god and no supernatural dimension to the universe. His book, The System of Nature, became known as the Atheists’ Bible. D’Holbach therefore is an enormously important figure in the history of disbelief, and his home is rightly regarded as the birthplace of modern atheism. “It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.” Baron d’Holbach It would be nice if one could actually visit the premises where these 54

controversial issues were discussed. The problem is that no one seems to know exactly where d’Holbach actually lived. You'd have thought there would be a plaque on one of these elegant façades or at least a modest inscription commemorating the fact that one of the pioneers of French atheism held court there but I can't find anything to that effect. Are we to assume that even now it's regarded as something too shameful to be mentioned? Surely not. After all, France became a secular state a few years later and d’Holbach played a significant part in laying the foundations of its progressive free thought. He was so, perhaps. His atheism was too much even for the revolutionaries to stomach and with the subsequent series of revolutions and restorations someone like d’Holbach might have disqualified himself from the commemoration he undoubtedly deserves. Well, one way or the other, there's no trace of him to be found here in the street where the great church of the mudlands still dominates the vista. You can't even find his grave either. He was buried in the church of Sauerosh less than half a mile away, and yet his grave no longer exists apparently. For some reason, even his remains seem to have been carelessly mislaid and although the church brochure openly admits that he was buried here, there's nothing inside to indicate the fact. Anyway things have moved on since then in streets such as this. The streams of mechanized traffic flow past exotically commercial shop fronts. Neither religion nor its denial seem very significant anymore. Still, it seems rather odd that what was once a controversial moment in the history of thought is apparently forgotten. But perhaps what happened here has been overshadowed because in the subsequent history of skepticism, 55

disbelief, atheism became closely associated with the establishment of completely new structures and with violent political revolutions on three different continents.

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III The Final Hour

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As we've seen, by the end of the 18th century atheism had finally emerged in France. But it was more or less confined to the educated and the privileged. There was, as yet no, open expression of plebeian doubt. And yet over the next 200 years atheism would begin to infiltrate the lives of ordinary people and the once obedient piety of the working class would undergo a radical transformation. So how did that happen? In 1790 the Parisian aristocrat Paul Henri Thierry, the Baron d’Holbach, wrote a book that was so openly atheistic and so provocative, but the French authorities, not content with banning it, had it publicly burned by the official executioner. “It is only by dispelling the clouds and fantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.” The Baron d’Holbach The Baron d’Holbach is widely referred to as the Newton of the Atheists. His book, the System of Nature, is often accepted as the first openly and a validly atheist work in European scholarship. And yet, he wasn't quite as bold as that suggests. After all, the book was published under an assumed name. Atheism, it seems, even when it finally emerged, was not yet quite a safe idea. In England the intellectual elite didn't even go as far as that. They weren't atheists exactly, but deists. That's to say they didn't deny the existence of God. They were perfectly happy to reconstruct Christianity, and reduce the deity to some distant first cause. And to be on the safe side, what the intellectual aristocrats did was not to talk about it in front of the servants. Religion was far too intricately bound up with the fabric of political authority and social hierarchy. Indeed it was an essential ingredient in the maintenance of the privileged life which the elite 58

themselves enjoyed. To undermine the religious faith of the masses would be both politically dangerous and perhaps socially suicidal. And yet, this could not, and indeed it didn't last.

Thomas Paine By the end of the 18th century a more popular and subversive form of skepticism began to appear. And although to begin with it didn't take the form of explicit atheism, the argumentative deism of lower middle class publicists such as Thomas Paine set the stage for a much more radical form of religious skepticism. One which in England at least was to find itself in almost unremitting conflict with the political and legal establishment. “Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity.” Thomas Paine It's no exaggeration to say that Thomas Paine was one of the most influential thinkers that England has ever produced. But his skeptical attitude, his deism, was profoundly different from that of the privileged classes in which deism had originally been born. He was a self-taught philosopher who had not benefited from a university education. The revolutionary impact of his ideas has been studied by the Cambridge historian Simon Shaffer: “What I think is so striking is that a lot of the relatively elite 59

intellectual response to the appearance of plebeian unbelief in cheap print is not so much that these are false arguments, but that they're dangerous arguments. Since it's agreed on all hands that knowledge is power, giving power and giving the power of materialism and naturalism to large sectors of the labour in classes was judged to be very dangerous. And one does see in the 1820s in England for example, folks who are as it were elite atheists, who argue that there is no rational evidence for the existence of God, that you don't have to ground morality on faith in God's existence, but that it would be socially fatal for everybody to know that. There's a sense in which there's always been a social heft to the debate about atheism in Britain, that there are ideas it's safe to contemplate, but not safe to publish and make widely available.” “All churches where the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and then slave mankind and to monopolize power and profit.” Thomas Paine It's not altogether surprising that the first and most enthusiastic people to embrace Tom Paine were the dissatisfied colonists in North America. Paine's eloquent advocacy of independence proved to be inspirational. It was he who first coined the phrase that dignified their revolutionary ambitions, the United States of America. Paine abandoned his English home and went to live in America. The first rare editions of some of his most influential early works can be found in the New England Museum [in New Rochell, NY]. It's interesting when you look at the first edition of Common Sense, which on the title page is addressed to the inhabitants of 60

America, even in the first paragraphs when he's addressing himself to the problems of society, there are already expressions of the principles which stimulate him to criticize the authority of the church. “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” Now that distinction really applies to what he later says in the Age of Reason about the authority of the church. Almost everywhere in the Age of Reason, he attacks orthodox beliefs and encourages people to develop their own rationality, their own moral sensibilities and their natural ability to interact morally with one another, contrary to what the monarchical and indeed the ecclesiastical authorities thought that without the church, without government, man would become wicked and return to his animal nature. “It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rape, and murder. For the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man, and the Bible is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.” Thomas Paine Here he was, what the upper classes would have called a common man, but he's expressing what all men have in common, which is much more interesting. “The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called religion.” Thomas Paine As soon as the Americans had succeeded in establishing their independence, they were eager to show their gratitude to the English 61

radical who had helped to inspire them. In 1776 the estate from which the original house once stood was commandeered by the state of New York and taken from someone who had been a loyalist to the British during the War of Independence. And in 1784, it was given to Thomas Paine in recognition of his services to the American Revolution. Paine did not immediately take up residence in this house, for not content with inspiring the American Revolution and helping to write the Declaration of Independence, he was also influencing the revolutionary thinkers in France who would soon tear down that country's monarchy. Paine left the United States and travelled to Paris. He was welcomed and extraordinarily elected to the Revolutionary National Assembly. The French revolutionaries closed down churches across the whole country and the bishop of Paris was forced to declare himself a charlatan. And yet, the Revolution was not, strictly speaking, atheist. Robespierre, for example, insisted on the existence of some kind of supreme being. A fate or festival was dedicated to this supreme being. But it's questionable how seriously this was taken when you hear stories that it was a Paris prostitute who was crowned the goddess of reason here in the deconsecrated church now called the Pantheon. Paine may have supported the Revolution but since he was opposed to the execution of the French King, he was imprisoned and only narrowly escaped the guillotine. And there was no welcome for such a skeptical revolutionary in England. So he returned to America to the farm he'd been given by that grateful nation. Ironically, his religious skepticism was now something of an embarrassment to many Americans, and he died 62

unmourned, and more or less ignored in New York in 1809. You stand alongside the busy traffic in dauntingly affluent suburb of New York City, it's quite difficult to believe that this modest bronze tablet marks what was once the burial ground of one of the emblematic heroes of the American Revolution. Less than two years after Paine's death the English radical William Cobbitt exhumed his body and took it back to England. But the British government refused to build a memorial to Tom Paine and unbelievably at some point the body was simply lost. “Thomas Paine needs no monument made of hands. He has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty.” Andrew Jackson Tom Paine has no tomb, his body lies somewhere in an unmarked grave. Given the impact of Paine's ideas in America and France it's hardly surprising that radical deism and atheism gained a dangerous reputation. In England, Paine was now known amongst a growing number of political radicals as the immortal Tom Paine. His book The Rights of Man had been published in pamphlet form for the readership of the masses, and by the time of his death one million five hundred thousand copies had been sold. His rhetoric had helped to inspire revolutions in America and France, so the English authorities were doubly on their guard.

Reform and Skepticism in England “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.” Napoleon Bonaparte 63

Paine's skeptical and radical ideas were now taking hold in England where still only three percent of the population had the right to vote. In August 1819 more than fifty thousand ordinary men and women came to St Peter's Square in Manchester. They came to hear speeches calling for parliamentary reform, and in response the authorities sent in the cavalry with sabers. In the process, eleven people were killed and over four hundred injured. This the Peter Lou massacre revealed the extent to which the English authorities were prepared to go to defend a status quo that itself depended upon the support of a Christian establishment. On that day one of the speakers, a witness to the massacre, was the atheist Richard Carlisle. Carlisle had already come into conflict with the establishment by publishing and distributing Tom Paine's pamphlets. The fact is that Richard Carlisle would be one of an apostolic succession of atheist radicals committed to the interests of the working class who would over the next hundred years help to create a new political philosophy. However the government realized that radicalism and atheism went hand in hand and they were determined to fight them both. Richard Carlisle was actually imprisoned for publishing an atheistic and politically subversive journal called the Republican. His crime, blasphemous and seditious label. His journal, carried on under the editorship of his wife but she was also imprisoned, and then his sister but she was also imprisoned indeed 150 people were imprisoned for publishing and selling the Republican and between them they served a total of 200 years in jail. In fact one of the Republicans most distinguished contributors was the romantic poet Percy Bysshe who had been sent down from Oxford for 64

writing a pamphlet called the Necessity of Atheism: “If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?” Percy Bysshe Shelley Oxford University was unfortunately not prepared to see Shelley's work as a promising philosophical treatise. Perhaps he was born just a fraction too early to be able to attend a university where his opinions might not have been so out of place. He could have gone, as I did, to University College in London. I don't know exactly why I chose to come to University College Hospital to do my clinical work after I graduated in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1956. I think, one of the reasons was the fact that the medical school was associated with a university on the other side of the road and that meant that I could follow up some of the things that had interested me as a student at Cambridge. I was also drawn by the fact that it was a secular institution. In fact, the place was known almost from its foundation as ‘the godless institution of Gao Street’. That was because when this college was established in 1826 it was deliberately created in order to allow students of all religious denominations, and perhaps none, to study and graduate. Until the initiative that founded University College London, it was impossible to enter any British university if you were not a communicating member of the Church of England. This of course excluded Catholics, 65

Jews, non-conformists and of course non-believers. What you see in a box are the mortal remains of someone who is perhaps the most memorable person responsible for this philanthropic initiative. It is of course the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham who on his death strangely insisted that his medical colleagues publicly dissected his body. In fact, although the head of this effigy is just a waxwork now the original head is kept deep freeze elsewhere, the founder's bones still exist under the clothes that you can see here. Now the fact that someone other than an executed criminal would voluntarily submit his corpse for public dissection indicates Bentham's sublime indifference to the notion of resurrection, his disbelief in immortality and his commitment to the utterly material basis of reality. Nevertheless, Bentham did recognise the need for some sort of secular alternative that would guarantee the moral stability of society and for him the answer was utilitarianism, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Now eloquent though his arguments were, it was difficult to see in it a practical programme of social action of the thought that political radicals like Carlisle were looking for. And when philosophical principles were eventually recruited to the service of social reform, they took a much more subversive and revolutionary turn which would dominate the political agenda of the whole world for the next hundred years. “All thinking men are atheists.” Ernest Hemingway The very idea of a secular moral philosophy, not to mention a social order based on it, was inevitably in conflict with a Christian establishment. At the same time Christians were about to be disconcerted by a completely unexpected threat to the foundations of their belief. Although it took some 66

time for the church to reconcile itself to the picture of the universe which Copernicus and Galileo had created, and incidentally Galileo was not officially apologised to until 1984, but by the end of the 18th century the spatial layout of the universe was now an established fact. When he came to chronological considerations, science was about to embarrass Christian dogma once again. Wherever the earth was said to be situated in the universe, the religious belief was that it was created by God as described in Genesis in six days, and this idea was still at the foundation of Christian and Jewish faith. The fact is that there were academics and theologians who had spent hours calculating what they thought was the precise age of the earth on the basis of the biblical account of it, and as early as 1650 James Asher had come to the startlingly precise conclusion that the earth was created in 4004 BC on October the 22nd, in the evening apparently. What God had been doing that morning is still open to conjecture. But the rapidly developing science of geology in the hands of men such as Buckland, Hutton and above all Charles Lyle was about to subvert the idea that the earth was created as recently as theologians had previously maintained. According to the newly emerging version of geological history the earth had existed for many millions of years and this was one of the basic presuppositions upon which Charles Darwin would eventually raise the theory of evolution.

Subverting the Idea of the Intelligent Design There's a strange sense of paradox as you walk around the rather 67

impressive estate, the house in which the origin of species was written by a wealthy person from the British upper middle class establishment. Charles Darwin after all was a gentleman with unquestionable social pedigree and yet his book was one which would subvert the foundations, the intellectual foundations upon which a great deal of English social life was based. The point is that Darwin's work would call into question God's role as the creator of nature and that would inevitably undermine the authority of a predominantly Christian, social, and political establishment. And what he finally published in 1859 would turn the theological establishment, and to some extent by the same token, the social establishment on its head. By formulating a theory that explained the origin of species, Darwin was inevitably challenging the idea that God himself was the origin of everything. It was a devastating, and as the American philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out, a dangerous idea. At the beginning of your book you refer to this wonderful schoolboy notion of a universal acid which no receptacle can contain and you make a comparison with that and Darwinian theory. Now. I wonder if you'd like to explain in what respect Darwin's idea was dangerous: “Well I think that we've had an idea, humankind has had an idea for as long as there have been people and that is it takes a big fancy thing to make a simpler thing. You never see horseshoe making a blacksmith, you never see a pot making a potter, it's always the other way, I'm big fancy things making simpler things. And then along came Darwin and he had the audacity to propose a complete 68

inversion of that idea that the purport of Darwin's theory was in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it. And it was this inversion of reasoning that was so dangerous because it turned everything upside down in a way. It suggested that we could have a bottom up theory of creative genius rather than a top down rather than a trickle down theory which depended on an intelligent artificer. The basic idea is so simple that you have variation that inevitably if there's variation in the population some are going to be better than others and the ones that are better than others are going to have more kids than the ones, than the less favored ones and the offspring are going to resemble their parents. And most of the skepticism over the century plus that we've had since Darwin proposed this idea has been along the lines of, well there's just too much work to be done by such a simple process.” But the newly discovered billions of years in the Earth's history gave plenty of time for Darwin's slow evolutionary process to work. And believers in God simply had to accept that they might have a problem. Darwin's discovery of natural selection is the first time that a scientific idea subverts one of the principle arguments in favor of God because it dispenses with the idea of design. Well, his theory has a certain sort of elegance because wherever you observe life, although its efficiency is undoubtedly startling, the developments are sort of Jim crack. They're improvised, they're put together without a view to an outcome. In fact, when you come to think of it, the word improvise is rather unfortunate and misleading because it makes it look as if something is blundering its way 69

towards a conclusion. Whereas nothing is blundering its way towards anything. There's no mentality at work here. There's no conscious object in view. The process, for example, of getting bits and pieces of the jaw of ancient reptiles into the inner ear of modern mammals, bones which enable them to hear is not one that took place because something foresaw that those bones might come in handy as a hearing device. Hearing simply emerged as an unintended consequence of the unsolicited variations. In Darwin's time, the material bases of heredity were still obscure and the origin of the variations or novelties upon which natural selection worked remained utterly mysterious. The biologist Richard Dawkins has written a great length about genetics and has committed much of his academic career to answering the questions that arise from Darwin's theory, something has to explain the novelties themselve: “Well the novelties themselves, of course, are genetic variations in the gene pool which ultimately come from mutation and more proximally come from sexual recombination. There's nothing very inventive or ingenious about those novelties. I mean they are random, and they mostly are deleterious. Most mutations are bad. And so you really need to focus on natural selection as the positive side and its own in actual selection that produces living things which have the illusion of design. The illusion of design does not come from novelty.” What was it about that early novelty before it culminated in something as useful as a feather? Where could natural selection get its purchase upon 70

something which was no more than a pimple? “There cannot have been intermediate stages which were not beneficial. There's no room in natural selection for the sort of foresight argument that says. Well, we got to persist for the next million years and it will start becoming useful. That doesn't work. There's got to be a selection pressure all the way.” So there isn't a process as we're going on in the cell saying look be patient? It's going to be a feather, believe me: “It doesn't happen like that. There's got to be a series of advantages all the way in the feather. If you can't think of one then that's your problem, not natural selection problem, natural selection. Well, I suppose that is a sort of matter of faith on my part since the theory is so coherent and so powerful.” Richard Dawkins' faith in natural selection is bolstered by the fact that as Darwin noticed the painful details hardly support the idea of a benevolent designer. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have created the ignomani die with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. Or that god would have designed it to be created that a cat should play with mice.” Charles Darwin Darwin's own religious faith had slowly ebbed away over the years but that was due as much to the death of his daughter as to his scientific ideas. For 71

a variety of reasons, not least of which was the fact that his wife was still deeply religious and he himself of course realised the theological implications of his own theory, Darwin resisted publication of his work for almost 20 years. It was only when another younger man, Alfred Russell Wallace, submitted a work with almost exactly the same scientific conclusions that Darwin was pushed into publication and as he feared the reaction was dramatic. “Is it on his grandmothers or his grandfather's side that he claims descent from a monkey?” Samuel Wilberforce “There is a metaphysical part of nature. A man who denies this may sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since written records began.” Adam Sedgwick For understandable reasons, the established church was appalled by the theory of evolution because it denied the very idea of an inaugural creation in which all natural forms had been established from the outset. And as far as the clergy were concerned, what was even more shocking was the idea that man was included in this process, and that as a mere descendant of apes, he had lost his curious spiritual priority. Man was no longer the star of this cosmic event. When you consider the relative ease with which educated Christians as we've already seen had been able to reconcile their beliefs with some of the new astronomical discoveries, it's not altogether surprising that with the exception of ignorant and stupid fundamentalists for whom Darwinism is a blasphemy, there were and still are religious people willing and able to 72

accommodate the now undeniable Darwinian proposals. But the point is that the religious now had to visualize the architecture of living things in an altogether new way, one in which God could no longer be represented as an ever-present pedantic designer. While the religious view of God was growing more attenuated, those who took a skeptical and radical view were feeling more and more confident. “The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” George Bernard Shaw The leadership of the skeptical and radical reformers was now undertaken by George Jacob Holyoke and in his journal, The Reasoner, he coined a new word to describe a belief system based upon reason and science. He called it secularism. Well, by the middle of the 19th century there were more than 40 secular societies in Britain and Holyoke's journal was selling more than 5,000 copies a week. Secularism was hugely popular throughout the 19th century and the National Secular Society still exists in the 21st century here in Conway Hall in London. After Holyoke the leadership of the secular societies fell to Charles Bradlour, a radical MP famous for being expelled from Parliament and briefly locked in the Tower of London for his failure as an atheist to swear on the Bible his oath of allegiance. Bradlour secured the right which we still enjoy for every man and woman in this country to affirm an oath rather than having to swear on the Bible.

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The Illusion At the turn of the century one might have been forgiven for thinking that disbelief would soon triumph, that religion would soon fade away and die. Nietzsche had just said amongst many other things that God was dead. So why should faith survive? By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, there emerges a man who claimed to understand the origins of religion, of all religions. Sigmund Freud. Although Freud was by no means the first thinker to try and explain the psychological origins of religion, his account is perhaps the most systematic attempt to represent faith as something fundamental to early human mental development. Well, Freud, like me, came from a Jewish background, although for obvious reasons he was much more explicitly aware of it than I am. Even so, Freud never really identified himself with the religion itself, and as a student of science he became increasingly suspicious of religion as a whole. And with the development of what became psychoanalytic theory he began to recognize that the belief in God, as to say in some sort of supernatural agency to which human beings were answerable, was the inevitable result of the infant's helplessness and his relationship to the apparently all powerful figure of the father. Look, this is what he says about it in his book called The Future of an Illusion. “The rest of our inquiry is made easier because this God creator is openly called father. The psychoanalysis of individual human beings 74

teaches us that the God of each of them is nothing other than an exalted father.” Sigmund Freud So he saw religion as an illusion. Now although he describes this as a wish fulfilment, it's quite difficult to see it entirely in that light since the figure created by the infant imagination had punitive as well as benevolent characteristics. But however Freud explained that apparent contradiction, it's quite clear that he saw religion as false and profoundly unhelpful. “Religious teachings are neurotic relics and the time has probably come for replacing them with the results of the rational operation of the intellect.” Sigmund Freud For obvious reasons Freud's theory disconcerted the conventionally religious. But the social implications of his theory were trivial in comparison with the politically programmatic atheism that emerged in the most radical of the ideologies that had been developing over the hundred years since Tom Paine. “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. The heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritual situation. It is the opium of the people. The demand to give up the illusion is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.” Karl Marx Now, whatever Freud thought about the infantile origins of the illusion, for the Russian communists who had been influenced by the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, it was an article of faith that the opium of religion would have no place in the forthcoming political millennium. 75

They were determined to establish an illusion-free zone. And in Soviet Russia indeed they established what was to all intents and purposes the first fundamentally atheist state. The paradox is that a revolution which was designed to usher in a new golden era for humanity tormented, tortured, imprisoned and annihilated even more victims than Christianity at its most excessive. So it's hardly surprising that atheism has been indelibly, if unjustly, stained by its association. By the end of the 20th century, disbelief had become much more widespread than ever. And although it's not the whole story, there's no doubt that some of the appalling social catastrophes of the last hundred years have seriously undermined faith in a benevolent God. Of course, cruelty and misfortune have always been cited as reasons for doubt. But the inescapable publicity which these excesses now receive in the mass media represent an unprecedented problem for the pious. In fact as we enter the 21st century, for many people, the questions of belief and disbelief seem scarcely worth considering. This brings me back to the very first person I talked to in this series, the English philosopher in New York Colin McGinn: “Nobody spends their time trying to prove to others that the Greek gods don't exist. You just decide that they don't and that's the end of the story for you. So I like to distinguish atheism from anti-theism. Anti-theism is opposition to theism. I am an anti-theist because I believe that religion is harmful. I'm not just an atheist who's something my only values are that I don't agree with it. I'm actively opposed to it. But then I distinguish that from what I call 76

post-theism or post-theism, which is the healthy state of mind where you've put all that behind you. Now we can't do that yet because there's lots of religion in the world and lots of bad results of it. But to me the ideal society would be one in which the question of religion didn't really arise for people. If it did, it wasn't a heavy question for them. They would say, to them, to each other, you know, those humans used to believe back there in 2003. Some of them believed there was this garden. Others didn't and they did TV programs about why they didn't. What a funny debate that was, you know. So it would be a post-theist society where it wasn't an issue.” “Why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I’m going to hell?” Homer Simpson It's quite hard to imagine what the world would be like without religion. For the simple reason that in one form or another, it's been with us for so long. And although the number of disbelievers is now larger than anyone could have imagined as little as a hundred years ago, religion still permeates social life. And in some parts of the world, it's more consolidated and oppressive than ever. So, for those like myself, and there are literally millions of us for whom there is no religion, we still live in a world in which it's difficult to be unaware of its existence. For obvious reasons, it's some of the more fanatical developments which get me most worked up, the wilder excesses of Christian creationism and of course the suicidal and sometimes the homicidal violence to be found in some parts of the Muslim world. But I'm also rattled by some of the more complacent assumptions which I find amongst my friends and acquaintances that my 77

godlessness implies some sort of lack of seriousness on my part, that people like me have failed to recognize the existence of the soul, and above all, of its immortality. Well, to be quite frank, I find this somewhat impudent. The fact that I entertain no prospects, whatever, of some sort of subsequent existence doesn't mean that I'm indifferent to the fact that I, like everyone else, must die. As I get older, I become more closely, if vicariously, acquainted with death and disease. In fact, as time goes by, I find myself opening the obituary pages of the newspapers with increasing apprehension. But all the same, I don't find myself wondering where these departed friends, relatives or colleagues now are. Because as far as I'm concerned they're nowhere. They have simply or perhaps not quite so simply ceased to be. So how about my own death, my own ceasing to be? Well, naturally I think about it because I'm much nearer to it now than I was. I think about how it will be. Would it be painful, for example? But still I don't think about it in terms of ‘will I after all I've committed myself to be shown to be a fool by waking up somewhere else and finding that there is something after all,. And will my face be red? The thought of death is constantly there. I know that it's unlikely now that I'll see my grandchildren get married or that I'll even see or know my great-grandchildren. In other words, I have to loosen my hold over the future. What's more, I may be in a situation where death can't come too quickly because I'll be in pain, distress, wheat and disabled. I want to be able to reach for the bell and say ‘this is where I get off’. I don't find it difficult to imagine not existing. I don't think about it at all 78

really. What I am frightened of is perhaps that near death there might be certain experiences associated with it which are painful and frightening, and from which one cannot escape for the moment. It's not the fear of death but of the mental states that sometimes exist when things are falling to bits. I'm not looking forward to that.

Visiting Gloria I am encouraged by the fact that there are perfectly ordinary people who confront their forthcoming extinction with graceful equanimity without having to fall back on unintelligible hopes for a future state. When I visited Gloria at St. Christopher's Hospice in London she was quite happy to talk about her lack of faith. She only asked that we did not show her face from which I alone could see that she approached her death with unexpected calm. Where are you religious as a girl? “I suppose I did, you know, Sunday school and the regular so and so, you know, sort of looking at high boys and…” That's not religion, dear. But do you think that when you die that you will continue to exist? “No, no. How can I explain?” But you don't foresee that you, Gloria, will somehow continue to exist.

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“No, no.” Do you regret that? “No, because I have something… I say something else. I want to come alive. I want to be alive again, even if it's for that bare second.” But not alive again after death? “No, no.” You mean alive just at that moment of death? “Yes.” What would that sudden terminal aliveness consist of? Would you be a young girl again, briefly, shortly? “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I would… I would be young again, but I would be all the things I wanted to be and… And in that sudden brief moment, I'd come to… And… That's all there is to it.” So you're looking for a sort of ecstasy at the moment of death? “Yes. Yes. I'm looking for it, but I don't know whether I should find it.” You're a very nice brave lady. I think it's wonderful. Thank you very much indeed.

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“Thank you.” In spite of what the pious still prefer to believe, there is now an impressively large number of people prepared to contemplate their own mortality without the invisible means of support previously supplied by religion. And, of course, to some extent, we all owe that to the pioneering efforts of the early Greek philosophers, not to mention to the often embattled thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and even to the social and political radicals of the last hundred years. Even if we don't explicitly recognize that pedigree, many of us now live in a secular world in which the various arguments for believing in a God or gods seem to have evaporated.

Consciousness As we've already seen, one of the most significant arguments in favor of the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent being was the apparent presence of intelligent design. But as we've also seen, Darwin's theory of evolution effectively annihilated what was perhaps the most dramatic evidence in favor of efficient intelligence and intention. What this has done in effect is to continue the process of painting religion into an increasingly small corner of reality. In fact, intelligence, which was once seen as the antecedent cause of all things, is in itself almost certainly a biological phenomenon. Far from being the initiator of things, we're now beginning to recognize that intelligence is a relatively late arrival in the universe. Like the limbs and 81

organs, which until Darwin were visualized as the products of intelligent design, it's becoming increasingly likely that intelligence itself is the product of natural selection, inconceivable without the existence of a brain. Even the idea of the soul which the faithful fondly visualize as the colonial outpost of an imperial power on high will, I'm sure, shortly be explained as the autonomous product of local brain work. All the same, I have to admit that there is one aspect of our own mentality, for which it's difficult as yet to foresee what type of explanation would even be relevant. I'm referring, of course, to consciousness. The point is that although I have no reason to believe that my consciousness is implemented by anything other than my brain, I remain convinced that there is something impenetrably mysterious about the relationship between brains and thoughts. And you can understand, therefore, why it's so hard to imagine, let alone tolerate the idea that the death of the brain necessarily leads to the end of the personal self. And this, of course, is the trump card with which religion has consistently played. In the end, I think there must be some extent to which belief or disbelief is a purely temperamental affair and for reasons which are quite hard to identify, human beings have always sorted themselves out into those who visualise the universe in material terms and those who see it animated throughout by a supernatural intelligence. For that reason, I think it's a mistake to see a straightforward relationship between the recent retreat of religious faith and the concomitant advance of scientific knowledge. After all, a relatively small minority of the increasing number of disbelievers has any acquaintance with modern science at all. And then, on the other hand, 82

there's a significant number of extremely accomplished and knowledgeable scientists who retain a strong religious belief notwithstanding. All the same, I do suspect that the widespread albeit patchally distributed disbelief in the modern world has something to do with science. Perhaps, it's more to do with what science has provided in the way of security, convenience and comfort. With the fact that although the general public is largely unacquainted with the theoretical basis of the immunities which they now so carelessly enjoy, the environment which science has created is so comfortable and so unthreatening that supernatural considerations have understandably weakened and faded. For consolations and assurances that were once provided by the church now seem strangely anachronistic and unnecessary.

So where am I at the beginning of a century, the end of which I certainly won't live to see posthumously or otherwise. As I said at the outset, I'm reluctant to use the word “atheist” to describe my own unshakable disbelief and that's not because I'm ashamed, afraid or even embarrassed, but simply because it seems so self-evidently true to me that there is no God that giving that conviction a special title somehow dignifies what it denies. After all, we don't have a special word for people who don't believe in ghosts or witches. But, on the other hand, that doesn't mean that I think it was scarcely worth bothering with a series of this length. On the contrary, there is a long history of atrocity committed in the name of religion, and an equally long history of truly heroic opposition. So in a sense this series is, well, a tribute to those who have one for me and many 83

others the right to stand up and be counted. But nowadays there's another, and I think more important reason. In various parts of the world, religion has undergone a politically dangerous form of revival. Islam has undergone a widespread, though by no means universal, mutation, and the non-Muslim west is seriously threatened for the foreseeable future by swarms of these lethal mutants. On the other hand, there is now an uncouth cabal of short-sighted Christian fundamentalists in the White House who have established a morbid and I think rather unhelpful liaison with the Israeli establishment, an alliance which only exacerbates the otherwise inexplicable suicidal reaction to be seen in Islam. So, one way or another, I think it's increasingly important for those of us who don't believe to establish an eloquent and in all probability completely ineffectual resistance.

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ATHEISM A ROUGH HISTORY OF DISBELIEF

Jonathan Miller BBC Four, 2004

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