The Necessity of Atheism
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition is the only secure way of attaining truth, on the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant. Our knowledge of the existence of a Deity is a subject of such importance that it cannot be too minutely investigated. In consequence of this conviction, we proceed briefly and impartially to examine the proofs which have been adduced. It is necessary first to consider the nature of belief.
When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief. But many obstacles frequently prevent this perception from being immediate. These the mind attempts to remove in order that the perception may be distinct. The mind is active in the investigation in order to perfect the state of perception, of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive. The investigation being confused with the perception has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active in belief—that belief is an act of volition—in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief. Of which, in its nature, it is incapable. It is equally incapable of merit.
Belief, then, is a passion. The strength of which, like every other passion, is in precise proportion to the degrees of excitement.
The degrees of excitement are three.
The senses are the sources of all knowledge to the mind. Consequently, their evidence claims the strongest assent.
The decision of the mind, founded upon our own experience, derived from these sources, claims the next degree.
The experience of others, which addresses itself to the former one, occupies the lowest degree.
(A graduated scale, on which should be marked the capabilities of propositions to approach to the test of the senses, would be a just barometer of the belief which ought to be attached to them.)
Consequently, no testimony can be admitted which is contrary to reason, for reason is founded on the evidence of our senses.
Every proof may be referred to one of these three divisions. It is to be considered what arguments we receive from each of them, which should convince us of the existence of a Deity.
1st, the Evidence of the senses. If the Deity should appear to us, if he should convince our senses of his existence, this revelation would necessarily command belief. Those to whom the Deity has thus appeared have the strongest possible conviction of his existence. But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility.
2nd, Reason. It is urged that man knows that whatever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity. He also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created. Until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a base where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is least incomprehensible. It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it. If the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burden?
The other argument, which is founded on a Man's knowledge of his own existence, stands thus: A man knows not only that he now is, but that once he was not. Consequently there must have been a cause. But our idea of causation is alone derivable from the constant conjunction of objects and the consequent inference of one from the other. And, reasoning experimentally, we can only infer, from effects, causes adequate to those effects. But there certainly is a generative power which is effected by certain instruments. We cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments, nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration. We admit that the generative power is incomprehensible. But to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being not only leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but also renders it more incomprehensible.
3rd, Testimony. It is required that testimony should not be contrary to reason. The testimony that the Deity convinces the senses of men of his existence can only be admitted by us, if our mind considers it less probable, that these men should have been deceived than that the Deity should have appeared to them. Our reason can never admit the testimony of men, who not only declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles, but that the Deity was irrational! For he commanded that he should be believed. He proposed the highest rewards for faith and eternal punishments for disbelief. But we can only command voluntary actions and belief is not an act of volition. The mind is ever passive, or involuntarily active. From this it is evident that we have no sufficient testimony, or rather that testimony is insufficient to prove the being of a God. It has been before shown that it cannot be deduced from reason. They alone, then, who have been convinced by the evidence of the senses can believe it.
Hence it is evident that, having no proofs from either of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God. It is also evident that, as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief. They only are reprehensible who neglect to remove the false medium, through which their mind views any subject of discussion. Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.
God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof. The onus probandi (burden of proof) rests on the theist. Sir Isaac Newton says:
I do not make hypotheses; that which cannot be deduced from phenomena is called an hypothesis, and hypotheses—whether of metaphysics, or physics, or of occult qualities, or even of mechanics—have no place in philosophy.
To all proofs of the existence of a creative God apply this valuable rule. We see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers. We merely know their effects. We are in a estate of ignorance with respect to their essences and causes. These Newton calls the phenomena of things. But the pride of philosophy is unwilling to admit its ignorance of their causes. From the phenomena, which are the objects of our attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent this general name, to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences. The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton. It bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. Words have been used by sophists for the same purposes, from the occult qualities of the peripatetics to the effuvium of Boyle and the crinities or nebulae of Herschel. God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible. He is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate. Even his worshippers allow that it is impossible to form any idea of him. They exclaim with the French poet:
Pour dire ce qu'il est, il faut etre lui-meme.
[To tell what he (god) is, you must be himself.]
Lord Bacon says that:
atheism leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety, laws, reputation, and everything that can serve to conduct him to virtue. But superstition destroys all these, and erects itself into a tyranny over the understandings of men. Hence atheism never disturbs the government, but renders man more clear-sighted, since he sees nothing beyond the boundaries of the present life.
The first theology of man made him first fear and adore the elements themselves, the gross and material objects of nature. He next paid homage to the agents controlling the elements, lower genies, heroes or men gifted with great qualities. By force of reflection he sought to simplify things by submitting all nature to a single agent, spirit, or universal soul, which, gave movement to nature and all its branches. Mounting from cause to cause, mortal man has ended by seeing nothing. It is in this obscurity that he has placed his God. It is in this darksome abyss that his uneasy imagination has always labored to fabricate chimeras, which will continue to afflict him until his knowledge of nature chases these phantoms which he has always so adored.
If we wish to explain our ideas of the Divinity we shall be obliged to admit that, by the word God, man has never been able to designate but the most hidden, the most distant and the most unknown cause of the effects which he saw. He has made use of his word only when the play of natural and known causes ceased to be visible to him. As soon as he lost the thread of these causes, or when his mind could no longer follow the chain, he cut the difficulty and ended his researches by calling God the last of the causes. That is to say, that which is beyond all causes that he knew. Thus he but assigned a vague denomination to an unknown cause, at which his laziness or the limits of his knowledge forced him to stop. Every time we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was able to operate by the aid of forces or causes that we know in nature. It is thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is ignorance, attributes to the Divinity, not only the unusual effects which strike them, but moreover the most simple events, of which the causes are the most simple to understand by whomever is able to study them. In a word, man has always respected unknown causes, surprising effects that his ignorance kept him from unraveling. It was on this debris of nature that man raised the imaginary colossus of the Divinity.
If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. In proportion as man taught himself, his strength and his resources augmented with his knowledge, science, the arts, industry, furnished him assistance. Experience reassured him or procured for him means of resistance to the efforts of many causes, which ceased to alarm as soon as they became understood. In a word, his terrors dissipated in the same proportion as his mind became enlightened. The educated man ceases to be superstitious.
It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests. Authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs. They prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray. But why did their fathers fall on their knees? That is because, in primitive times, their legislators and their guides made it their duty. "Adore and believe," they said, "the gods whom you cannot understand; have confidence in our profound wisdom; we know more than you about Divinity." But why should I come to you? It is because God willed it thus. It is because God will punish you if you dare resist. But this God, is not he, then, the thing in question? However, man has always traveled in this vicious circle. His slothful mind has always made him find it easier to accept the judgment of others. All religious nations are founded solely on authority. All the religions of the world forbid examination and do not want one to reason. Authority wants one to believe in God. This God is himself founded only on the authority of a few men who pretend to know him, and to come in his name and announce him on earth. A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
Should it not, then, be for the priests, the inspired, the metaphysicians that should be reserved the conviction of the existence of a God, which they, nevertheless, say is so necessary for all mankind?
These words immateriality, creation, predestination and grace. This mass of subtle distinctions with which theology to everywhere filled. These so ingenious inventions, imagined by thinkers who have succeeded one another for so many centuries, have only, alas! confused things all the more, and never has man's most necessary science, up to this time acquired the slightest fixity. For thousands of years the lazy dreamers have perpetually relieved one another to meditate on the Divinity, to divine his secret will, to invent the proper hypothesis to develop this important enigma. Their slight success has not discouraged the theological vanity: one always speaks of God; one has his throat cut for God; and this sublime being still remains the most unknown and the most discussed.
Man would have been too happy, if, limiting himself to the visible objects which interested him, he had employed, to perfect his real sciences, his laws, his morals, his education, one-half the efforts he has put into his researches on the Divinity. He would have been still wiser and still more fortunate if he had been satisfied to let his jobless guides quarrel among themselves, sounding depths capable of rendering them dizzy, without himself mixing in their senseless disputes. But it is the essence of ignorance to attach importance to that which it does not understand. Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God, everyone, in fact, fights only for the interests of his own vanity. Which, of all the passions produced by the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.
If, leaving for a moment the annoying idea that theology gives of a capricious God, whose partial and despotic decrees decide the fate of mankind. We wish to fix our eyes only on the pretended goodness, which all men, even trembling before this God, agree is ascribing to him. If we allow him the purpose that is lent him of having worked only for his own glory, of exacting the homage of intelligent beings; of seeking only in his works the well-being of mankind. How to reconcile these views and these dispositions with the ignorance truly invincible in which this God, so glorious and so good, leaves the majority of mankind in regard to God himself?
No one would then be able to doubt the existence of God, of his clear will, of his visible intentions. Under the eyes of this so terrible God no one would have the audacity to violate his commands, no mortal would dare risk attracting his anger. Finally, no man would have the effrontery to impose on his name or to interpret his will according to his own fantasy.
In fact, even while admitting the existence of the theological God, and the reality of his so discordant attributes which they impute to him, one can conclude nothing to authorize the conduct or the cult which one is prescribed to render him. Theology is truly the sieve of the Danaides. By dint of contradictory qualities and hazarded assertions it has, that is to say, so handicapped its God that it has made it impossible for him to act.
The enlightened and benevolent Pliny thus publicly professes himself an atheist.
I consider it, therefore, an indication of human weakness to inquire into the figure and form of God. For whatever God be, if there be any other God, and wherever he exists, he is all sense, all sight, all hearing, all life, all mind, and all within himself.
... And indeed this constitutes the great comfort in this imperfect state of man, that even the Deity cannot do everything. For he cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good. Nor can he make mortals immortal, or recall to life those who are dead; nor can he effect, that he who has once lived shall not have lived, or that he who has enjoyed honours shall not have enjoyed them; nor has he any influence over past events but to cause them to be forgotten. And, if we illustrate the nature of our connexion with God by a less serious argument, he cannot make twice ten not to be twenty, and many other things of this kind. By these considerations the power of Nature is clearly proved, and is shown to be what we call God.
The consistent Newtonian is necessarily an atheist. See Sir W. Drummond's Academical Questions, chapter iii.
Sir W. seems to consider the atheism to which it leads, as a sufficient presumption of the falsehood of the system of gravitation. But surely it is more consistent with the good faith of philosophy to admit a deduction from facts than an hypothesis incapable of proof, although it might militate, with the obstinate preconceptions of the mob. Had this author, instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have been more suited to the modesty of the skeptic and the toleration of the philosopher.
Everything takes place by the power of God. Nature herself is the power of God under another name, and our ignorance of the power of God is co-extensive with our ignorance of Nature. It is absolute folly, therefore, to ascribe an event to the power of God when we know not its natural cause, which is the power of God.
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