Lecture Seven Natural Religion and Its Critics
Scope:
The Enlightenment idealization of reason meant that the question of religion was tied up with the philosophical question: How do we know? Not all Enlightenment philosophers followed Descartes' "rationalism," which found the origin of knowledge in innate ideas.
The empiricists, by contrast, argued that knowledge must be founded on sense perception. Empiricists were among the strongest Enlightenment critics of religion. In the late 18'h century, the Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume questioned whether knowledge grounded in the senses could ever confirm the claims of natural religion, Christian claims to miracles, or even empiricist arguments for the existence of God. In France, Denis Diderot went further than Hume by articulating an atheistic, materialist vision of the cosmos.
Outline
I. Where Locke offers us a defense of something quite recognizable as Christianity, in Voltaire, we see something else, a religion stripped of much of its historical and doctrinal particularity. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire defended a form of what was called "natural religion."
A. The concept of natural religion plays a crucial role in the emergence, in the early modern period, of the generic concept "religion."
1. Many languages around the world do not have a word
that can be translated into the "religion" of modern European languages. Further, if we look at the premodern West, we see that the English and Latin words for "religion" referred only to a particular aspect of what today we would call the religious life; these terms were used to denote a religious, a monk or a nun, one who lived the cloistered life.
2.Three factors are instrumental in the emergence of the concept of religion as we use it today: the Protestant Reformation, Western colonialism, and the religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics.
3. During the 17'" century, thinkers, beginning with Herbert of Cherbury, started to draw a contrast between "revealed" or "positive" religion on the one hand and "natural religion" on the other.
B. Natural religion can be described in terms of five basic characteristics:
1. It is universally human.
2. It is rational.
3. It is compatible with natural laws.
4. It entails belief in a single supreme being and an immortal soul that will be punished or rewarded according to its actions in this life. It was the original religion of humankind but has been corrupted and has evolved into all the different positive religions that exist today.
C. Most defenders of natural religion believed that the existence of God could be proven through the argument from design.
II. In addition to defenders of Christianity and natural religion, the Enlightenment gave rise to a number of strong critics of religion, such as the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the French
thinker Denis Diderot.
A. Hume was an empiricist, but much of his influence stemmed from his careful efforts to show the limits of the knowledge we can derive from sense experience and, thus, the limits of our knowledge more generally. From this perspective, he made three important claims about reason and religion:
1. He argues that the analogy at the basis of the argument from design is faulty because it reasons to a cause (a perfect supreme being) that is not exactly proportional to the observed effect (the world).
2. He argues that it is not reasonable to believe in miracles on the basis of testimony, such as we see in the Bible.
3. He anticipates the development of 19th-century criticisms of religion by arguing that religion has its origins not in any divine action or reality but in human psychology and particularly in human fear and the human desire for power.
B. Denis Diderot was one of the few professed atheists of the Enlightenment period.
1. He not only argued, like Hum e, that religious explanations for the world and the cosmos cannot be rationally defended, but he developed a materialistic theory to explain the origins of various forms of organic and inorganic existence.
2. According to Diderot, we can understand and explain the cosmos without reference to a creator or transcendent reality.
Suggested Reading:
Hume and Flew, Writings on Religion.
Livingston, Modern Christian Thought Volume l.
Locke, Higgins-Biddle, and Stewart, The Reasonableness of Christianity.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the basic elements of natural religion?
2. What is Hume's main criticism of the argument from design?
Lecture Seven — Transcript
Natural Religion and Its Critics
In the previous lecture, we started to talk about the Enlightenment defining it as a cultural and intellectual movement centered on a new awareness of the power of human reason. With the appeal to reason, Enlightenment thinkers looked to the present and the future with new confidence and tried to loosen the bonds of tradition and religious institutions. The appeal to reason also led them to examine religion, asking whether it could be rationally defended or whether it was a relic from a past age that inhibited human autonomy. As I've noted, though, the question of religion in modernity was not simply a matter of defending or attacking religion, it was also a question of the definition of religion.
Where John Locke offers us a defense of something quite recognizable as Christianity, Voltaire defends a religion stripped of much of its historical and doctrinal particularity. Voltaire's is a form of what Enlightenment thinkers were coming to call "natural religion." The appeal to natural religion was part of a process by which religion as a generic concept came to be formed in the Enlightenment and became crucial for many defenders of religion. In this lecture, I want to explore this idea in some more depth. But then I also want to turn to religion's attackers by looking at philosopher David Hume's skeptical criticisms of Enlightenment defenses of religion, and by looking at an example of modern atheism in the French thinker Denis Diderot.
As I framed the Enlightenment period in the last lecture, I mentioned the titles of two books — one early in the period, Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity from 1695;and one late, almost exactly 100 years later, Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone from 1793. The difference between these two titles is telling, and it helps us understand a major development in Western thought about religion during the Enlightenment. Like good Enlightenment thinkers, both Locke and Kant linked religion and reason in their titles, but notice that they are applying reason to different things. Locke defends the reasonableness of Christianity. Kant, on the other hand, focuses on the more generic category — religion — "religion within the limits of reason alone." Although Kant's view of religion did remain deeply Christian, this difference reflects the fact that during the 100 years that separates Locke and Kant, the concept of religion — as opposed to particular faiths, such as Christianity and Judaism—the generic concept comes to play a major role in philosophical reflection. One (and this will seem rather odd) one way of putting it is that Enlightenment thinkers invented religion.
This isn't by any means to say something silly, like people for centuries and millennia before the Enlightenment weren't doing things that today we call religious. It is to say, however, that when those people in the premodern West and around the world thought about what they were doing, the concept "religion," as we use it today, was not, so to speak, part of their intellectual toolbox. That is, they did not think of themselves as "religious" — as participating in a form of life that they distinguished from politics, or morality, or other spheres of life that we, today, tend to distinguish from one another.
I just used the idea of an intellectual toolbox, so let's think about it this way: Concepts are tools that we use for dividing up, categorizing, the world — and thus for understanding our place in that world. When certain conceptual tools gain widespread acceptance, however, we generally don't see them any longer, as tools for arranging the world — we just see it as that's the way the world is. We don't see them at all. So, these concepts, like religion, become naturalized — they seem to us to reflect something about the world itself, not something we have produced in order to arrange and manage the world. But if we step back and we look at things historically, and if we look at people across different cultures, we can see that what for us seems common sense, that seems natural, is not shared by everyone.
So, what I want to say is that the concept of religion is a concept that was shaped in large part by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. They found it helpful or necessary for understanding the world, and it — in that sense — is a modern, Western concept. Many languages around the world do not have a word that can be translated into the "religion" of English and its equivalent in other modern European languages. If we look at the premodern West, as I mentioned back in the first lecture, we see that people did not use the English "religion" or its cognates — or, more often, the Latin religio — as a generic concept. Rather, they did not talk about being religious in the sense of adhering to one of these traditions.
Rather, in a locution that sounds rather strange to our ears, one talked about being "a religious," as I've mentioned — a religious was a monk or a nun, one who lived the cloistered life. This begins to change as we enter the modern period due to at least three factors. One factor is the Protestant Reformation because Protestants reject the cloistered life — the life of the monasteries — and so reject the distinction between monks and nuns on the one hand and lay Christians on the other hand. In this sense, each Protestant is a religious in the old sense of the word. A second factor is that with the Western colonial project comes exposure of Europeans to a wide range of different cultures and different practices — institutions and beliefs that involved, in some sense, supernatural beings and forces that seemed to the Europeans to be analogous to those kinds of supernatural beings associated with Christianity and Judaism. A third factor was the religious conflict tearing up Europe. A number of thinkers responded to this conflict by considering whether beneath all the debates and fighting over particular Christian doctrines, there was a true core or essence that everyone could agree on. The result of these factors and this reflection was that people started to distinguish between "revealed" or "positive" religion on the one hand, and "natural religion" on the other.
So, John Locke, for example, in his defense of the reasonableness of Christianity, focuses on the former — on a particular religious tradition that is based in revelation and has developed historically — Christianity. But even before Locke, thinkers such as Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who, like Descartes, had firsthand experience of the Thirty Years War, was exploring the teachings of a wide range of religions to see if he could discover whether there was anything they all had in common. He concluded that they shared the belief in the existence of one God — the idea that this God demands that we act virtuously, and that there will be rewards and punishments after death. Today, many questions have to be raised about the adequacy of his research and his conclusions, but the main point is that Cherbury thought that true religion could be established on the basis of just these universally shared ideas.
Where Cherbury was primarily concerned to address the religious violence in Europe, and to find a neutral point or a universal point that would help us out of it, later, when much of the violence had subsided, other thinkers, such as Voltaire, turn to the idea of natural religion — of this universal rational religion — as part of his criticism of the superstitious beliefs and rituals of positive religions, such as Christianity. Voltaire does not take these criticisms to mean that the whole idea of God is a mistake, and we saw this in the last lecture, but appeals to the kind of essential religiosity that Cherbury and others articulated to support the idea of purified, rational, natural faith. The disaffected Catholic priest Jean Meslier puts it this way in his Testament, which was published after his death in 1733:
I shall finish by asking God, if outraged by this sect, [that is, the Christians] to see fit to recall us to natural religion, of which Christianity is the sworn enemy — to that holy religion which God has set in the hearts of all people, which require of us to do nothing to others that we would not do for ourselves ... God gave us this religion in giving us reason. May fanaticism never pervert it!
As we see it developed during the Enlightenment, the idea of natural religion is made up of five basic characteristics. It is universally human. It can be identified and defended through the use of reason as opposed to revelation. Most defenders of natural religion would reject John Locke's affirmation of revelation. Natural religion is compatible with natural laws. It generally includes, as its basic components, a single supreme being that should be worshipped, and that commands and inspires in us piety and good conduct, and in large part this piety and good conduct is inspired by the fact that we have an immortal soul that will be punished or rewarded. For many, though not for all, natural religion was the original religion of humankind, and that it had been corrupted or twisted, complicated unnecessarily in the course of history, and this has resulted in all the different positive religions that are out there.
Others, though — and Kant as we' ll see in the next lecture is an example of this — it is not the original religion of human beings, but it is a religion of the future — it's a religion toward which, in one way or another, the history of the positive religions is moving. At the heart of the idea of rational natural religion and at the heart of some visions of Christianity of the time is the claim that there is a single supreme being, and that reason, not revelation, attests to the existence of this being. But how, exactly, does reason attest to God' s existence? We've seen one answer to this question in Descartes, who gives us a rational argument for the existence of God based in first, principles and deduction from those principles, particularly from the I think, therefore I am.
But during the 18'" century, another route becomes more popular one based on an empiricist rather than a rationalist epistemology. Here we need to recall two points from the previous lectures. As I said, Descartes argues to the existence of God by appealing to innate ideas about God, causality, and perfection — and these ideas, he argues, necessarily lead us to the conclusion that God exists. But where Descartes' rationalism starts with innate ideas, empiricists such as Hobbes and Locke begin with sense-impressions received by the mind from the world. Another way to think about this difference is that Descartes offers what philosophers call an "a priori" argument for God — literally, a priori means "from before." Descartes' argument for God is made from before, or independently of experience. But empiricists offer what are called "a posteriori" arguments. A posteriori means "from afterwards," so these are arguments made from after experience — arguments grounded in empirical observation of the world: I saw Elvis yesterday, therefore he must still be alive.
How did empiricists make a posteriori arguments for the existence of God? Locke tells us from a quote I read in the last lecture; "the works of nature, in every part of them, sufficiently evidence a Deity." What kind of appeal can someone such as Locke make to nature if, as I have pointed out, the modern cosmos is one from which God is largely absent? What can nature still tell us about God? The main argument for the existence of God derived from an a posteriori or empirical approach to the issue is called the "argument from design" — a version of which is much in the news today because it is at the basis of claims for Intelligent Design. The basic idea is that we can observe that the world of nature is so complex and remarkable that it must have been designed by an intelligent creator.
We've seen Descartes' ontological argument depends on claims about innate ideas and appeals to the principle of contradiction. According to Descartes, it is a logical contradiction to assert that God does not exist. The argument from design, however, appeals not to contradiction — but to analogy. As its defenders argued, if you were walking along a beach on a deserted island and came upon a watch in the sand, you would note its complex, intricate design and would not suppose that this was some natural sea-plant that had washed up on the beach, but a human creation. In the same way that is, by analogy — we must suppose that the world and human kind must be the result of an intentional, planned creation rather than a product of chance. For if we look around the world and see how intricate, and beautiful, and complex it is, or if we think about human beings in particular, we might say with Hamlet: "What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! / how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how / express and admirable!" If we say this, we may conclude, though, this wasn't Hamlet's point — we may conclude that this wonderful creature must have been created by an intelligent designer.
The argument from design was a favorite of the deists and others who favored the idea of natural religion. But we should distinguish the relation of God to nature that we see here from the relation that characterized medieval thought, as I presented it in earlier lectures. Where theologians, such as Aquinas, focused on the natural desire of human beings for God, saw God's grace working in us so that we naturally sought our completion in God's revelation, in God's grace, the defenders of natural religion saw the only real link between God and nature in the idea that God created nature, In other words, nature for them was evidence of a creation in the past — after which God removed himself from it — not evidence of a continual working of God in and through nature. To this point, we've discussed Enlightenment defenders of religion, including Locke's claims for the reasonableness of Christianity, Voltaire's natural religion, and deist views of the watchmaker God. Now I want to turn to the Enlightenment critics of religion, and I want to focus on two figures: the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the French thinker Denis Diderot.
David Hume is one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment period and continues to exert a significant influence in philosophical circles today. Indeed, many consider him to be one of the most important English-speaking philosophers of the Western tradition. Early in his career, though, Hume developed a reputation as a skeptic and perhaps even an atheist, and this made it impossible for him to secure an academic position. It does seem likely that Hume was an atheist, or at least an agnostic, though his writings on religion make it difficult to assert this with any certainty — in part because he put some of his most controversial ideas into the mouths of characters of dialogues that he created.
From a more general philosophical standpoint, however, Hume clearly was something of a skeptic — and a very provocative and influential one. He was an empiricist, but much of his influence derives from his careful efforts to show the limits of the knowledge that we can derive from sense experience — and so the limits of our knowledge more generally. For instance, he questioned whether we can be confident, after careful examination of our sense-impressions and our chains of inference, whether we really can know that one event causes another. We can observe two billiard balls and know a lot about them: their color, their weight, their shape — and if we roll one of them, we can know its velocity and its direction. If, in rolling one, the ball strikes another ball, we can know the velocity and direction of the second ball. But do we know, on empiricist grounds, that the first striking the second causes the second to move? That is, do we have a sense-impression of causality, even if we observe, over and over, the sequence of one ball striking the other — and this other ball, then, rolling? Hume says no — that causation is not a form of empirical knowledge, but what he called an "association," or perhaps a better word would be a "convention."
It is perhaps very sensible and useful to think about the relation between the two balls in terms of causality; it does clearly work, but this is not the same thing, for Hume, as saying that we know that one event causes the other. The point is not that Hume is saying we are wrong to think about causation here, but he is rather trying to pinpoint where the idea of causation comes from — and claims that because there is no specific sense-impression that grounds the idea of cause, we do not know causality. He brings this kind of careful questioning to his work on religion as well, and in doing so comes to question many of the claims made by Enlightenment defenders of religion. Most famously, he addressed problems with the arguments for the existence of God and for miracles, and in doing so criticized the kinds of arguments put forward by Enlightenment thinkers in defense of Christianity and religion — raising new questions about the compatibility of reason and religion. I want to point to three of them. First, Hume examines the argument from design — arguing that the analogy at the basis of the argument is a false one because the cause, God, is not exactly proportional to the effect, the world. One cannot, Hume writes, "ascribe to the cause [in this case, God] any qualities but what are exactly sufficient to produce the effect." Again, the argument design is arguing from the effect, the world in its supposed intricacy, to the cause, to God. What Hume is saying here is that we cannot ascribe any qualities to this cause that are not exactly sufficient to produce the effect. He puts it also this way: "Let your Gods therefore 0 philosophers be suited to the present appearance of nature." In other words, he argues that when we look very closely at the world, we have to admit that despite its complexity and its beauty, there's also a lot of imperfection — even evil — in the world.
If we are going to agree that we cannot ascribe to the cause — God qualities that are not found in the effect — the world — that is, if we are going to agree that we should only attribute to the cause qualities that are exactly sufficient to produce the effect, then we cannot move from an imperfect world to a perfect creator. In a more humorous vein, Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and these were safely published after his death in 1776, one of his characters says that instead of assuming a perfect God, we might assume that our world is "only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." Or even, he goes on to add, "the world is the production of the old age and the dotage in some superannuated deity." So, for Hume, the argument from design cannot get us to the perfect God of the Christians or of the defenders of natural religion — only to a God in diapers or in the depths of senility.
A second target of Hume's critical thinking about religion was belief in miracles. As we have seen, for Locke, accepting the biblical testimony for miracles is of the utmost importance for it gives us reason to accept Jesus as God's revelation, and so Jesus' sayings and actions as truths "above reason," as Locke put it. So, what Hume does is basically compare what we can know from testimony and what we can know from experience. Defining a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, laws which themselves are confirmed by experience, Hume argues that experience must deny the existence of miracles. He claims further that the proof against miracles from experience can only be overridden by a proof that is superior to the proof of experience. Can the testimony of others, such as we find in the Bible, provide such proof? Hume not only answers this question in the negative, but he says this: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." So, we need a kind of double miracle here a miracle of the event itself, and then the miracle of the testimony.
Locke seems to think we had something like this, but Hume does not, In fact, Hume suggests that it is more reasonable to consider the testimony of the Bible to be wrong or mistaken than to assume that the natural laws established by our senses have been violated.
But note the limits of what Hume is saying. He is not pretending to have proved that miracles have never taken place, but only that testimony cannot prove that it is probable that they have taken place. Consequently, he argues, it is always more reasonable to look for a natural explanation for something than to assume a miracle has taken place. He goes on to write that he has sought only to "confound those dangerous friends or disguised enemies of the Christian religion who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human reason. Our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason." Is Hume, whom many believe to have been an atheist, being disingenuous here by seeming to uphold Christianity and faith? Perhaps, and we might take as evidence this passage, with which he ends his essay on miracles:
Upon the whole, we Religion not only was at first attended by miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by a reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.
As we will see later in this lecture series, there are many Christians who would be quite sympathetic with most of what Hume says in this passage, but for Enlightenment defenders of religion, this struck at the heart of their arguments for reasonable religion. But, again, before we assume that Hume was perhaps sympathetic to religion, but not just to religions of reason, we have to consider a final point. In his essay "The Natural History of Religion," Hume makes an argument—that had been anticipated by Hobbes —namely, that religion has its origins not in any divine action or reality, but in human psychology, and particularly in human fear and the human desire for power. At the end of the essay he writes that if you
examine the religious principles that human beings have developed, "you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men' s dreams." Here, I don't have time to examine this argument in detail, but I will note that we will see more elaborate versions of it playing a major role in criticisms of religion from the 19'" century.
Basically, Hume is treating religion as a natural phenomenon and trying, therefore, to offer a persuasive, naturalistic explanation for it. It originates in human psychology, not in any divine action. We will see a similar approach being taken to the Bible by scholars in the 19 century, and we will see Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, like Hume, arguing that religion has its origins in human fear and their desire for power. As I've said, Hume wrote about religion in such a way that it was impossible to really pin down what he actually believed. But if it is not clear that David Hume was an atheist, it is clearer that his French contemporary Denis Diderot, whom Hume met when he was living in Paris, was one. Early in his life, Diderot professed a kind of deism and — based in his interest in biology, and his study of butterflies, and even maggots — put forward his own version of the argument from design. In his later work, however, and under various influences, Diderot changed his mind and not only began to assert that religious explanations for the world and the cosmos cannot be rationally defended, but he developed his own theory of the universe that offered a wholly naturalistic account of the emergence of the universe and all that it contains.
Remember for Denis and other defenders of natural religion, the whole idea that God created the universe was crucial — so here' s Diderot offering a naturalistic explanation for the emergence of the world and the universe. Like Hume, Diderot questions divine creation and design by pointing to monstrosity and deformity, and thus claims that a theory of origin must explain both these things — not just the good things, the perfect things, but the imperfect evil things — both things that work according to a design and those things that seem not to work in that way. He did not believe that the hypothesis of a divine creator could do this. Accordingly, he turned to an alternative explanation and argued that everything can be explained by matter in motion — or, as he put it, "matter in fermentation." The historian Michael Buckley describes Diderot's basic idea as one in which "Dynamic matter generates the various forms of inorganic and organic existence and continually dissolves them once generated." This is not the work of a creator God, not even the work of some rude infant deity, but simply the convergence of matter and chance. Here we might see one way of thinking about what I have called the "modern cosmos."
I have stressed that this is a cosmos that can be understood to operate according to natural laws — a cosmos in which we might be able to see evidence of God's creation and design in such laws even if we cannot see God actively participating in the cosmos. But with Diderot, what we get: an atheist version of this cosmos, one that argues that we do not need a transcendent principle to explain how the cosmos came to be and how it continues. His is a materialist and completely naturalistic vision, with no room and no need for God,
Let me say by way of a summary that if it has occurred to you that as you've been listening to discussions of Descartes and the Enlightenment thinkers that ideas about God that they are offering seem rather bloodless, that their efforts to prove the existence of God — whether their arguments are persuasive or not — seem to lack the passion you associate with religious commitment — you are certainly not alone. We' ll see, as the lectures move into the 19' century, that this is a criticism many thinkers leveled at Enlightenment arguments about religion. But it is worth keeping in mind the context, especially early on — the despair, fear, and disgust that many had felt early in the modern period in the face of religious violence and persecution. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that for many leading intellectuals, their passion was directed elsewhere—notably to the technological and intellectual advances that already had been made, but even more toward the new possibilities that were being imagined — perhaps, above all, to the new possibilities of freedom. Think about the revolutionaries of the period. Think of figures like Jefferson, and Madison, and Washington. Religiously, they were so sober and reserved that it is hard to tell just what they believed, and people in the United States argue about this a lot. Politically, though, they shook the world and believed that their revolution depended, in no small part, on such a sober and reserved attitude towards religion. This attitude will be expressed in particularly strong form in the subject of our next lecture: the great philosopher Immanuel Kant.
