Scope:
The Scientific Revolution and the philosophical modernism of Descartes are crucial elements in the initial phase of modernity. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, many thinkers came to explicitly and triumphally embrace this modernity in the cultural and intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers embraced a natural, universal human reason that they saw as promising freedom from the past and tradition. For some, this entailed freedom from religious authority, superstition, and even religion itself. These thinkers thus presented religion with the first great challenge of the modern period: Can religion be rational? Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, defended a "reasonable" Christianity, and others defended the concept of "natural religion," a universal religion based in reason and on the idea of single supreme being, an immortal soul, and moral behavior.
Outline
I. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, worldly, secular ways of understanding ourselves and the world emerged, not only in the realm of science but also in ethical, political, and historical thinking.
A. These presented many challenges to traditional religious — especially Christian — ways of looking at things, and they raised all sorts of questions for those who tried to understand the place of religion in this new cosmos.
B. These challenges were taken up by thinkers in the period we call the Enlightenment, which lasted until the end of the 18th century.
II. To understand what thinkers in the Enlightenment meant by "reason," it is necessary to consider two fundamental epistemological approaches.
A. Descartes exemplifies the rationalist approach to reason. For the rationalist, true knowledge originates in what he called innate ideas — intuitive, self-evident principles — that we then examine and, through deduction, use to produce knowledge.
B. But where Descartes began with the self-evidence of ideas in the mind, other thinkers began with those ideas formed through the interaction of the mind and the world, the ideas made available to us through our sense impressions. These are the empiricists.
III. Descartes gives us one way of addressing this issue by using rationalist methods to prove the existence of God and the immortal soul.
A. A different approach, based more on empiricist arguments, can be found in Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity.
1. Locke distinguished between two kinds of truths: those that "can be made out by natural principles" and those that reason finds "to be revealed from God."
2. In other words, some truths are self-evident to reason and others are truths "above reason," that is, truths that cannot be proved by reason but which it is reasonable to believe.
3. Locke argued that we can reasonably assent to these truths above reason if they do not contradict reason and if reason concludes that they were revealed by God.
4. The miracles attributed to Jesus by the Bible are evidence that he was sent by God as a revelation from God.
B. Where Locke sought to show the reasonableness of Christianity, the French thinker Voltaire defended religion from the perspective of what we call "deism."
1. Writing in a French context dominated by Catholicism and its emphasis on tradition and church authority, Voltaire was a scathing critic of traditional Christianity.
2. Deism is basically the idea that there is a God who created the world, but this God does not interfere in human affairs and desires us to conduct ourselves on the basis of reason.
3. Deists generally took an empiricist approach to arguments for God's existence by arguing that our experience of the world leads us to conclude that it must have been designed by a creator.
4. For Voltaire, God is not just the creator but is also good and rewards and punishes according to the moral (or immoral) behavior of human beings.
5. Voltaire thought that this point was particularly important because he feared that without belief in God, morality would disappear, a position held by many Enlightenment thinkers.
Suggested Reading:
Gay, The Enlightenment.
Hobbes and Rogers, Thomas Hobbes Leviathan.
Locke, Higgins-Biddle, and Michael, The Reasonableness of Christianity.
Taylor, A Secular Age.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the crucial differences between the rationalist and empiricist views of knowledge?
How do these different epistemologies relate to ideas about how we know that God exists?
Lecture Six — Transcript
Enlightenment and Religion
At the beginning of our last lecture, I said that with Descartes, we come to the beginning of modern philosophy. As I begin this lecture, I want to briefly recap our journey to this point — especially as it concerns the loss of what I have called the "premodern cosmos" and the variety of factors that played a role in the shift from the premodern to the modern. We've talked about the metaphysical innovation of the nominalists who questioned the connection between our concepts and the reality to which those concepts refer. We've discussed the Protestant insistence on sin's corruption of the human, including the corruption of the ability to perceive God in the workings of the natural world. We've discussed how the Scientific Revolution displaced humanity and the world from the center of the cosmos and increasingly spoke of nature in mechanical terms leaving less and less room for the workings of the divine.
All of this adds up to a picture of the cosmos — if we can still even use that term — in which God might be said to be more absent than present, in which the natural world is more and more separated from the supernatural. It adds up to a sharp, metaphysical or cosmological dualism, a sharp divide between the natural and the supernatural. We've also seen that at the same time that conceptions of the cosmos changed, so, too, did conceptions of human reason and intellectual authority. When Descartes distinguishes between theology and philosophy, he begins a process by which theology, the former "Queen of the Sciences," loses its cultural and intellectual authority. As God becomes further and further removed from nature, theology becomes less and less important as an intellectual enterprise for Western society and culture. This dualism of God and nature is paralleled in Descartes by a dualistic conception of the subject — a body-mind dualism where the subject is not embedded in body, nature, or matter, and thus not in time or history, but in some sense transcends or stands outside all of these. This view of the subject will be important for understanding what I describe a little later on as Enlightenment philosophy and religious thought.
Another way of thinking about what is happening during the early modern period is that in the wake of the Scientific Revolution — as we already have seen in Hobbes — worldly, secular ways of understanding ourselves and the world are emerging — not only in the scientific realm, but also in ethical, political, and historical discourse. These new secular discourses present many challenges to traditional religions, especially to theological ways of looking at things, and they raise all sorts of questions for those who try to understand the place of religion in this new cosmos.
How do we understand ideas like faith or revelation when the scientific empirical method becomes normative for evaluating evidence and truth? How do we understand how God acts when we can explain everything as an operation of nature? How do we understand the need, or nature, or purpose of worship, or of history or God's saving action when human beings are making unprecedented advances in taming nature, in healing sickness, and increasing standards of living? Over the next few lectures, I want to examine a range of different answers to these questions that emerged in the late 17th and the early 18th centuries — a period that at the time and ever since has been called the "Enlightenment."
The most general rubric I want to invoke for thinking about these answers goes to the central topic of this series of lectures: As thinkers try to understand the place of religion in the modern period, they divide themselves into two broad camps. On the one hand, we have those who think that religion is — in one form or another compatible with modernity. On the other hand, we have those who see religion as a relic of a former age that is bound to fade away, or as an enemy of modernity that should be eliminated.
But things are a little more complicated than simply saying that there are defenders of religion and attackers of religion. First of all, they are complicated by the fact that different thinkers have different ideas about why religion needs to be defended or attacked. Second, and more importantly for now, they are engaged in debates over the very meaning of the word "religion."
So, over the next three lectures, in addition to trying to identify and discuss how thinkers argued for or against religion, we need also to think about how attackers and defenders of religion defined it in the first place. In this lecture, I will first offer an overview of the Enlightenment as reflected in thinkers such as the British philosopher John Locke and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. I, then, address the following topics. First, picking up on Descartes' inquiry into human knowledge, I will discuss the important debate between those, like Descartes, who take what has been called a "rationalist approach to epistemology," and those — like John Locke — who take what has been called an "empiricist approach to epistemology." Then, I want to explore two different Enlightenment defenses of religion: John Locke's view of what he calls the "reasonableness of Christianity" and Voltaire's view of religion as a necessary support for morality.
To begin, then, let's have an overview of the Enlightenment. First, we can say that the Enlightenment, particularly as it applies to questions about religion, stretches roughly from the publication of John Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695 to German philosopher Immanual Kant's book, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, published in 1793. I should point out that so far in telling this story of the transition from the premodern, medieval cosmos to the modern cosmos, I have tended to narrate the story as one of loss — the retreat of God from the natural world. But to tell the story this way does not really help us understand the perspective of most modern thinkers, in the early modern period in particular, who, as we can gather from the fact that they saw their time as one of "enlightenment," saw themselves as the avant-garde of a new age as having turned away from what they called the "dark ages" of superstition to an age of light and reason. They saw themselves as bringing something new to humanity — as ushering in a period in which human beings, as a species, would reach maturity. For these thinkers, enlightenment is clearly a positive thing, and it is summed up, above all, in the watchwords reason, progress, and freedom.
Catalyzed by the advances in the physical and natural sciences and in mathematics, advances that characterize the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment is a period in which the power of what Descartes called "natural reason" is considered by many of Europe's leading thinkers not only to be applicable to our understanding of the natural world, but also to the human world of ethics and politics — and even, as we will see, religion. Where the leading thinkers of the Scientific Revolution were mathematicians and astronomers, such as Descartes and Newton, during the Enlightenment, philosophers and literary thinkers joined in a loose alliance to argue, as John Locke — the British philosopher and political theorist — put it: "Reason must be our last guide and judge in everything." With this dedication to the power of reason, Enlightenment thinkers saw human beings as finally taking the reigns of their own destiny.
They were very self-conscious, as I said, of being part of a new age — of being "modern" and of having thrown off the old authority of tradition. For them, it was a moral imperative to criticize all aspects of human society in order to loosen the bonds of tradition and follow reason into a more humane and more rational future. This emphasis on the present and the future, and on life in this world, becomes one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment, and it is here that we begin to see developing the distinctly modern idea of human progress. Immanuel Kant, certainly the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest philosophers of the Western tradition in general, summed it up near the end of the 18 century in an essay entitled "What is Enlightenment." There, he argued that human beings had emerged into the freedom of adulthood from what he called "humanity's self-incurred tutelage." He urged his fellow thinkers to "dare to know."
In other words, for Kant and for many other Enlightenment thinkers, the exercise of reason was also an exercise of freedom — or, to use Kant's more technical term, an exercise in "autonomy." This is a word that comes from the Greek, auto, which means "self'; nomos, which means "law": to be autonomous is to give oneself the law, which for Kant, and we shall see later, is the basis of morality. Morality, in other words, is not given by tradition or the commands of revelation, but in and through the exercise of human reason, We, as rational beings, give the moral law to ourselves. Because reason was at the heart of the Enlightenment and their view of human beings, the kinds of epistemological problems we saw Descartes grappling with were central for Enlightenment philosophers as well. As I've noted, it's one thing to claim that human beings are rational and should make reason the primary authority in understanding the world and in guiding human life, but it is another to specify exactly what this means. In short, what is reason? What does it mean to be rationale We've already seen Descartes' answer to this question — an answer that helped to set the epistemological agenda for modern philosophy and that remained influential through the Enlightenment.
Descartes admired mathematics because it rested on solid foundations. One thing that characterizes mathematical reasoning, and maybe most clearly geometrical reasoning, is that it is deductive — that is, it moves from general principles or axioms to particular conclusions that follow logically from those starting points. So, when Descartes argues for the existence of God, for example, he argues from premises about perfection and causality that he claims are clear and distinct to the conclusion that God must necessarily exist. In this process of reasoning, Descartes makes no appeal to anything outside of his mind. He employs his radical doubt to place the world outside of his mind to the side, out of consideration. In other words, the authority of reason for Descartes is grounded in the possibility of identifying the mind's clear and distinct ideas, and then moving deductively to further truths. Historians of philosophy refer to this approach to knowledge as "rationalism."
But many Enlightenment philosophers found this way of thinking about reason and knowledge too abstract, not engaged enough with the things of the world, and they developed another way of thinking about reason and knowledge. Where Descartes began with the self evident, innate ideas, other thinkers began with those ideas formed through the interaction of the mind and the world — the ideas made available to us through our sense-impressions. For historians of philosophy, this is the most important alternative to Descartes' view of knowledge and is generally referred to as ""empiricism." So, we have Descartes and the rationalists focusing on innate ideas and deduction on the one hand, and we have the empiricists who focus on sense-impressions on the other hand. For the empiricists, including thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, all knowledge comes from experience — from our encounter with the empirical world. In other words, it is based in the way that the world impresses itself on our minds.
One common image that was used was that the world impressed itself on our minds like a stamp impresses itself on a piece of wax. Our minds are like this piece of wax and receive impressions from outside of the mind, and so the mind is essentially a passive receiver of sense-impressions from the world. But what exactly happens in this process? What is it, exactly, that impresses itself on the mind? What, in other words, are the basic units of perception and, therefore, of knowledge? Empiricists disagreed about this, so for them the basic task of epistemology was to identify these fundamental units of experience. This was important, because they claimed that for an idea or a judgment to be considered true, we have to be able to point to an objective reference in experience—point to the sense impression. Empiricists also argued about the process of induction, whereby we draw inferences from these basic experiences.
Again, where rationalists stressed logical deduction from first principles, empiricists stressed induction from particular experiences — so they moved from the particular to the general, whereas the rationalists were moving from the general to the particular. So, the empiricists moved from sense-impressions to more general ideas. They claimed that we build complex ideas out of elementary sense data, and then reason — by induction — to more general and more complex ideas. Of course, the farther away we get from grounding our knowledge in these sense-impressions, the more we infer from there, move towards the general — the more tenuous our ideas become. This is not to say that empiricists rejected all innate ideas — they affirmed mathematics, for example — but they argued that we cannot know anything about the world through the appeal to self-evident, innate ideas. Similarly, rationalists wouldn't claim they don't learn anything from experience, but that the empirical knowledge must be grounded in the more certain foundations of the type described by Descartes. With this basic distinction in mind between rationalism and empiricism, and we' ll return to this a little bit in the next lecture, let's think about the other side of the problem: How did Enlightenment thinkers view religion? In general, the Enlightenment philosophers argued that religion had to be viewed from the perspective of reason — and, as I've already suggested, from this perspective, we can see Enlightenment thinkers taking two positions.
Those for whom the authority of reason meant having to show how religion could be defended, explained, and lived reasonably — how religion is, in fact, rational — and those Enlightenment thinkers for whom reason and religion conflicted, for whom modernity involved the overcoming of religion. So, for the rest of this lecture and into the next, I want to explore these positions under three different headings. First, I want to talk about "reasonable religion," religion as reasonable. Second, I want to talk about religion and morality. Then, third, especially in the next lecture, I want to talk about what came to be called "natural religion."
So, let's start with reasonable religion, and if we' re going to start with that it makes sense to start with the British philosopher John Locke. John Locke was born in 1632 in England. His life spanned a time of political and religious turmoil in England, including the Civil War and the bitter conflicts in England between Protestants and Catholics. Locke was a Protestant. He was a scholar at Oxford in his early adult years and then became a tutor for the Earl of Shaftesbury. In 1682, Shaftsbury became involved in a plot against the Catholic King, and because of his close association with Shaftesbury, Locke fled England for Holland in 1683, where he stayed until the Protestant William of Orange became king after the Revolution in England of 1688. In Holland, Locke wrote some of his greatest works, including his epistemological work called An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and his political work A Letter Concerning Toleration. In 1695, he wrote the book, The Reasonableness of Christianity.
Locke's approach to the question of reason and religion reflects the empiricist tendency to understand reason not on the model of geometric or mathematical certainty, as in Descartes, but to stress what constitutes a reasonable inference. When we observe the world and carefully analyze the patterns and regularities we find, what reasonable principles can we posit? In thinking about religion, Locke is less interested in showing that reason can prove all of the basic doctrines of Christianity or of religion more generally, but in showing that religion — more specifically for him, Christianity is, to use his word, "reasonable." When it comes to religion, then, Locke follows the principle he articulates in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He states it like this:
Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything. I do not mean that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles and if it cannot, that then we [must then] reject it; but consult it we must and by it examine whether it be a revelation from God or no; if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares for it, as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates.
What we can see here is that when it comes to religion, Locke distinguishes between two kinds of truth: there are those truths that can be, as he says, "made out by natural principles," and we can think of Descartes' natural reason, but there are also those that reason finds "to be revealed from God." So, one way of thinking about those claims made by religious traditions, as far as Locke is concerned, is to say that they are reasonable if they can be arrived at independently through the use of reason alone — and this, again, was Descartes' approach in his Meditations: What can we prove through he use of natural reason alone? So, for example, if the Bible says to love your neighbor, and then a moral philosopher comes along and shows through reasoned argument that makes no appeal to religion, that to be moral is, in fact, to love your neighbor, then we can say that the religious claim is true.
But Locke makes it clear in this passage that we also can reasonably accept religious truths that cannot, as he puts it, "be made out by natural principles." There are other truths of religion — and for Locke a central one was the Christian claim that Jesus was the Messiah other claims that are, as he put it, "above reason," that reason cannot arrive at on its own. Locke argues that we can reasonably assent to these truths, these revealed truths, if they do not contradict reason and if reason concludes that they were revealed by God. So, reason is still working here. Reason is still important here. What reason is deciding is not that this is the truth, but that it is revealed and, therefore, is true. So, such truths of revelation are not known with quite the same certainty as the truths we arrive at through reason, but, nonetheless, we do gain real knowledge from revelation. It is, therefore, reasonable to base our religious lives on such revealed truths. The key here — as I've said — for Locke is that only reason can judge whether something is a revelation or not.
Then, the question, of course, is how? How does reason do this? How does reason decide that something is revealed and something else is not? One place where Locke treats this question most clearly is in his discussion of miracles, where he writes the following: "To know that any revelation is from God, it is necessary to know that the messenger that delivers it is sent from God, and that cannot be known but by some credential given him by God himself." Miracles — Locke argues — are one such credential, but he goes on to argue that only certain kinds of miracles work this way. Those miracles that are basically for the purpose of gaining some kind of earthly power are not to be seen as witness to God's revelation. Rather, the only miracles we can take seriously as evidence of God' s revelation are those that are performed precisely so as to show that the messenger is from God. For Locke, this essentially disqualifies all the miracles in what he calls "the heathen world."
Further, he argues, miracles as credentials for revelation must concern only what he describes as the "only true God," which leaves him to say that the only figures — only figures — that might fulfill his criterion are Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, because those are the only ones that are attesting to the one true God. But then he goes on to say that Muhammad did not claim any miracles and so should be eliminated from consideration. One might ask here about the miracle of God's revelations to Muhammad. Muslims certainly think that was a miracle, but we' ll have to leave that for another time. So, for Locke, then, the only miracles we can really believe as evidence for revelation come from Moses and Jesus.
In The Reasonableness of Christianity, he has this to say about Jesus: "The evidence of Our Saviour’s mission from heaven is so great, in the multitude of miracles he did, before all sorts of people that what he delivered cannot but be received as the oracles of God, and of unquestionable verity." So, Jesus, in his miracles, shows us he's a messenger from God, and thus authorizes everything he says, and we should understand everything he says as coming from God. It is reasonable, on Locke's grounds then, to believe that the doctrines and teachings of Christ are revelations &om God. Locke makes one further point about revelation and reason that we need to consider namely that revelation is important not only for communicating to us those "truths above reason," but also those truths that can be arrived at through the use of reason alone, but which, for various reasons, people have not yet been able to arrive at on their own. Especially in the past, people were not able to use their reason properly, according to Locke, and so God sent revelations that would help people to know how to live — especially that would help them to live morally. This failure, this failure in the use of reason, does help Locke explain why it took more than 1,500 years for Christians like him to finally get God right. He writes:
Though the works of nature, in every part of them, sufficiently evidence a Deity; yet the world made so little use of their reason, that they saw him not, where, even by the impressions of himself, he was easy to be found. Sense and lust blinded their minds in some, and a careless inadvertency in others, and fearful apprehensions in most ... gave them up into the hands of their priests.
Here, Locke is writing as a good Protestant, criticizing the "priests" — that is, the Catholics — and explaining how the failure to use reason properly made it impossible for people to discover true, reasonable religion until the Protestants came along. We also see him making a point that we will explore further in the next couple of lectures: Not only the Bible, but nature itself attests to the existence of God. Where Descartes proves God through the appeal to innate ideas, we will see others trying to prove God through the appeal to the external world. We will need to consider, then, what exactly this means — given what I've said about the separation of the natural and the supernatural at the dawn of modernity.
Another Enlightenment thinker who exerted a major influence was the French philosopher and literary figure Voltaire. Voltaire lived from 1694 to 1778 and was known not only for the brilliance of his writing, but for the very wide range of his literary output — which included essays, philosophical works, poetry, and plays, such as the famous Candide. He was a witty and acerbic social critic, and so his writings often got him in trouble with the censors and the authorities — and this led, at various points, to imprisonment in the Bastille and exile to England. Writing in a French context dominated by Catholicism and its emphasis on tradition and Church authority, Voltaire had very harsh words for religious claims to authority and what he saw as' the superstition of Christianity. He was not, like Locke, interested in defending the reasonableness of Christianity. In fact, he was not interested in defending Christianity at all. Indeed, he was such a strong critic of Christianity that he defended a form of religion stripped of the particularities of Christianity. He expresses this view in a particularly vitriolic and funny passage, in which he writes:
May this great God who is listening to me, this God who surely cannot have been born of a virgin, or have died on the gallows, or be eaten in a piece of dough, or have inspired books filled with contradictions, madness and horror — may this God, Creator of all the worlds, have pity on this sect of Christians who blaspheme Him.
What is he saying here? First, he is rejecting fundamental Christian doctrines that he finds fantastic or superstitious: that the mother of Jesus was a virgin, that Jesus died on the cross, that when Christians participate in the mass they are, in fact, eating the body of Jesus when they eat the wafer, or that God could have revealed himself in a book as problematic as the Bible. But, second, he is, nonetheless, affirming God: God is great; God is the creator; and, at least implicitly, he says here, God inspires people. Although scholars have argued over what Voltaire's real position on religion was — and the answers range from Roman Catholic, to Protestant, to atheist, so scholars are all over the place here — what we see suggested in this quote is a form of something called "deism," which many scholars do, in fact, think best characterizes Voltaire's religion.
Deism is basically the idea that there is a God who created the world, but this God does not interfere in human affairs — certainly not through miracles — and desires us to conduct ourselves on the basis of our reason. The deist God is sometimes referred to as the "watchmaker God" — a God who created the universe, wound it up, and then stepped back to watch it run. But Voltaire's deism is a bit richer than this because for him, God is not just the creator, but is also good and punishes and rewards according to the moral — or immoral — behavior of human beings. Indeed, Voltaire thought that this was particularly important because he feared that without belief in God, morality would disappear. This is a position that was held by many Enlightenment thinkers, though we can distinguish at least two versions of it.
We have on the one hand a more or less traditional Christian version, like Locke's, who believed that God had revealed a moral law and that we could later arrive at this moral law by reason, but that our morality was still supported by the idea of a final judgment. On the other hand, we have a view, such as Voltaire's, that is not specifically Christian, but still holds to a God that is creator and judge and a God that is evident to reason. We' ll pursue this point in the next lecture, when we talk about how for some Enlightenment thinkers, real, rational religion was not manifested in particular religious traditions, such as Christianity, but in what they called "natural religion." We've seen in this lecture that with the Enlightenment, the question of religion, of whether religion can be modern or not, hinges on the question of the reasonableness of religion: Are we rationally justified in believing the claims of revelation, as in Locke, or can we rationally believe in God and show how religion makes a constructive contribution to human life, as in Voltaire? We will see in the next lecture that Voltaire's way of looking at things — based on the idea of a natural, rational religion that has no need of revelation — dominates the thought of later Enlightenment thinkers, at least of those who seek to defend religion.
