The Non-Interactive, Non-Intervening, Scientifically Provable God
Part 3 in a 5-part series on how the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement known as the ‘Enlightenment’ radically changed Christianity
Part 1: Discovering and Defining God Through the “Machine” of Nature
Part 2: Newton’s God as First Cause and Physical Force Behind Nature
Part 3: (this post) The Non-Interactive, Non-Intervening, Scientifically Provable God
For some educated European elites, the eighteenth century was a brightly optimistic time. The Thirty Years War was a distant memory. People were determined that the continent should never again fall prey to such destructive bigotry. Since natural wonder gave sufficient evidence for a sovereign creator, churches did not need to coerce people into accepting their teachings. Scientific discoveries mounted apace. These marvels pointed to a supreme Intelligence that could be discovered through human reason.
To keep abreast of these exciting developments, religion would have to change. Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of belief in God that came to be called Deism. This was no half-measure toward the denial of God’s existence; Deists were passionate about God and seemingly obsessed with religion. They believed they had discovered the primordial faith behind the biblical account. They spread their rational religion of salvation through knowledge and education with missionary zeal. Ignorance and superstition became the new original sin.
Theologians Matthew Tindal and John Toland in Britain, the philosopher Voltaire in France, scientist, statesman, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin, and statesman Thomas Jefferson in North America all sought to bring faith under the control of reason. They wanted every person to grasp the truths revealed by science and learn to reason properly. As representatives of Deism, they rejected the idea of a God who erratically intervenes in nature, working miracles and revealing knowledge not available to human reason.
Deists viewed biblical narrative in the same empirical way that they viewed nature, rather than as metaphorical for the ‘inner person’ of human consciousness. Religious faith became synonymous with ‘belief’ as an assent to factual propositions. Since historical accounts and miracles in the Bible were physically impossible and empirically unbelievable, they had to go.
For more on concepts of ‘belief’, see Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?
Voltaire (1694–1778) defined Deism in his 1764 book Dictionnaire philosophique. Concerning proper religion, he wrote:
Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? Which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance, and humanity?[1]
Of course, Deists were right about the absurdity of believing that God necessarily causes or controls natural phenomena, and they were right about the injury to humanity of trying to coercively maintain ‘belief’ as they understood it. Their shared history had featured horrific displays of the ways religion can be catastrophically dysfunctional. What they lacked was an understanding of the ways religion is functional insofar as it inwardly addresses the difficult personal issues and experiences of self-conscious existence, through metaphorical narratives and disciplined spiritual practices, including dedication to the practice of faith as open-eyed, self-aware, conscious presupposition not dependent on the factuality of its symbols and narratives.
Enlightenment philosophers thought everything could be explained through the processes discovered by science. Still, their views depended on the existence of a God who would ultimately be proven by science. Atheism as we know it was still inconceivable. Voltaire called it a “monstrous evil,” but because science was supposedly on its way to proving God’s existence, there were “fewer atheists today than there ever have been.”[2] He did not comprehend that atheism would ultimately depend on the very concept of ‘belief’ held by himself and some of his contemporaries.
For more on concepts of ‘belief’, see Is Religious Belief About Facts Outside Us, Or Realities Within?
Deism—and Enlightenment thinking in general—were the purview of a relatively small number of elites. Nonconformists of the literate English underclass associated these ways of thinking with policies that would deprive the ‘lower orders’ of their independence and autonomy. Newtonian ideology was linked with coercive government; natural religion was a ploy by elites to keep people in line.
Seemingly in reaction, fervent pietistic movements flourished within the English and German Protestant traditions. For their adherents, faith was neither an affair of the mind nor focused on anything that could be proved logically; it was a religion of the heart. Its significance lies in spiritual practices.
Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.
But Enlightenment religion and pietism were not a stark binary. For pietists, doctrines such as the Incarnation were not historical facts from the distant past; rather, they symbolically expressed the mystery of new birth within the individual. John Wesley (1703–91), a leader in the Anglican revival movement known as Methodism, endeavored to apply a scientific ‘method’ to spirituality. Methodists followed a systematic regimen of prayer, Bible study, fasting, and good works. But for them, religion was not a doctrine in the mind; rather, it was a light in the heart, lit and attended by looking inward.
Enlightenment Deists and the Pietists who reacted against them were children of the same age. They shared many of the same ideals, including mistrust of arbitrary authority, a sense of modernity, and an emphasis on liberty and progress. Such shared ideals would, for example, bring together classes of society to fight in the American Revolution against the British crown.
Enlightenment philosophers posited that God could be proven as a fact rather than being held as a great mystery connected with the mystery of our being, whose reality is apprehended through the practice of faith. Their empirically provable God was a notion that would finally enter popular consciousness two centuries later. Next week’s post—the fourth in this five-part series—introduces some dissident thinkers who critiqued ideas that characterized the Enlightenment.
[1] Voltaire, and Theodore Besterman, trans. Philosophical Dictionary. Penguin, 1972. p. 327.
[2] Ibid., p. 57.