Religion

James Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Thu Jan 13 12:36:56 PST 2000


On Thu, 13 Jan 2000 15:01:01 -0500 (EST) Michael Hoover <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> writes:
>> Were the Enlightenment thinkers "aggressively atheist"? A few of
>them were
>> (e.g. Baron d'Holbach), but the majority were not. Locke
>recommended
>> toleration and argued that the care of the souls should not be
>committed to
>> the civil magistrate, because "true and saving religion consists in
>the
>> inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing is acceptable
>to God."
>> Newton believed that Harmony in the System was an argument for a
>Deity.

Newton was a transitional figure between the Enlightenment and the beliefs of an earlier age. Newton was very much interested in subjects like theology, biblical studies and alchemy. Indeed, he devoted far more time and energy to these studies than he ever did to mathematics or physics. Newton certainly believed that the apparent harmony of the solar system provided persuasive evidence of the existence of a divine creator and he most certainly regarded himself to be a pious Christian but we also know that his conception of God involved the quiet rejection of Trinitarianism.


>> Montesquieu thought it a good thing to have several religions in a
>State.
>> Voltaire was against fanaticism and superstition (as all
>Enlightenment
>> thinkers were) but was not against religion as such, which,
>according to
>> him, "exists to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the
>goodness
>> of God by their virtue." Rousseau was a Deist, certain "that the
>whole
>> universe is one design, and sufficiently displays one intelligent
>agent,"
>> who regulates it to preserve "the present and established order of
>things."
>> Jefferson called for toleration, but he said he was a Christian. So
>did
>> Franklin and Paine.

Franklin during his public career made it a practice to maintain memberships in churches of several different denominations in Philadelphia, however, we know from his private correspondence that he like most of the Founding Fathers was deist who rejected such orthodox doctrines as the divinity of Christ.


>> In other words, the title of Kant's book on religion _Religion
>within the
>> Boundaries of Mere Reason_ seems to describe the dominant attitude
>of the
>> Enlightenment thinkers.
>> Yoshie:
>
>Wasn't most of Enlightenment crowd deist?

The majority of them were but there were a minority of increasingly outspoken atheists which included Baron d'Holbach and Helvetius. Diderot started out as a deist but later on he shifted to position that fluctuated between pantheism and outright atheism. In Britain David Hume while declining to publicly identify himself as an atheist was generally regarded by his friends to be an infidel and he was denied a chair at Edinburgh because of that reputation. Hume at the urgings of his friends declined from publishing his *Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion* during his lifetime because they were generally interpreted as being very skeptical concerning religious claims. Dr. Johnson's biographer, Boswell was astounded to find that Hume on his deathbed was able to face death calmly, without fear despite his lack of faith in an afterlife.


> Don't recall who suggested
>that some attempted to hold onto security blanket by referring to a
>'reasonable Christianity'.
>
>Jefferson called himself a 'real' Christian to distinguish himself
>from
>Christians who called him an infidel. He claimed that he was disciple
>
>of doctrines of Jesus in contrast to those he called Platonists who
>he claimed drew their dogmas from what Jesus neither said nor saw.
>And
>beyond thinking that Jesus was a groovy guy, TJ never doubted either
>existence of or rational planning of supreme creator.

Jefferson certainly regarded himself as a 'real' Christian but his theology was hardly acceptable to orthodox Protestants then or now. For him Jesus was a moral teacher not a god. Jefferson indeed created his own version of the Gospels in which he attempted to remove all traces of superstition which he maintained did not reflect the true teachings of Jesus but which had been added on by his disciples following his death.

Jefferson's deism was also interesting in that he combined a belief in God with the materialist philosophical outlook that he picked up in France. Not unlike Thomas Hobbes, Jefferson conceived of God as a material substance.


>
>Rousseau is kind of odd man out among Enlightenment crowd, repudiated
>by likes of Voltaire & Diderot. If memory serves, R claimed (in
>_First Discourse, Science and the Arts_) that notion that God made man
>
>good but man wasted it by creating evil society flashed before him
>when
>he was struck by God.

Rousseau was concerned with among other things with denying the doctrine of original sin so he attempted to provide an alternative account of the Fall which placed the blame on the emergence of private property as a social institution.

Concerning religion, Rousseau had been a Protestant by birth then converted to Catholicism as a young man, and later on opted for a form of deism. He caused scandal when he asserted that many of the Calvinist divines of his native Geneva were really Unitarians. However, he was probably on to something since many of their American counterparts in Massachusetts later on did in fact become Unitarians and indeed created their own church in the early 19th century.

Jim Farmelant


> Michael Hoover

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