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Letter From Paris
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment
Atheism was especially chic in 18th century Paris.
Atheism is trendy — again. Over the centuries it periodically raises its ugly head, from the ancients like Epicurus and Lucretius, who blithely described a purely material, pleasure-based, godless universe, to Europe’s 18th-century Enlightenment. And now something called New Atheism is clamoring for attention in America.
The zeitgeist favors it. Consumption-oriented young Americans are dropping out of religion at a historic rate: fully 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds now claim no religion, twice the number in 1990. The American Religious Identification Survey reports that those with no religion are growing in every corner of the country, from secular Northeast to conservative Bible Belt. New Atheism believers are egged on by the movement’s so-called Four Horsemen: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. Their idea of a good bedtime book bears a title like The End of Faith, The God Delusion, God: The Failed Hypothesis, or God Is Not Great. They loudly and proudly put their faith in no faith at all.
Now from Europe comes a candidate fifth horseman. Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (Basic Books, 361 pages, $29.95), is an erudite, detailed — and tendentious — account of the Paris literary salon where the wealthy Baron Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach wined and dined some of the most passionate of the Enlightened. Blom, a German-born, Oxford-educated historian and novelist who lives in Vienna, is also author of a history of Europe from 1900 to 1914.
The forgotten radicalism he celebrates refers to the most anti-religion, anti-revelation, anti-God theorizing done during this period of ferment, when bold new thinking in science, mathematics, religion, and politics was in the air all over Europe. (The French called it the Siècle de Lumières, Germans the Aufklärung.) Blom gladly embraces the desolate world conceived at Holbach’s intellectual bull sessions, “a world of ignorant necessity and without higher meaning, into which kindness and lust can inject a fleeting beauty.”
Gathered on Thursdays and Sundays in Holbach’s elegant town house across the Seine from the Louvre to enjoy multi-course meals — 30 dishes often filled his groaning board — were not only the French philosophes like Denis Diderot, creator of the famous Encyclopédie, the father of Romanticism Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the sharp-tongued opponent of tyranny, Voltaire. From the 1750s to the 1770s the salon was also a must for foreign visitors to Paris who wanted to make the avant-garde scene.
English historian Edward Gibbon dropped in occasionally, as did the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume and his fellow Scot, the free-market economist Adam Smith. The great English actor David Garrick puckishly dubbed Holbach’s group “a wicked company.” When Benjamin Franklin arrived in Paris in 1776, one of his first requests was, “Take me to the philosophes.” He had already heard that the salon was a place where intellectual sparks flew, cold, pure reason prevailed, the ignorant, churchgoing masses were despised, and a good time was had by all. The Irish-born English satirist Laurence Sterne noted that “Every man leaves the room with a better Opinion of his own Talents than when he entered.” Holbach knew how to flatter an intellectual.
Usually organized by aristocrats for their amusement and prestige, the literary salon was a Paris institution in these heady decades before the French Revolution. It was a stage where budding, rebellious philosophes could show off their wit and sing for their supper. It was also a way to circumvent the harsh censorship laws under Louis XVI. Penalties for publishing anything considered critical of the monarchy or the Catholic Church ranged from symbolic tearing and burning of the book by the hangman of Paris, to doing time in the Bastille, or public torture and execution. Diderot, once imprisoned for his writings, later disguised his atheistic thinking in fiction.
Holbach, whom Blom fulsomely praises as “a man of great intellectual courage and moral fortitude,” was born in Germany, became a naturalized French citizen, and wrote in French. His most popular book, Système de la nature (The System of Nature), derided religion and an afterlife as mere superstition. (Oddly for a man of such supposed courage and fortitude, he timidly published it in Holland under the name Mirabaud.) Man was simply a machine devoid of free will. As for belief in God, that could only be due to ignorance and fear. Another book, Le Christianisme dévoilé (Christianity Unveiled), proclaimed Christianity to be harmful nonsense, “in no way different from all other superstitions with which the universe is infected.”
BLOM CLEARLY ADMIRES THIS STUFF. But what his book actually reveals, unwittingly, is the dark side of an Enlightenment whose most radical theoreticians were misfits who held a contemptuous, ultra-cerebral, exclusively materialist view of the human condition. Dark as it may appear to some of us, it was catnip to the likes of Denis Diderot, a sybarite with alley cat morals who agreed wholeheartedly that God and religion interfered with the Good Life. In his case the wish obviously was father to the thought.
Diderot had attended a Jesuit school and became a tonsured abbé headed for an ecclesiastical career until piety yielded to lust. As he tells it, “I was going to take a doctorate in theology. On my way I meet a woman beautiful as an angel; I want to sleep with her, and I do.” His marriage to the simple seamstress was mainly a façade for affairs with a succession of women, including a threesome with two sisters. (No doubt good writer’s research for his two erotic novels.) His succinct philosophy, shorn of all the philosophical claptrap: “There is nothing dependable but drinking, eating, living, loving and sleeping.” Somehow all that living, loving, etc. did not interfere with his day job editing the monumental 28-volume, 20 million-word illustrated Encyclopédie.
His sometime friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great Romantic, agreed. Civilized societies with their religion-based ethics, he held, enslaved men and perverted them from their “crude but natural” morality based on immediate desires and needs. Rousseau’s own desires and needs would have barred him from polite society anywhere but Holbach’s group. They ranged from obsessively describing how he had watched a man “manipulating himself” to seeking after women willing to spank him. (His subtle technique consisted of haunting alleys and dropping his pants to moon likely prospects.)
To his credit, even the unbalanced Rousseau was uncomfortable with bleak reason as the only basis for a philosophy of life, without meaning or spirituality of any kind. Increasingly paranoid and given to rages, convinced that Holbach and Diderot were plotting to destroy his reputation, he broke with them. Voltaire, a moderate deist, was also wary of godlessness for his own reasons: as he said, he wanted his servants to believe in God so they wouldn’t rob him blind, and his wife to be pious so he wouldn’t be cuckolded.
No matter. Holbach’s well-fed coterie became the dreaming flower children of the 18th century. Their favorite hallucination was a brave new world where, as Blom sympathetically explains, “desire, erotic and otherwise, would make their world beautiful and rich.… In this godless universe there would be no more sin, no reward or punishment in an afterlife, only the search for pleasure and fear of pain.” Just as today’s New Atheists are opinionated and preachy, the hard-core Paris Enlightenment scorned those who disagreed. Edward Gibbon, though a skeptic, was revolted by the “intolerant zeal” of the philosophes, who “preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt.”
To be sure, Europe’s Enlightenment was an important development in Western intellectual, moral, and political history. Its critique of the arbitrary, authoritarian state and demand for individual freedom led to nothing less than the French and American revolutions with their insistence on the right to self-government. Most mainstream Enlightenment thinkers had the good sense to distrust the human and social implications of the more radical philosophes’ ideas.
But some of those ideas lent themselves to disastrous distortion. Rousseau’s utopian notions of an ideal society ultimately based on ideological manipulation and political oppression were later used by totalitarian lunatics. Maximilien Robespierre seized on them to justify brutally de-Christianizing France during the revolution and controlling its population with state-sponsored terror. In the 20th century Lenin and Cambodia’s murderous Pol Pot, who studied Rousseau in Paris in the 1950s, cherry-picked his philosophy of a society based on guilt and paranoia.
Ironically, the radicals of the French Revolution rejected the two arch-radicals of the Enlightenment. Robespierre and his Jacobin henchmen found the notions of God and religion, grotesquely secularized into the Goddess of Reason and worship of an abstract Supreme Being, more useful in manipulating the citizenry than outright atheism. Thus it was that the remains of Holbach and Diderot finished not in Paris’s Pantheon, final resting place of France’s official Great Men, but in unknown graves, their paeans to godlessness forgotten.
About the Author
Joseph A. Harriss is The American Spectator’s Paris correspondent. His latest book, An American Spectator in Paris, was released this fall.
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Robert Pinkerton| 2.22.11 @ 7:08AM
Gaetano Mosca, in his The Ruling Class, lays the blame for paternity of modern socialism at Jean-Jacques Rousseau's doorstep.
Durant tells us that Rousseau was an enthusiastic admirer of Plato.
Tom A.| 2.23.11 @ 2:47PM
Regarding 18th Century Enlightenment and its spawn, it is useful to recognize the Enlightenment’s incubation period, the entire 17th Century. For example, the immensely influential Parisian intellectual, Ninon de Lenclos, born 1620, imbibed Epicureanism – quick definition: optimize pleasure, pain – as a young girl from her father, lived as an Epicurean, and was a spiritual libertine. She permanently took the side of her atheist father against the religiosity of her mother, during her early teens. What distinguishes the pre-Enlightenment figures such as Ninon and her salon’s circle is a relative absence of hostility to religion, acceptance of believers, and social integration of the clergy. Compare this 17th-Century laissez-faire indifference to the later Enlightened, tail-biting aggression of the ambiguous Voltaire upon the religion of Euler, court mathematician to Frederick the Great. This tail biting seems to have been passed down to us -- on steroids.
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 7:23AM
God's dying again. This time the sword is the internet.
How to explain the decline of criminality in the face of so many more non-believers? Could it be that enlightened self-interest is the driver..the golden rule is its own reward?
Kelly Staples| 2.22.11 @ 7:40AM
"A Wicked Company" sounds like a wonderful read - many thanks for the heads-up. "The Portable Atheist" edited by Christopher Hitchens is worth a look as well. Enjoy.
Frisbee| 2.23.11 @ 12:58PM
Try "Atheist Delusions" by David Bentley Hart.
crooked wren| 2.22.11 @ 8:45AM
Ah. What will the Caliphate do to those who have embraced haute-ish atheism?
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 9:19AM
nothing. what will the tea party do to atheists?
do you find it disquieting that your enemies share your views on just about any social issue extant?
W| 2.22.11 @ 12:25PM
If you believe that the muslims will tolerate your atheism, but the tea party will not, then you should move to iran or egypt or saudi arabia
Stephanie| 2.22.11 @ 4:01PM
He/she doesn't have the balls to do that. Only in America where they can safely spew their filth and "beliefs". I feel truely sorry for you who have nothing to guide your sorry lives by but your own ego. But as a Tea Party member, I respect your right to do just that.
Quartermaster| 2.22.11 @ 7:34PM
Care to cite a few examples of those social issues? I'd bet a lot that we share little.
The Bruce| 2.23.11 @ 2:09AM
The Tea Party will do nothing to atheists, as they respect your right to religious freedom. Do your own thing, as long as it doesn't impose on the liberty of your neighbors.
On the other hand, Muslims, all of whom I assume are religious, are committing crimes against each other under the guise of Sunni vs. Shiite (My god is better than your god). Once they get done killing each other, I wonder how long it will take before they set their sites on the "godless" societies.
Oh wait, they've already done that. It seems they're capable of multitasking.
Liberals will run to their new-found god (the State), which will be ineffectual and "tolerant" whilst believers in true personal liberty will have to pick up the slack (and a rifle) and do the job that "some Americans aren't willing to do."
The unfortunate result of this is that spineless, cowardly liberals will still exist here. And they'll still remain in denial of the forces that almost killed them. But, hey, it'll still be a free country after all.
Alert1201| 2.22.11 @ 9:50AM
Funny, as soon as an article comes out regarding the subject of atheism the Atheistic Church of the Loons come out in full force with their canned responses.
Frisbee| 2.23.11 @ 12:57PM
Ha! You hit the nail on the head, Alert1201.
Petronius| 2.22.11 @ 9:57AM
I'm happy you asked. To all those now indulging in predatory, perverse, and parasitic behaviors: cease and desist, or you will no longer live here. Of atheism: all prohibitions they have enacted to the display of Christian images and practice of Christian service at any general public assembly will be repealed. And all religious activities taking place on public school properties will be controlled by local school boards, not Federal Judges. Atheists may continue to believe whatever they please, but any overt abuse against any other person of any faith for such cause may be classified as "hate crime".
Brian Mc| 2.22.11 @ 11:43AM
I smirk just before I say a little prayer for Atheists. The absence of religion is a religion: I say that the state of this absence is offensive and needs to be banned. In other words, I find it offensive that you are offended by my beliefs. Is it because you are offended more, that your disgruntlement is justified and mine is not?
Quartermaster| 2.22.11 @ 7:35PM
Atheists are among the most religious people on the face of the planet. Atheism is, indeed , a religion.
The Bruce| 2.23.11 @ 2:23AM
I wouldn't go as far as your last sentence, but there seems to be an inconvenient clause in the 1st Amendment that the left always ignores... "or prohibit the practice thereof."
mophat| 2.23.11 @ 4:26AM
2 shay!
Psychmstr | 2.22.11 @ 10:24AM
Harriss offers a good review but would have improved it considerably had he omitted the snarky attitudinizing against reason and the consequent a-theism of rational people.
There is no necessary connection between rejecting religion and embracing totalitarian ideology; a reasonable man would see much that is complimentary between embracing force as the main instrument of securing faith, whether in religion or in some secularized substitute for faith.
The alternative to faith of any kind is reason and experience.
Harriss apparently does not grasp that alternative, since he evidently accepts beliefs on the basis of faith.
KyMouse| 2.22.11 @ 2:54PM
Psychmstr, Christian faith is built on a solid foundation of reason. Unlike religions which claim that their god(s) lived in an unspecified place during an unspecified time in the mists of prehistory, Christianity says that a certain Person, Jesus, lived in certain towns in Israel during several specific decades in history. We even know some of the actual buildings in which He walked and interacted with people (e.g. the Temple in Jerusalem).
Jesus, who claimed to be God, told His followers that He would be executed in order to pay for the sins of all who would put their faith in Him. When He was executed, His disciples became discouraged. But somehow, He vanished from His tomb, in spite of the fact that it was guarded by Roman soldiers.
Within days, His downhearted followers claimed to have seen Him in the flesh, and became fearless proclaimers of His words, even though they knew that they themselves would probably be executed. One of them (Paul) had previously hated Christians and persecuted them. Another (Thomas) had vowed not to believe in His resurrection unless he put his fingers into the nailprints on Jesus’ hands.
For Jesus’ enemies to disprove His resurrection, all they needed to do was display His dead body to the public. If Jesus had escaped His grave somehow, He would have been so weak and bloodied from His crucifixion that He wouldn’t have fooled anyone into believing that He had miraculously risen from the dead. And His disciples, who had been ready to give up after His crucifixion, wouldn’t have suddenly become joyful proclaimers of His message. But they did.
What happened to change these people? It is reasonable to believe that it was something spectacular. If God could create the universe, He could live as a human being and die. And He could rise from the dead.
The denial of these accounts usually begins with the doubters refusal to believe in miracles. That’s prejudice, not reason.
Quartermaster| 2.22.11 @ 7:38PM
Theology was known as the Queen of sciences. Modern Science was born of Christianity. The previous serious attempt at Science was in Athens, and it was still born.
The foundation of Science was the realization that God was reasonable, and that his creation could be known through reason. Atheists engage in a sordid form of historical revisionism when they say that Christianity is anti-Science.
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 10:38AM
Can't think of any prohibitions enacted by atheists, Petroneus..and when you speak of perverse parasitism, do you include diddling young boys?
Frisbee| 2.22.11 @ 10:04PM
Hitler knew Rohm was a homosexual, but insisted that he not be with young boys.
Let's draw up a list of known atheist institutions and see what they prohibit. Let's start with Red China.
The Bruce| 2.23.11 @ 2:36AM
"Can't think of any prohibitions enacted by atheists"
Besides any religious display within the public square? Especially during a religious holiday like Christmas?
Hell, if a Christian child reads a Bible during recess at a public school, the Book is confiscated and the child faces suspension. The same child could be reading the Koran (sp) and is held up as a hero.
Most of you aren't really atheist (at least not politically). You're just anti-Christian. If a couple of Muslims showed up to your door and asked if you'd like to convert, you'd likely tuck your tail between your legs and submit out of fear.
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 12:13PM
Brian mc, if you want to live a life of delusion, knock yourself out. I'm not offended by your faith, just bemused.
I can't think of any atheists ever calling someone a heretic..
W| 2.22.11 @ 12:27PM
Atheists like Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler, etc did not call others who disagreed heretics, they just killed them.
don't care if you are an atheist, but show some intelligence.
Seek| 2.22.11 @ 5:22PM
Communism warred against private property; atheism was a sidebar issue. Nazism was about racial nationalism as collective triumph of the will; most of the Nazi leaders, including Hitler, were Catholics. Nice try, though.
W| 2.22.11 @ 6:02PM
They may have been born Catholics, but they were not Catholics in their life. You know that if you read any history. Why the lie, Seek? The triumph of the will was based on atheism, that there is no God, and man can be the Superman. Dont need you uninformed condescension.
RCV| 2.22.11 @ 7:04PM
In no way was Hitler a Catholic. Catholic priests and nuns were among the regular targets of Nazi oppression.
JmsA| 2.22.11 @ 7:30PM
Blut und Boden: Blood and Soil was the Nazis' religion, not Catholicism.
Quartermaster| 2.22.11 @ 7:40PM
Hitler was not a Roman Catholic, he was a Pagan, having adopted the ancient Germanic pantheon.
Stalin, OToH, was indeed a staunch anti-Christian Atheist.
As to your assertion of Nazism was, you are utterly ignorant.
Frisbee| 2.22.11 @ 10:07PM
"sidebar issue"? Didn't Marx label religion "the opiate of the people"?
Any Nazi's that were "catholic" were even less "catholic" than Nancy Pelosi. Learn the difference between "apostate", "nominal", and "true believer".
Frisbee| 2.23.11 @ 12:54PM
Hitler was catholic by birth, but atheist by choice.
The Bruce| 2.23.11 @ 2:41AM
YSW, just think of how "bemused" the rest of us will be when you find yourself praying to God when you find yourself on your death bed.
There's an old saying, "there are no atheists in a foxhole." When faced with your own death, even you will pull your head out of your ass at the last minute, even if it's only because you're playing the "what if" game in your head.
Peace.
Petronius| 2.22.11 @ 12:36PM
Pedophilia is also predatory. Predatory behavior is criminal.
fundamentalist| 2.22.11 @ 12:46PM
Harris: "But some of those ideas lent themselves to disastrous distortion."
No. Atheists merely took those ideas to their logical conclusion. One such logical conclusion was eugenics. Hayek shows how the "enlightenment" gave birth to socialism in his "The Counter-Revolution in Science."
Socialism led directly to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim, the killing fields of Cambodia and many other mass murderers.
Socialists of all stripes murdered over a hundred million people in the 20th century, making it the bloodiest in the history of mankind.
And the "enlightenment" was not an era of reason at all, but of false rationality, as Hayek called it in his last book "The Fatal Conceit."
The Tiger| 2.24.11 @ 6:02PM
Not to rain on your parade or anything, but I'm an atheist and I fail to see how eugenics and socialism are logical conclusions of Darwinsim. If you take Darwin's theories to their logical conclusions than it easily becomes apparent that variety is the course that best allows a species to survive, as in disaster situations those in the population best suited will continue to thrive continuing the species. Even so, you still need the others in the gene pool in order to prevent nastier problems like "In-breeding." From that perspective, eugenics is a DUMB idea because it artificially and arbitrarily selects out variations that might one day prove beneficial without consideration of the consequences aside from "well, he's not one of the pretty people."
And yes, the enlightenment did give birth to socialism, but it also produced concepts like the Republic in the form that it was produced in the original thirteen United States. Many people seem to forget that we are actually in a republic even though change has caused ours to be terribly watered down.
In my opinion the enlightenment gave us some incredible stuff, much of which had been started on before the Dark Ages and then got lost after the fall of Rome. It gave us physics, philosophy, advanced mathematics, and methods of thinking critically.
Sure it may have pumped out a few duds. But the enlightenment was still awesome. If you want to know what socialism truly is, it isn't just an atheist thing. There are socialist aspects even in religions like Catholicism and Islam (in the former mostly because the liberal movement has co-opted it in places and the latter due to the poor tax which is instigated on everyone when charity should be by choice.)
If you boil it down to it's base elements, socialism is the failure to see man (yes, I use the generic he) as an individual with the ability to reason in favor of a mindless animal subject to nothing more than group think. This is why so many liberals and religious leaders hate Ayn Rand so much, because she puts so much emphasis on the importance of one's mind and the ability to make one's own judgments in her philosophy.
Socialism resulted in some wicked horrible stuff. I know what happened in China and Cambodia, and I am well aware of what's going on in North Korea right now, but I tend to think people find it all to easy to attach Socialism to Atheism when in fact they are two completely different ideas, that if used logically, should be incompatible as the renunciation of blind faith should extend to blind faith in a government or ruling party. The Republic serves an important and vital purpose, but an atheist who believes in the arbitrary power of a socialist state and that it should have the ability to dictate the right way to think is no atheist, but a brainless buffoon.
I apologize for the length of this response.
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 1:13PM
W, Hitler was no atheist..don't know or care if the others you cite were. I don't believe that priests who molest altar boys really believe in eternal damnation; do you? Let's stay on point.
W| 2.22.11 @ 1:46PM
Read some history, Hitler was an atheist, the Nazi party was atheistic. You don't know about Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao? Learn some history and current events before you post your opinions. The point is the morality of atheists, or did you miss that also? When you have no facts or arguments, throw in the "priests" as a response. Nobody is defending abusive priests, we are discussing the atheists, remember?
Stephanie| 2.22.11 @ 4:09PM
Kind of like throwing up GW's name every time anyone criticizes obama.
And Catholic priests molesting children has nothing to do with the protestant religion, You Said What. Don't lump all Christian religions into the same bowl.
RCV| 2.22.11 @ 7:07PM
Catholic priests molesting children has nothing to do with the Catholic religion either.
The Bruce| 2.23.11 @ 3:00AM
YSW, you're partially right. Hitler believed in the ultimate supremacy of the state and the Reich, not a "god." That disqualifies him as an atheist, as true atheism is the disbelieve in anything supreme.
Only a true nihilist believes in nothing, and is therefore the only true atheist.
Therefore, socialists and communists are religious in their own rite (to the state).
George LeS| 2.22.11 @ 1:13PM
The trouble with this review is that it accepts the proposition that, because the philosophes proclaimed themselves voices of reason, they actually were so. Only a few of the commentators seem to have noticed this.
I don't know why this is. We see, every day, people like Obama & Gore make this claim, and for the most part, we recognize its fatuity. For some reason, this clarity disappears when confronted with Atheism. Well, at least those who err so are in good company; even Edmund Burke slipped here.
But the answer is not Tertullian, but Aquinas and Hooker. One note which distinguishes the truely from the merely professedly rational, is that the former recognize that opinions springing from solitary observation and reflexion are seldom, in the first instance, correct. They are willing to learn from others, that is, to check their thinking here, just as they would in math. The pseudo-rationalists are always sure to enclose themselves in a self-reinforcing group. A salon, one might say.
Kent D (Omaha)| 2.22.11 @ 2:03PM
Recently I read a brief history of France (La Belle France, by Alistair Horne). I was struck by the coincidence (?) of the enthronement of "reason", and the horrific savagery of those revolutionary months. At times I felt like I was reading about atrocities perpetrated by religious fanatics in some third-world country -- beheadings, people torn limb from limb by angry mobs, and tortures too terrible to recount. It certainly demonstrated Europe, and mankind, at a very low point.
I am well aware of the statistician's principle that "correlation does not imply causation". But when I hear the modern-day atheist elite waging their polemical jihad against God, I remember the goddess of Reason leading pompous Enlightenment parades through the blood-bathed streets of Paris. And I want to ask Richard Dawkins and his ilk, "Atheism as a social foundation has already been tried by the French. How did that work out for them?"
The Bruce| 2.23.11 @ 3:14AM
And we saw what the French Revolution led to... Napoleon.
This is the fundamental difference between a Republic and a Democracy. Our founders understood the dangers of a "democracy" which is why they founded a Republic (and they explained the differences between the two).
Sadly, most of the uneducated class don't understand the important difference between the two. And that "class" involves many with higher education. Even our politicians describe our government as a "democracy" now. How badly the American people have devolved.
In my day, even those with an eighth grade education understood more about our system of government than the supposedly "educated" now. Most of the "educated" now can't even name how many branches of government we have, or what they're called.
How far the apple has fallen from the tree...
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 2:05PM
W, read some history yourself. Ever hear of "Gott mit uns"? [didn't spellcheck] "God is with us".....
Anyway, what's the relevance to THIS thread? We're discussing whether God exists; what's your proof? As Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
bob alou| 2.22.11 @ 2:21PM
And exactly what extraordinary evidence did Sagan provide for the extraordinary claim that something that is common coin for every time, every civilization and billions of people living today, believe, namely that there is a God who is worthy of worship and praise, is extraordinary? It would seem to me that those who hold the atheistic view are the ones who have to prove the negative.
W| 2.22.11 @ 3:26PM
Carl Sagan? Is that the best you can do?
seriously, if you want to learn about proof of the existence of God, read Anthony Flew,"
There is a God." he was an atheist and discusses all the arguments that you may have. There are many books, start with Thomas Aquinas, Dinesh D'Souza,Armand Nichol on Freud and CS Lewis.
But you are not really interested in a serious discussion, are you? If you are discussing atheists, then you do not believe that discussion of famous atheists such Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro, and their accomplishments are not relevant? Why, because you do not know what they have done, or your are trying to hide what they have done, or you want to ignore what they did?
Your posts are juvenile, at best. Go read, learn, the post.
Quartermaster| 2.22.11 @ 7:50PM
"Gott mit uns" on Wehrmacht belt buckles was a hold over from Wilhelmine Germany.
I long ago quit arguing God with Atheists. A man whose ignorance is intentional, who accepts no evidence, except that which he claims as such, is not a man of reason as he claims, but is merely an opaque individual with little claim on the time of anyone willing to reason and learn. There is a good reason why the Psalmist said "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." The Apostle Paul, who was quite familiar with the foolishness going on in Athens also said, "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools...."
Paul knew Atheists quite well, and described them very accurately.
"You Said What" is a troll and a fool.
W| 2.22.11 @ 9:23PM
excellent post, Quartermaster
The Bruce| 2.23.11 @ 3:20AM
And if they believe in their own dogma they represent an obscure, defective minority and, through natural selection, will simply breed themselves out of existence.
Patience.
Jeamar37| 2.22.11 @ 8:40PM
YSW: All of the sudden this thread you are so invested in is about the existence of God. It seems from your previous comments, you are already a committed atheist who wants to promote the "spiritual" advantages of being so. You are the one who seems to have gotten off-thread.
mophat| 2.23.11 @ 4:44AM
When we are ready and trully need the answers / proof, they appear and we are grateful and amazed that they were always there...and it will be extra-ordinary and dare i say...super......natural!
SoMuchForRousseau| 2.22.11 @ 2:06PM
Hilter was no atheist????? True if Race or Aryanism is one's god. Read "Bonhoeffer" for an in-depth view of the complexities of Nazi thought and actions concerning religion and see how false this comment is.
Slavery would probably have never been abolished without the revival of a traditional Christian religion in England in the same time period (later enlightenment).
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 2:24PM
You're deflecting. Hitler's beliefs aren't germaine to this thread.
Stephanie| 2.22.11 @ 4:12PM
Won't you be suprised when it's time for you to cross over.
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.22.11 @ 2:35PM
bob alou, all religious beliefs are equally valid? What of those who believe in many gods? Are they right, by dint of number? We used to believe the sun orbited the earth, and any number of follies.
Pope John Paul was terrified that science would discover a Unifying Theory; I favor science over willful ignorance.
W| 2.22.11 @ 3:27PM
Has science found this unifying theory?
Tina B| 2.22.11 @ 4:54PM
I know it sounds too simple, but the Unifying Theory that Einstein and every physicist (whether quantum or nano) since then has been seeking can be found in the BOOK.
The real story of man, his creation and purpose, and the unifying theory of our universe such as we know it, is that it is all for His glory. The Lord our God is One. He is revealed on earth as Jesus Christ, by means of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us, and through His Word. That's unifying enough for me.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if when I meet God, He has universes revolving and rotating around Him as the center, and they are all living and glorifying Him. Living universes.
Similar to our solar system, as well as the tiny atom. Fractals reveal these relationships in mathematical pictures of beauty.
Just some thoughts about your "unifying theory" my little atheists. What are your thoughts about it?
At least those of us who believe, and live according to this belief, have a template for our lives. We fill it in with the choices we make, but we certainly have a raison d'etre. What's yours?
Seek| 2.22.11 @ 5:26PM
What you've described is not a theory.
Vegas Strippers | 2.22.11 @ 5:31PM
Reading the article and the commentary, one is struck that intolerance may be stronger than both reason and faith. Why can't "Enlightenment" come in different forms. To some through faith and others by "reason". I work in an industry where we face intolerance every day. It is a shame to encounter the same among the Spectator audience.
Tina B| 2.22.11 @ 5:53PM
Seek, you are correct. I knew that ;-)
Vegas,
The Light (of real Enlightenment) reveals only the Truth. There is but one truth. It is not relative.
To disagree is not to be intolerant. It is to disagree.
If you "seek" truth by being enlightened, if anyone does, the Truth is there, and it will set you free.
Like KyMouse, my belief or my faith is based also in reason. I am a thinker, and I question. . . and I have found the answer. And to me, those who haven't, well I can shine my little flashlight their way. We can. I love TAS for this forum.
We can agree to disagree, but many of us must call the Truth, the Truth. Not intolerance, just facts.
mjfin| 2.22.11 @ 7:29PM
The reanimation of Western religion in the coming century will depend on the very hard work of achieving a synthesis between science and evangelical Christianity. It will require the emergence of intelligent, scholarly theologians who simultaneously reject the pallid, weak traditional religions - e.g., the Church of England, liberal Episcopalians - from which people are departing in droves, while absorbing, and accepting, down to its last deterministic fiber, the lessons of modern science.
That would combine the passion, joy and faith of middle American participatory religion, while rejecting the creationist heresies that would transform God into a miniature Harry Potter magician, squatting microscopically over the DNA of ancestral species, to diddle the chemical base pairs in order to fix the mistakes made by natural selection.
This is a tall order, but might be done . . .
Quartermaster| 2.22.11 @ 7:54PM
Creationist heresies? What a laugh. How little you know of science. *REAL* real science.
For the record, I am a scientist and make my living in its daily application. There is no conflict between settled science and Christianity. The conflict comes from fools that elevate science to the position of their god and then turn about and reject science as a result.
That last sentence is not contradictory. It is exactly what morons like Sagan, Meyer and Dawkins have done. They are/were charlatans.
mjfin| 2.23.11 @ 1:30AM
Quartermaster:
For the record, I am a scientist as well.
I agree with you in this respect. There is no conflict between settled science and Christianity. But one of reasons that religion is losing ground today is the selective rejection of its theories by Christians who have been taught to believe that accepting - say - evolutionary theory, is a threat to Christian faith. It is not a threat. And Christians who profess a creationist approach to the origin of species are in part responsible for the rejection of Christianity by young, intelligent people with a sound scientific education.
Creationists are not part of settled science, and do promote heresy.
They do this by denying the explanatory role of evolution, which indeed is responsible for the origin of species. To deny this ultimately requires believing that natural selection, which operates because of accidental (but constrained) modifications to genetic material (DNA) do not occur, or that these changes occur, but are ineffective in causing speciation. In one case DNA is immutable. This is heretical. In the other, it requires that God acts as I have described, as a microscopic squatting magician. Both are heresies.
Fortunately Christianity is perfectly compatible with evolution, and the rest of science, and creationists and creation science in fact do real damage with their arguments by creating the impression that to be a Christians means to deny scientific theory which (superficially) appears to threaten faith.
Sagan, Dawkins and Hitchens are neither morons, nor charlatans, but they are not serious men with respect to religious arguments. They tend to believe that creationist views of the origin of species are fundamental to Christian belief. This is unfortunate since A) creationist views of that sort are trivial to refute, and B) these views have nothing to do with God or Christianity. As a result, these guys sometimes look like cheap-shot partisans who pick off the low hanging fruit generated by generally ignorant, semi-educated fundamentalists.
W| 2.23.11 @ 8:05AM
I agree that Christianity is compatible with science. Your statement that evolution explains the origin of life is not correct. Evolution may explain what happens once the original life was created by the changes. There must be something to evolve from, and science cannot yet explain credibly the origin, the first life. Nor can evolution explain why, if that occured, man separated from the apes. You may have your argument, but you cannot prove the why.
The most plausible explanation I have read is that God created the first life with the code or program to evolve to other life or organisms.
Can, you as a scientist, explain credibly how the first life came about?
mjfin| 2.23.11 @ 2:15PM
W:
I did not say that evolution based on the modification of DNA explains the origin of life. I said that evolution (of that type) explains the origin of (different) species. This would include the evolution of man from lower apes. Speciation (generation of new species) operates through modification of DNA.
As for the origins of life: well we are close.
Life originated prior to the existence of DNA through the geological assembly of the primitive chemicals that make up living cells, such as amino acids, lipids (fats) and other components that serve in living cells as the subcomponents of proteins, cell membranes, DNA, and other structures.
To describe one small part of this process, it turns out that ordinary natural geological processes can easily make essentially ALL of these subcomponents of life. I have made many of them myself in a few hours under laboratory conditions that mimic those thought to exist on the primitive earth. When you shake them together in water they have remarkable properties: they can be made to form microscope cellular structures. These primitive (non-living) cells grow from nutrients in the water, can bud and split (divide) forming new cells, and can maintain an electric potential across their membranes (like real cells), which selectively restricts access into and out of the cell to chemicals.
More recently, Craig Venter (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter) one of the pioneers who sequenced human DNA, has generated a completely synthetic DNA molecule of his own design, made from ordinary off-the-shelf chemicals, that when inserted into bacterial shells went on to reproduce.
These new creatures made (mainly) from laboratory chemicals and engineered DNA are forming the basis of completely new and novel life-forms and are expected to form the basis of a new commercial industry. It is also potentially dangerous, as you can imagine.
So it appears that the Universe is structured or predisposed to operate on the chemical components within it to create conditions that are extraordinarily favorable to the creation and evolution of life. Through evolution and ordinary chemical processes, living creatures are generated in the image of God. I do not find any of these scientific events threatening to Christian faith in any way whatsoever.
W| 2.23.11 @ 5:30PM
interesting,but:
1. Venter added chemicals to bacteria. He did not produce bacteria. Venter, also through his company, Celera, tried to patent for his commercial benefit genes.
2. why is the universe so predisposed and favorable to evolution and life? was it planned this way?
I agree with most of what you said, but science cannot explain how life started.
Do you believe in the big bang theory?
Why did man separate or evolve from the apes? do you believe it was by chance as many atheistic evolutionists do?
mjfin| 2.24.11 @ 4:39PM
W:
To answer your comments:
1) Venter did more than "add chemicals to bacteria". He generated, in a test tube, an intact, working, artificial DNA molecule of his design. DNA gives a cell all the information (a blueprint) for how to make all the parts of the cell. He made bacterial shells by removing their DNA, and then placed his new DNA molecule into them. This new bacteria-like organism then operated under the instructions of the new DNA.
Bacteria are complex, but we can make most of their subcomponents in the laboratory. I myself have made cell membrane stand-ins for those made by bacteria. But DNA is the most complex of them. Because of Venter (and others) we now have the ability to make laboratory DNA molecules that include all the information needed for a cell to function and reproduce.
It is only a matter of time before scientists can make complete living cells (i.e., including bacterial shell parts) from common chemicals made by ordinary geological processes.
And what man can do in the lab, geological processes operating for millions of years on the primitive earth can also do, through trial and error.
2) The short answer to your question is yes, I think the Universe was planned this way, but "planning" is kind of an inadequate word. A more formal way of putting it is that the laws of physics in existence from the beginning of our Universe structure it in a way that channels (makes more probable) physical processes that favor the production of living things.
And not just any living things. Our kind of living things.
3) Big bang. Not a question whether I "believe" in it or not. The physical evidence that the Universe was created in a Big Bang is persuasive, and I accept that theory based on this evidence until something better comes along.
4) Chance as the explanation for origin of humans from apes. The explanation for the evolution of man from apes goes something like this:
A) small groups (tribes?) of pre-human apes were forced out of their happy jungle environment onto African grasslands by changing climatic conditions. The new environment was very dangerous and challenging for these ancestors of ours.
NOTE: By small group I mean REALLY small. DNA evidence strongly supports the conclusion that ALL human beings are descendants of a single proto-human female ancestor (Eve?).
B) All groups of animals (like these apes) show random variations in intelligence, running speed, posture, etc.
C) The new environment favored physical traits like walking upright, running long distance without overheating, communications, tribal cohesiveness, specialization between male and female, etc. that are human characteristics.
D) Offspring with the favored (human-like) traits preferentially survived. Those less favored were eaten by animals or starved.
E) Over time a population of these ape-men gradually changed so that more and more of these human-like characters appeared in the population. This is called evolution through natural selection. It occurs most rapidly in very small populations placed under the severe stress of a new environment.
Something like this undoubtedly happened. Evolution did not occur through random chance, although changes in DNA structure - mutation - were random, and produced offspring with differing abilities to survive.
Note the very powerful role the new environment had on these proto-humans, effectively of channeling or constraining the evolution of these creatures into new ones with more human characteristics.
But it took a specialized environment and ape-like creatures predisposed for the leap to humanity for it to occur.
kingsmill| 2.22.11 @ 8:43PM
Hitler's faith was in naturalism. He worshipped at the altar of scientific materialism. He hoped to apply Darwinism to all aspects of life.
" We follow not Christ, but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and Holy Water,
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth. "
"National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things."
"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure. "
"The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that's why someday its structure will collapse.... ...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.... Christianity the liar.... We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. "
"Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eight century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. The Germanic peoples would have become the heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire."
Tony in Central PA| 2.22.11 @ 10:06PM
From the assertions of people like Rousseau, Voltaire and various modern atheists, one would think that freed from the shackles of Christianity, Europe would develop into a Utopian society where human potential would be dramatically expanded. Hasn't quite worked out that way, has it ?
cdc| 2.22.11 @ 11:00PM
It's not a handful of modern authors or a bunch of dead philosophers that are causing increases in the numbers of atheists, agnostics or nonreligious; heck the vast majority has not opened a book by Dawkins any more than one by Voltaire or Rosseau.
Christianity or other religions do not provide persuasive arguments or evidence of the supernatural. The most effective solution would be government funded churches and religious propagandizing (see the currency) and punishing (fines, prison, torture, etc) anyone who publicly disagrees by word or action with official doctrine.
Sure this is alien to the constitution and resembles modern china, but whats a little tyrany if its for the greater good?
YOU SAID WHAT?| 2.23.11 @ 2:07AM
I'm not a scientist. I don't deify the Unified Theory; I stated that the Pope was terrified that it would make itself manifest. What does that say of the Holy See?
I personally believe the wellspring of all religion is as follows: 1- Someday, I will die. 2- I mustn't die. God didn't create man, man created God.
George LeS| 2.23.11 @ 10:23AM
What is your source for the assertion that JPII was "terrified" of the UT?
darcy | 2.23.11 @ 12:11PM
Good article. Not to nitpick, but it seems a little odd to see Rousseau referred to as the "father of Romanticism," not just here but seemingly everywhere. Kant was the father of Romanticism. If anything, Rousseau was a precursor of the Nihilism that followed.
Michael| 2.23.11 @ 5:06PM
Slop. Harriss writes as if lurid adjectives and dramatic adverbs are themselves arguments. Ideas which depend not on content but upon attitude colonize the minds of simpletons. Just so here.
Reebok | 8.11.11 @ 3:06AM
is good