Back to Previous Page

Download this Article

Edward Jayne
January, 2000

1. Primary Sources--Ancient Civilization.

Many so-called primitive societies apparently lacked a clear and definable religious faith when first observed by missionaries and anthropologists. These included Tasmanians, Aetas and Negritos of the Philippines, Yaghans of Tierra del Fuego, the Veddahs of Ceylon, and African Bushmen. Most of them quickly assimilated religious practices once exposed to the possibility, but at the very beginning they were reported to have lacked a coherent belief system as well as could be fathomed by competent observers (see McCabe's A RATIONALIST ENCYCLOPAEDIA, pp. 410-11, and Buchner's FORCE AND MATTER, pp. 301-15).

On the other hand, only a handful of advanced civilizations seem to have tolerated atheism, skepticism, and heresies that challenged orthodox belief. Relatively brief periods of religious tolerance seem to have occurred in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and longer periods in India and China as well as ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Arab society, and modern Western Civilization. As early as the twenty fourth century, B.C., for example, a relatively high level of tolerance would be suggested in ancient Sumeria and Babylonia by the oral epic of GILGAMESH, in which Gilgamesh murders the nature demigod Humbaba, rejects the advances of the goddess Ishtar, and slaughters a Bull of Heaven symbolic of divine authority, then fails to achieve eternal life or even the advanced knowledge exactly when he can expect to die. Likewise, the carpe diem "Song of the Harper," advocating to enjoy life while it's still possible, would suggest that Egypt enjoyed comparable sophistication during the reign of Emperor Amenhotep III (father of Ikhnaton) in the sixteenth century, B.C.

Major eastern religious sects with an atheistic emphasis at least during their inception have included both Taoism and Confucianism in China--Lao-Tse (c. 614 B.C) by having emphasized materialist determinism in the life cycle, Confucius (551-479 B.C.) by having totally avoided the issue of religion. The same may be said of the Ajivikas sect of Buddhism and the Samkhya system of Hinduism in India. Ancient Indian atheists included Uddalaka and Makkali Gosali during the sixth century B.C.; and ancient Chinese atheists included Yang Chu, Hsu"-tzu, and Wang Chong respectively during the fourth and third centuries, B.C., and first century A.D. Likewise important at a later time were Tominaga and Ando in Japan during the eighteenth century, A.D. It should be stressed, however, that there has been no cumulative advance in secular philosophy among any of these non-western societies that has lasted more than a century or two. Brief periods of enlightenment have occurred, but these have degenerated into uninterrupted periods of traditional orthodoxy.

Though a secular perspective has swept most of the world over the past two hundred years, it may be asserted with relative confidence that this derives not from the resurrection of any of the indigenous non-western secular traditions that came to an end many centuries ago, but from the impact of western science and technology linked with western tradition's cultural advances. In contrast, western civilization itself began twenty-six hundred years ago with almost ten centuries of remarkable secular achievement from the sixth century, B.C., to the fourth century, A.D. This was followed by Europe's Dark and Middle Ages that occupied at least an entire millenium from the fourth to the mid-fifteenth century, A.D., during which a period of high Arab civilization filled the gap for not more than four hundred years between the eighth and early twelfth centuries. Beginning with the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, secular achievement has survived the seventeenth century religious wars and advanced to entirely new levels, even in the United States despite its current obsession with its presumably unadulterated Christian heritage.

Both Hesiod and Homer (c. 750 B.C.) of Greece preceded western secular history, and their texts, including Homer's two epics THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, can be interpreted as theodicies to justify the authority of ancient Greek gods. Only two of Homer's minor characters challenged this orthodoxy, Thersites in Book 2 of THE ILIAD and Eurylochos in Book 12 of THE ODYSSEY, and both were treated with contempt as envious commoners who defied aristocrats who were appropriately dutiful to the gods. It is useful, in fact, to think of high Greek civilization as having thrived as a rejection of Homeric mythology.

The first documented freethinkers of western tradition were pre-Socratic materialists, beginning with the Milesian philosopher Thales (c. 636-546 B.C.), who proposed that water is the material "stuff" of the universe. Anaximenes substituted air for water, and Anaximander (c. 611-547 B.C.) proposed an as-yet unidentified "non-limited" substance arche, as well as suggesting biological evolution. Later pre-Socratic materialists included Heraclitus (c.535-475 B.C.), who identified arche as relentless strife symbolized by fire, Parmenides (b. c. 515 B.C.), who described it as an indivisible continuity of light and night, Leucippus and Democritus (c. 460-370 B.C.), who described it as a field of atomic particles suspended in a void, Empedocles (c. 495-35 B.C.) who described it as a mixture of earth, air, fire and water dominated by the perpetual struggle between love and hate, and Anaxorgas (c. 500-428 B.C.), who suggested many as yet undetermined elements, all of which are present in varying combinations in every portion of reality. Unfortunately, Anaxorgas also suggested nous as cosmic mind, and this became pure spirit for Plato, and later, and indirectly, a prototype for the Holy Ghost of Catholic theology. Even the mystic philosopher Pythagoras (c. 582-507 B.C.) may be included among the materialists, if for no other reason than his effort to account for the physical universe on a strictly mathematical basis. All surviving fragments of these and many other pre-Socratic materialists are available in three separate texts: Kathleen Freeman's ANCILLA TO THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS (Harvard, 1957); G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven's THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS (Cambridge, 1957); and Richard McKirahan's PHILOSOPHY BEFORE SOCRATES (Hackett, 1994).

Skepticism followed materialism among pre-Socratic philosophers, and it played a dominant role during the Ages of Pericles from, say, 450 to 432 B.C. Identified as Sophists, skeptics included such figures as Gorgias, Cratylus, and Protagoras, as well of course as Socrates, whose most basic argument was that he knew more than others simply because he knew that he didn't know. Additional to his remarks in Plato's dialogue, PROTAGORAS, Protagoras wrote only two sentences that survive today, both of which remain important: "Of all things the measure is man [not by implication God or the gods]--of the things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not," and "About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life." This was the first sentence of Protagoras's treatise ON THE GODS, which spurred such public outrage that all his writings were burned and he fled from Athens only to drown during a storm at sea. Metrodorus of Chios, pupil of Democritus, was even more emphatic in his insistence upon human ignorance: "I deny that we know whether we know something or know nothing, and even that we know the mere fact that we do not know (or do know), or know at all whether something exists or nothing exists." As with the Greek materialists, all extant writings of the Greek Sophists are included in the Freeman, McKirahan, and Kirk & Raven texts.

There were a few outspoken atheists among the ancient Greeks, including Diagoras of Melos, Prodicus of Ceos, and, at a later date, Euhemerus of Tegea and Theodorus of Cyrene. Nothing they wrote survives. On probably spurious charges the sculptor Phidias (c. 500-432 B.C.) was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for atheism until his death, Anaxorgas was tried and convicted on the same charges but fled to escape a comparable fate, and even Pericles himself was drawn into the controversy when he successfully defended his mistress, Aspasia, in public trial on the same charges. Critias (460-403 B.C.) was the most prominent figure identified as an atheist, having played a harmless role in his cousin Plato's dialogues despite having led the thirty tyrants in executing 1,500 Athenians. Critias suggested in his lost play SISYPHUS that government invented religion to encourage the good behavior of its subjects. His poetic satire with the same theme may be found in Sextus Empiricus, AGAINST THE PHYSICISTS, I.54--in SEXTUS EMPIRICUS III (Loeb Classics, 1936), pp. 31-33.

Among Greek tragedians, Sophocles was totally conservative in his dedication to the Homeric gods, and in fact his OEDIPUS THE KING may be treated as a cautionary depiction of Oedipus's destruction for having rejected oracles in favor of the principle of fate (or tyche). Aeschylus's tragedies, including his trilogy ORESTEIA, bore comparable implications except for his final tragedy, PROMETHEUS BOUND, which challenged the authority of the gods. Euripedes's tragedies sustained this theme, repeatedly implying the question why Homeric gods could be capable of extravagant misbehavior. In fragment 286 of his tragedy BELLEROPHENON, Euripedes went so far as to write, "There are no gods in heaven. To believe in such old wives' tales is folly." Protagoras read his disastrous final treatise on the gods aloud to a circle of friends at the residence of Euripedes before trying to publish it. Euripedes's reputation among contemporaries as an atheist would also seem to be confirmed by the remark of a female character in Aristophanes's comedy, THESMOPHORIAZUSAE, "In his tragedies he [Euripedes] persuades men that the gods do not exist."

Like Sophocles, Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) reacted against skepticism, in his instance by proposing a metaphysics of transcendent ideal forms that could presumably withstand dialectic inquiry. Plato questioned the existence of Homeric gods in his dialogue EUTHYPHRO, but in TIMAEUS he proposed the existence of a Demiurge, a single creator that could later be identified with the Christian God.

In DE ANIMA Aristotle (384-22 B.C.) similarly proposed an "unmoved mover" that could be identified with God, and spoke of the soul as the "whatness" of living bodies, even suggesting in Bk. 3 the possibility of its immortality. However, Aristotle sought to locate Plato's eternal forms in nature itself, and he did not believe the universe had been created by a God or gods. Moreover, in his final years he was exiled from Athens on the charges of atheism and died in exile just a year before the death of his most eminent disciple Alexander the Great.

Theophrastus followed Aristotle as the chief "peripatetic" philosopher at the Lyceum, and Theophrastus in turn was followed by Strato from 286 to 268 B.C. Strato seems to have been an uncompromising atheist who sought a viable theoretical synthesis between Aristotelian science and Democritus's atomistic philosophy. Strato's "presumption" was, simply enough, the principle that the burden of proof is always upon believers. As perhaps to be expected, all of Strato's writings have been lost or destroyed despite his central importance in the advance of science.

Once it was constructed late in the fourth century, B.C., the city of Alexandria fell into competition with Athens as the epicenter of Hellenistic civilization. It also came to predominate in science, mathematics, and medicine as well as the field of religion. Euclid (c. 300 B.C.) and Apollonius of Perga (247-205) substantially advanced the field of geometry, and in astronomy Strato's student, Aristarchus, (310-230 B.C.), followed by Eratosthenes (284-192 B.C.) and Hipparchus (190-120 B.C.), established the size and shape of earth as a sphere in a heliocentric universe. Only later did their fellow countryman Ptolemy (A.D. 85-165) reject these assumptions for a more comforting geocentric universe. Hero (c. 2nd century, B.C.) invented a number of ingenious devices, most notably the first steam engine called the aeolipile. Under the guidance of the Ptolemies, the god Serapis was successfully created and promoted as a syncretistic fusion of Greece and Egypt's fertility gods, Dionysus and Osiris, in order to integrate polytheistic eastern religions. The goddess Isis was retained as Serapis's consort, and within just a couple of centuries temples and monuments to Isis dominated the landscape across the Mediterranean region. Jews and Christians were allowed to practice their beliefs, and it was in Alexandria that the religious philosophers Philo (c 20 B.C.-A.D. 50) and Plotinus (A.D. 205-270) later sought a synthesis of Greek cosmology and Hebraic revelation. Two Christian theologians who followed, Arius (A.D. 256-336) and Athanasius (A.D. 297-373) were at the center of the trinitarian controversy that dominated Christian polemics for centuries.

During the Hellenistic period between Alexander's death and Rome's occupation, Athens continued to predominate in the field of philosophy, by then divided among four schools: Aristotle's Lyceum as well as the Stoic and Epicurean schools and the so-called New Academy that supplanted Plato's Academy with a strictly skeptical epistemology. Stoics speculated about the materialist universe, but they primarily engaged in mysticism justified by the role of breath (or pneuma) as an "active principle" that could be identified with divinity. In contrast, the other three schools--the Lyceum, New Academy, and Epicurean group--were essentially atheistic. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) and his disciples culminating with Lucretius (c. 96-55 B.C.) carried on Greece's materialist tradition with an emphasis on Democritus's atomism. Epicurus conceded the existence of gods, but he emphasized an exclusively material universe that offered no chance of life after death. See A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley's THE HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHERS, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1987), which offers a comprehensive collection of fragments representing the Hellenistic skeptics and Epicureans as well as the Stoic philosophers. THE STOIC AND EPICUREAN PHILOSOPHERS, ed. by Whitney Oates (Modern Library, 1940) contains Lucretius's ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, the most thorough defense of materialism in ancient classical literature, and Epicurus's important "Letter to Herodotus" upon physics, pp. 3-15, which discusses among other things the universe's boundlessness, atomic structure, simple and compound elements, perception, primary and secondary qualities, atomic "soul" (nous, or monad), the birth and collapse of celestial bodies, and the conservation of matter.
Meanwhile, the New Academy, led by such figures as Arcesilaus (316-241 B.C.), Carneades (c. 214-129 B.C.), and Clitomachus, a disciple of Carneades, carried on the tradition of the Sophists on a more systematic basis. Like Socrates, Carneades authored almost nothing, but he was an outspoken atheist, had the reputation of a brilliant speaker, and was by far the most important figure among New Academic skeptics. Just as Plato did for Socrates, Clitomachus transcribed many dozens of Carneades's lectures and dialogues, but, as with Strato's writings, all of these have either been lost or destroyed. It should be emphasized that the New Academy's skepticism was entirely at odds with the skepticism of Pyrrho (c. 360-270 B.C.), a contemporary of Plato who had argued that no truth is absolutely certain, so one should seek peace of mind (ataraxia) by accepting prevalent orthodox beliefs (Christianity, for example, in later centuries). Arcesilaus and Carneades took an entirely different approach, fully agreeing that the truth is elusive, but concluding that one is thereby obliged to seek the closest possible approximations through accurate observation toward the calculation of probabilities.

Cicero's DE NATURA DEORUM (NATURE OF THE GODS, published 45 B.C.; Loeb Classics, 1929) challenged contemporary religious superstition, but his ACADEMICA (published at the same time, and available in the same Loeb volume) was by far his most important contribution to philosophy, because it explained Carneades's theory of skepticism based on the principle of suspended judgment (or epoche) needed to calculate probabilities in the investigation of perceived data (visum). Two hundred years later, Sextus Empiricus (c 2nd to 3rd century, A.D.) advocated Pyrrhonian skepticism as revised by Aenisidemus (possibly a contemporary of Cicero), but he also explained Carneades' empirical methodology and included a brief atheistic essay attributed to Carneades that challenged God's existence with the argument, among others, that an omniscient God cannot be both omnipotent and benevolent--see SEXTUS EMPIRICUS I (Loeb Classics, 1933), pp. 325-33. Sextus's many other references to Carneades may be located by consulting the separate indexes of his four volumes of writings published by Loeb Classics. Despite its awkward analysis, Diogenes Laertius's LIVES OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS, 2 vols (ca. 3rd century A.D.) also provides a useful account of Academic skepticism in vol. 1., Bk. 4, pp. 334-443, as well as extended sections devoted to Pyrrho and Epicurus, including Epicurus's "Letter to Herodotus," vol. 2, pp. 564-613. All three of these authors--Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Diogenes Laertius chronicled and excerpted texts and passages from ancient philosophy otherwise unavailable to modern readers.

The satirical dialogues of Lucian (ca. 120-80 A.D.), especially "Zeus Tragoedus," in THE WORKS OF LUCIAN, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1905), vol. 3, pp. 80-104, declare an essentially atheistic perspective. Lucian is usually treated as the ancient world's final major author who was hostile to religion.

The "golden age" of Roman civilization occurred at the time of Cicero and Lucretius during the first century, B.C. During his reign as Rome's first emperor (31 B.C. to A.D. 14), Augustus sought to justify his imperial authority by encouraging a renewal of orthodox Roman polytheism. With the encouragement of Augustus, Virgil (70-19 B.C.) wrote THE AENEID to justify Roman tradition on a Homeric basis, but Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18) satirized it in METAMORPHOSIS by emphasizing the sexual misdeeds of gods fully as indifferent to human need as Epicurus had suggested.

By the second and early third century, A.D., various Asiatic religious mysteries competed with official Roman polytheism, including the worship of Cybele, Serapis, and Mithra, as well as Gnosticism, Zoroastrian and Manichaen doctrine, and of course Judaism and Christianity. By the late third century, competition for ascendancy was reduced to Christianity and Mithraism, and by the fourth century Christianity prevailed upon the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312. Under Julian the Apostate (361-63), there was a brief resurgence of paganism, but Theodosius finally consolidated Christian authority during his reign between 379 and 395. When Alaric invaded Rome in 410, it was obvious to all that Rome was no longer a dominant civilization, and the question that has remained unanswered is the extent to which the rise of Christianity was a product of Rome's decline and fall, and the extent to which it was its cause. Both Athens and Alexandria also went into decline with the fall of Rome.

2. Primary Sources: The Dark and Middle Ages.

There is no appreciable evidence of freethought in Christian Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages. Belief was emphasized rather than doubt or skepticism. The early church father Tertullian (c. A.D. 160-230) argued, simply enough, that Christianity is so unbelievable that one cannot help but believe in it. Bernard Williams's translation of Tertullian's Paradox can be quoted in its entirety: "Just because it is absurd, it is to be believed; and he [Christ] was buried and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible." ("Tertullian's Paradox," in NEW ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY, ed. by Antony Flew and Alasdair Macintyre, p. 190). Tertullian is also quoted as having said, "After Jesus Christ, all curiosity is superfluous." Theodosius outlawed pagan religion with his 380 edict, "We brand all the senseless followers of the other religions with the infamous name of heretics," and he imposed a series of penal laws against pagan religion, one per year, over the last fifteen years of his reign. He also sponsored the destruction of pagan temples, culminating in either 389 or 391 A.D. with the destruction of the six-hundred year old Serapeum in Alexandria, the "Vatican" for the worship of Serapis, by then one of the most popular gods in the Roman empire. Also destroyed was the Alexandrian library attached to the Serapeum, which included from five to seven hundred thousand texts, almost all of which were irretrievably lost. These included four-fifths of Aristotle's writings, most Greek tragedy, and all except random fragments of most other Greek philosophers--except Plato, whose writings Christian theologians found useful. The second Caliph, Umar, has been accused of having ordered the destruction of the library in 641, but by then there was little, if anything, left of it, and the first reference to its destruction by Umar was almost five hundred years later.

In 529, Justinian, a later militant Christian emperor, outlawed Athenian philosophy. According to John of Salisbury, Gregory the Great (590-604), the first Pope to establish his authority for the entire Roman Catholic Church, saw to it that all surviving pagan books were burned and that pagan temples and all Roman statuary that could be obtained was destroyed (see McCabe's A RATIONALIST ENCYCLOPEDIA, p. 360). Gregory is also said to have insisted on the maxim, "Ignorance is the mother of devotion," to have rebuked a French bishop for the "horrible crime" of opening a school, and to have argued that reading secular literature was "a frivolity, an impropriety, and a sin." By the eighth century illiteracy was universal. Charlemagne, for example, could read but not write. It has been estimated that as early as 600 there was no library of more than 2,000 volumes anywhere in Europe, including the Vatican library, which in 1484 had no more than 2,000 volumes (see McCabe, p. 360).

The issue of heresy first took on exceptional importance when the Emperor Constantine, a converted Christian, convened and presided over the Council of Nicaea in 325 to establish the so-called Arian heresy relevant to the trinitarian dispute upon Christ's identity as the son of God. St. Augustine (354-430) justified Christian prosecutions based on Christ's words in one of his parables, "Compel them to come in" (Luke, 14.23). To come in was construed to mean joining the church, and compulsion extended to capital punishment when needed. This also seemed justified by the treatment recommended for heretics in Deuteronomy, 17.25: "stoned with stones till they die." In 385, the Spanish bishop Priscillian and six of his supporters were the first to be burned at the stake for heresy on the charge of advocating celibacy for the priesthood (later adopted by Hildebrand in the twelfth century). This mode of execution, the so-called auto da fe (or "act of faith") did not resume until thirteen canons and priests were executed at Orleans at the beginning of the eleventh century, after which the practice became increasingly popular. In 1209, Pope Innocent III launched his campaign against the Albigensian heresy in France with the slaughter of the entire population of Beziers--from 15 to 60 thousand--7,000 of them killed inside the cathedral. Probably the most influential Pope in the history of the Vatican, Innocent argued, "If traitors to the State must die, how much more traitors to God." When warned that some of Bezier's intended victims might be orthodox Christians, the Papal legate, Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux, answered, "Kill all; God will know his own" (see McCabe, p. 318). Altogether, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered during the Albighensian campaign.

Papal authority is said to have peaked under Innocent III (1198-1216) at the beginning of the thirteenth century, presumably the pinnacle of the middle ages, after which it fell into decline under Boniface VIII (1294-1303), at least partly resulting from the failure of the Crusades. In 1302 Boniface issued the bull Unam sanctam declaring that church's spiritual power took precedence over temporal power and that it was necessary for salvation to be subject to the Pope. After Boniface's death, France's King Philip the Fair, whom Boniface had tried to excommunicate, responded by charging his corpse with heresy for supposedly having been overheard to utter the blasphemy, "that neither the body nor the soul rise again," and "So that God gives me the good things of this life, I care not a bean for that to come. A man has no more a soul than a beast. Did you ever see any one who had risen from the dead?" Boniface was also charged with having said that Mary was "no more a virgin than my mother," and of Christ, "He was no Son of God, but a shrewd man and a great hypocrite." Boniface was likewise charged with a longer remark to the same effect: "Christ! he was no Son of God; he was a man, eating and drinking like ourselves; he never rose from the dead; no man has ever risen. I am far mightier than he. I can bestow kingdoms and humble kings." Proceedings against Boniface were postponed, then dissolved, so there is no certainty the charges were true, but they remain useful for having exposed a hostile vision of Christianity that could not otherwise have been told during the Middle Ages. See Draper's THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE, vol. 2, pp. 87-88, as well as Will Durant's version in The Story of Civilization, vol. 4, The Age of Faith (Simon and Schuster, 1950), pp. 811-18. Most histories of the Middle Ages tend to ignore the episode.

Like the Crusades so crucial to Vatican authority, the Inquisition was a product of the Middle Ages, not the earlier so-called Dark Ages, but, unlike the Crusades, it extended into the Renaissance and beyond. As a condition to his papal coronation, Frederick II (1194-1250), a ward of Innocent III during his childhood, mandated the trial and punishment of heretics, and Gregory IX formally initiated the Inquisition in 1231, after which many tens of thousands were burned at the stake. St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74), who is said to have personally witnessed portions of the Albigensian campaign, later defended and summarized the organization of the Inquisition in SUMMA THEOLOGICA (Part II of the Second Part, Question XI, Articles 3 and 4--pp. 440-442 in vol. 2 of the Great Books edition). Over two centuries later, in 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella belatedly established the Spanish Inquisition to help expedite the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and soon enough the scope and violence of the Spanish Inquisition exceeded anything before. As many as two thousand victims were burned at the stake in Andalusia during 1481, and as many as ten thousand by the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada (1420-1498). As calculated by the Madrid's early nineteenth century Grand Inquisitor, Llorente, over 340,000 were killed by the Spanish Inquisition over a period of four centuries. In 1542, Paul III established the Roman Inquisition in Rome itself after Charles V's invasion and occupation beginning in 1527, and Paul IV imposed the Index Expurgatorius (or simply "the Index") of Prohibited Books in 1557 and 1559. in Rome between 1553 and 1600, seventy-eight individuals were either burned alive or hanged, then burned. In effect, Charles V assumed command in Rome to save the papacy from the Italian Renaissance, and he succeeded.

Martyrs of the Inquisition during the sixteenth century include Hetzer in 1529 and Giorgio da Novara in 1500 for having denied the divinity of Christ, Geoffroi Vallee in 1574 for having written an offensive freethinking treatise, and the French scholar and printer Dolet in 1546 for having translated Socrates's description of death, "Thou shalt no longer be," into a verbal construction suggesting the denial of an afterlife, "Thou shalt no longer be anything at all." Perhaps the most outspoken martyr was a Dutch priest, Hermann van Ryswyck, in 1502 after having declared, "that the world is eternal and was not created as was alleged by 'the fool Moses,' that there is no hell, and no future life; that Christ, whose whole career was flatly contrary to human welfare and reason, was not the son of Omnipotent God, but a fool, a dreamer, and a seducer of ignorant men, of whom untold members have been slain on account of him." The Renaissance was finally and decisively brought to a close when Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, followed in 1619 by Vanini, whose tongue was first ripped from his mouth by his executioner for having declared that Christ "sweated with fear and weakness, and I, I die undaunted." When Galileo faced the Inquisition in 1633, he understandably recanted. See Robertson's 1936 HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, vol. 1, pp. 429, 406, 431, 425-28, and 442, and vol. 2, 590-92 and 594. Useful accounts of Bruno and Vanini's executions can also be found in Foote and McLaren's INFIDEL DEATH BEDS, pp. 12-13 and 54-55.

But this is not to limit the excesses of the Inquisition to the Catholic church. Calvin first beheaded Gruet in 1547 for having written, "All so-called laws, divine as well as human, are made at the will of men," and in 1553 he burned Servetus at the stake as slowly as possible to increase the pain for having rejected Trinitarian dogma. In 1541, Henry VIII burned three persons at the stake "because they denied transubstantiation and had not received the sacrament at Easter." In 1579, Matthew Hamont, a ploughwright of Hetherset, was tried and burned at the stake, "for that he denyed Christe," and in 1583 John Lewes was likewise burned at the same site for the same reason. Other contemporaries executed for heresy include John Hilton in 1584, Peter Cole in 1587, and Francis Kett in 1589. The last two such executions in England were of Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman in 1611, the year Shakespeare produced his final play, THE TEMPEST. See Robertson, vol. 1, pp. 486-89, 495, 502-6, and 540-41.

Witchcraft had also become an important issue. In 1484, Innocent VIII issued his bull Summa desiderantes to sanction witchcraft prosecutions as justified by the Bible: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22.18), after which witchcraft trials became more prevalent than heresy trials. Many hundreds of thousands of women were thereafter tortured and executed as witches. Heresy and witchcraft persecutions more or less came to an end by the mid-to-late seventeenth century.

Meanwhile, civilization thrived in the Arab world during the so-called Dark Ages of Western Europe. The Islamic revolution of Mohammad (570-632) took place in the mid-seventh century, and Mohammed's successors quickly expanded Islam into an imperial power that stretched from India to Spain. Under the brief reign of the fourth Caliph Ali (656-661), Arab conquerors restored the patronage of learning with an emphasis on Aristotelian philosophy. By the mid-eighth century the Omayyads reached Cordoba, Spain, and their Spanish domain became an advanced civilization at a level fully comparable to ancient Alexandria until the early eleventh century. The great library of the Spanish Caliphs was said to include as many as six hundred thousand manuscripts, and there were sixty additional public libraries in Andalusia alone. Major advances were achieved in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, optics, hydrostatics, botany, and chemistry, the latter through the use of apparatus for distillation, sublimation, fusion, and filtration. Arab scholars took it for granted that the world is spherical, and they accurately computed its size by measuring the length of a single degree. Scientific geniuses included al-Biruni (973-1048) and Alhazen (965-c. 1040), who discovered atmospheric refraction, first proposed the modern theory of optics, and productively speculated upon both gravity and evolution among many other questions. From Damascus to Cordoba, philosophy was pursued in the tradition of Aristotle, dominated by Avicenna (980-1037) and Averroes (1126-98). Atheists and agnostics included al-Warraq and al-Rawandi of the ninth century, the agnosticpoet Abu'l Ala-al-Ma'Arri (973-1057) a century later, who denied divine revelation and declared that "the world holds two classes of men--intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence" (see Robertson's HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, p. 286), and, later yet, Omar Khayyam, author of the RUBAIYAT. Unfortunately, this period of enlightenment could not persist. As had already happened to Rome during the fourth and fifth centuries, Arab civilization collapsed when Arab fundamentalists invaded from Morocco during the mid-twelfth century, only to be defeated in 1212 by the united armies of Christian Spain.

Inspired by advances in Arab philosophy, particularly by Avicenna and Averoes, scholastic philosophers of medieval Europe such as Abelard (1079-1142), Roger Bacon (c. 1214-94), and William of Ockham (c. 1300-49) could be identified as Nominalists, as opposed to Realists, because they challenged Platonic categories important to Christian theology for having no direct relevance to the material universe. Bacon spent over twenty years of prison confinement because he advocated imitating the empirical inquiry already pursued by Arab scientists. The supposedly atheistic perspective of Averroes was linked with his interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy, and of course it was St. Thomas Aquinas's great achievement to salvage Aristotle from this interpretation.

The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (1194-1250), the ward of Innocent III during his childhood, grew up to challenge the authority of the Vatican by making his own particular accommodation to Arab civilization both in his court and during the almost completely bloodless Sixth Crusade he led from 1228 to 1244. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he was widely believed to have authored an anonymous Latin tract, The Three Impostors, that referred to Moses, Christ and Mohammed as described by the title.

In his youth, the poet Dante (1265-1321) was a Guelph supportive of the Vatican, but in later years he converted to the Ghibelline cause supportive of the authority of Holy Roman Emperors. He wrote DE MONARCHIA between 1310 and 1313 to advocate increasing the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor at the expense of the Vatican. Today, this might seem a relatively harmless political stance, but it clearly aligned Dante, the author of THE DIVINE COMEDY (1321), with the secularist trend that emerged over the following centuries. Dante's secular preference is also suggested by his catalogue of pagan philosophers in the first and least painful circle of hell: Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Zeno, Democritus, Anaxorgas, Cicero, Seneca, Avicenna, Averroes, Plato, and Aristotle, who is treated with the most respect. Excluded were Protagoras and Epicurus, perhaps for excessive freethought. See INFERNO, Canto 4, lines 130-44.

3. Primary Sources: The Renaissance, Reformation and Counter- Reformation.

Today many historians deny the existence of the Renaissance, but it can be defended, simply enough, as the recovery of classical art, history, literature and philosophy additional to the writings of Plato and Aristotle that theologians had already resurrected between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Or, more simply yet, the Renaissance can be seen to have flowered as a nascent phase in the modern recovery of ancient freethought. The success of Humanists in finding and translating ancient texts during the early Renaissance was a major intellectual breakthrough whose importance cannot be sufficiently emphasized. Early Humanists such as Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75) were pious Christians, but later Humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) and Lorenzo Valla (1406-57) were more critical of Christian orthodoxy. Valla, for example, condemned Christian asceticism, argued that scholastic debate upon free will and divine omniscience could not be resolved, and exposed as a forgery the Donation of Constantine that granted the papacy secular authority in Italy. Among many other accomplishments, Poggio found and recovered the single extant manuscript of Lucretius's DE NATURA RERUM. Except for Poggio's effort, the text would have been lost.

Averroes's so-called double truth became prevalent during the Renaissance as a rhetorical strategy of juxtaposing orthodox and pagan insights in order to hint the superiority of paganism while insisting upon one's personal devotion to orthodox religion. This tactic was the most effective in dialogues modeled after those of Cicero in which issues could be debated without being resolved. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), probably the most eminent Italian Renaissance philosopher, used this dialogue format in ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL (1516), included in THE RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OF MAN, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Kristeller, and John Randall (Chicago, 1948), pp. 280-381, in order to explore with sufficient subterfuge the arguments of the late Alexandrian philosopher, Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. A.D. 200), that Aristotle rejected an afterlife. Fierce public reaction forced Pomponazzi to modify his text, but his friendship with Leo X and Cardinal Bembo, Pomponazzi's former student, guaranteed his relative safety from persecution. It was Leo X, son of Lorenzo de Medici, who was said to have exclaimed, "And all these privileges have been secured to us by the fable of Jesus Christ."

The dialogues of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) that led to his auto da fe by the Roman Holy Inquisition offer compelling post-Copernican speculation of the universe as an organic whole composed of infinite space filled with countless stars, planets and moons. Expanding on Epicurus and Lucretius's cosmology, Bruno also argued that the same elements and physical laws exist everywhere, that the universe neither began nor can be expected to end, and that the ultimate units of nature may be alternately described as physical atoms, mathematical points, and metaphysical monads. His cosmology was essentially pantheistic based on the assumption that there is a multiplicity of natural things that originate out of a single substance. He accepted God's existence as the original cause and principle of unity for the universe, but he rejected a personal God in favor of God's immanence as nature itself. See THE INFINITE IN GIORDANO BRUNO, WITH A TRANSLATION OF HIS DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE CAUSE PRINCIPLE, AND ONE, edited by Sidney Greenburg (Octagon, 1978).

The two dominant authors in the French Renaissance beginning in the mid-fifteenth century were Rabelais (1490-1553 and Montaigne (1533-1592). Rabelais used extravagant satire to justify his criticism of orthodox religion, while Montaigne doubled truths in his essays through the ironic juxtaposition of pagan and Christian testimony without declaring his own preference. In his longest essay, APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBOND (1575-80), which was essentially Epicurean in outlook, Montaigne asked, "What do I know? ("que sais-je?") and argued in response that he could find no valid basis for human judgment except the flux of constant change and contradiction. In his final essays, for example "Of Repentance" (1585-88), Montaigne once again made peace with orthodox Christianity, but with stoic "nonchalance" in his acceptance of life. Montaigne's protege, Pierre Charron (1541-1603) provoked even more controversy than Montaigne himself with his book LA SAGASSE (1601), in which he advanced Montaigne's ideas with a more emphatic commitment to the principles of reason, tolerance, relativism, and determinism.

The English Renaissance that reached fruition toward the end of the sixteenth century was almost inextricably mixed with the Reformation. In Italy one followed the other; in France there was overlap in their sequence; in England the two converged, such that Shakespeare, clearly a Renaissance poet, followed Spenser, who can also be identified with the Reformation. There were no major English Renaissance philosophers in the secular tradition, but some of the Renaissance poets were. These included Marlowe (1564-93), who escaped trial for his atheism only because he was killed in a tavern knife fight, and Raleigh (1554-1618) who was tried and exonerated on the charges of atheism, only to be beheaded at a later date on relatively minor charges, but with the understanding that he might have escaped this fate except for his reputation as an atheist. The pervasive use of the carpe diem ("seize the day") convention in the sixteenth century sonnet also suggests a secular perspective, since it implied the lack of any punishment after one's death for the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. The cavalier tradition beholden to this convention during the seventeenth century ended with the Earl of Rochester (c. 1612-58), who risked outright atheism, then recanted at his death.

Shakespeare (1564-1616) was exceptionally non-committal in his treatment of religious issues, as argued by Santayana in his famous essay, "The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare," in ESSAYS IN LITERARY CRITICISM BY GEORGE SANTAYA, ed. by Irving Singer (Scribners, 1956), pp. 137-48. It may be maintained, however, that Shakespeare's final testament, if such be had, was most likely Prospero's speech in THE TEMPEST, 4.1.148-58, that ends with the words, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep." Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy in the play HAMLET (1600-1602) also uses the sleep analogy, but more obviously with not to be used as a double entendre to suggest both death and the absence of life after death, the latter as already implied by Dolet with his fateful translation, "thou shalt no longer be anything at all." By the final scene, Hamlet is able to say, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-11). But when Horatio tries to commit suicide, the identical act Hamlet has decided against in his earlier "to be or not to be" soliloquy because of the threat of eternal hellfire ("aye, there's the rub," etc.), Hamlet argues, "Absent thee from felicity awhile" (5.2.352) as if he no longer gives credence to such a threat. Hamlet's final words, "The rest is silence" (5.2.363) also suggest the absence of an afterlife, though Horatio's rejoinder, "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," no less emphatically suggests the opposite. Here, once again, one suspects, Averroes's double truth is at play, this time within the context of tragedy. Shakespeare's comedy TWELFTH NIGHT, written and produced at almost the same time as HAMLET, used ridicule to the same effect, for example in Feste's parody of an Inquisition trial, Act 4, Scene 2, in Feste's lines about heaven and hell, 1.5.56-73, and in a couple of of Feste's carpe diem songs.

The Renaissance was brought to an end by religious wars between the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation that swept across Europe from the early sixteenth century to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. By most accounts, Luther (1483-1546) initiated the Reformation in 1517 when he pinned on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg his 95 theses against the use of papal indulgences. Indulgences had been sold and distributed throughout Europe since the early Dark Ages presumably to shorten the duration spent in Purgatory, and Luther had studied them well enough to decide that their sale in Germany to help subsidize the construction of the Vatican was inappropriate. Luther likewise rejected the classical influence of Greece and Rome, the very core of Renaissance achievement, and instead advocated a renewed study of Saint Augustine's teachings. Luther despised in particular classical philosophers, especially Aristotle, of whom he said, "Truly a devil, a horrid calumniator, a wicked sycophant, a prince of darkness, a real apollyon, a beast, a most horrid impostor on mankind, one in whom there is scarcely any philosophy, a public and professed liar, a goat, a complete epicure, this twice execrable Aristotle" (quoted by Draper in Conflict, p. 215). Luther agreed with the Catholic Church that it was the duty of the state to eradicate heresy, though of course his particular list of heresies was somewhat different. Paradoxically, it was Luther's rejection of Humanist scholarship that prevented the northern European humanist scholar Erasmus (c. 1466-1536) from joining the Protestant movement. Despite Luther's advances, Erasmus refused to abandon Catholicism because he did not want to sacrifice humanistic goals that he felt could be better achieved under traditional Catholicism.

4. Primary Sources: Seventeenth Century Rationalists.

By most accounts modern science began with the astronomy of Copernicus (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), and Galileo (1564-1642), setting the stage for the grand synthesis of Newton (1642-1727) in his Principia (1687). It cannot be ignored that Copernicus was probably familiar with Cicero's summary of Carneades's theory of induction, as suggested by his remark in his Preface to ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE HEAVENLY SPHERES (1543) that he had first encountered in Cicero the concept of the earth's motion as suggested by Nicetas (sic). Copernicus could only have been referring to the ancient astronomer, Hicetas, spelled with an H, and ACADEMICA is the only extant text in which Cicero mentions Hicetas, just a few pages after Cicero's explanation of Carneades's theory of probability and the suspension of belief. One may assume that Copernicus experienced epoche (or suspended disbelief) as he labored to make a full mathematical explanation of his heliocentric cosmology as an alternative to the Ptolemaic geocentric model.

A modern theory of scientific induction was first proposed by Juan Luis Vives from Spain (1492-1540), who claimed in DE CAUSIS CORRUPTARUM ARTIUM (1531) that true Aristotelian doctrine went direct to nature; by Giacomo Aconzio of Italy, who advocated in DE METHODO (1558) that a true logical method was needed for a real knowledge of things"; and by Juan Huarte y Navarro (1530-92) of Spain, who argued in EXAMEN DE INGENIOS PARA LAS CIENCIAS (1575) the necessity of studying second causes as opposed to God's providential authority. Scientific academies were established in Italy at Naples in 1560 and Florence in 1637, followed by England's Royal Society in 1660 and France's Academy of Sciences in 1666. These were of enormous importance in promoting science beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the principal advocate of the scientific method recognized today. Like Vives, Aconzio, and Navarro, Bacon argued in ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING (1605), ". . . that God worketh nothing in nature but by second causes." Apparently unfamiliar with these others, as well as such figures as Nifo and Zabarello at the University of Padua, Bacon proposed his own theory of "genuine induction" for interpreting particulars to establish valid axioms, as opposed to Aristotelian deductions (described as "anticipations") that might be used to support dubious philosophical assumptions. Unfortunately, Bacon took pains to reject Carneades's theory of probability, but as a materialist he emphasized the importance of "an acquaintance with things," and, as later explained by Mill in his SYSTEM OF LOGIC (Harper, 1884, p.227), Bacon advocated a relatively sophisticated "eliminative induction" that was superior to induction by simple enumeration. Today we primarily remember Bacon's list of four "idols" that distort human thinking--of the tribe (inherent in human nature), of the den (unique to the individual), of the market (resulting from the language of social intercourse) and of the theater (implicit in systems of philosophy). Bacon used the fourth to criticize Aristotelian empiricism but neglected to mentionthat it might also be applied to religion. See NOVUM ORGANUM (1620), Bk. I, xxxix-lxvii. Throughout his life, Bacon was orthodox in his religious beliefs, and he argued in his essay on Atheism that we cannot suppose the totality of things to be "without a mind."

The French philosopher Descartes (1596 1650) employed a "method
of doubt" (skepticism, of course, but in the service of religion) to be able to propose an internally sufficient Christian cosmology immune to contradiction by science. In his DISCOURSE ON METHOD (1637), he established his initial premise, "I think, therefore I am" (cogito, ergo sum), from which he could elaborate a strictly Christian metaphysics. Despite Descartes' devout Christianity, his theory was a major step toward modern secular philosophy. He affirmed the supremacy of reason, thereby diminishing the importance of belief, and he emphasized the invariability of the laws of nature, thereby calling into question God's providential intervention. Like other seventeenth century metaphysicians, he was willing to sacrifice the concept of a personal God in order to justify his belief in the existence of God as the ultimate authority in the universe.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1629) rejected Descartes' geometric model of the universe for a mechanistic cosmology drawn from Galileo. Despite his early experience as a protege of Bacon, Hobbes was the most infamous "atheist" of his day, but he never challenged or cast doubt on religion without giving himself room for justification on orthodox grounds. His cryptic skills in balancing his judgment may be observed in his definition of religion in LEVIATHAN (1651; Great Books ed., p. 79): "And this fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion; and in them that worship or fear that power otherwise than they do, superstition." Hobbes's further treatment of religion in the next chapter, "Of Religion," (Part I, Chapter 12), explains, among other things, how religion can be used to manipulate society. With obvious irony, Hobbes defined atheism as "the sin of imprudence," suggesting the all-too obvious insight that it was foolhardy to acknowledge one's disbelief in the mid-seventeenth century.

The French philosopher and scientist Gassendi (1592-1655), a close friend of Hobbes, rejected Descartes's mathematical model of the universe for an atomistic cosmology drawn from Democritus and Epicurus. Gassendi's modernization of atomic theory was successfully adopted by Boyle for chemistry and Newton for the theory of light, and it paved the way for future discoveries in atomic and molecular structure. Gassendi also proposed the first correct law of inertia and made numerous useful discoveries in physics and astronomy in support of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. In Part I ("The Logic") of SYNTAGMA PHILOSOPHICUM more simply described as the Syntagma (1649), Gassendi proposed what he described as "constructive scepticism," a concept that brought the central tenets of Academic scepticism into modern empirical philosophy. He cited numerous classical sources to suggest the extreme difficulty of establishing the objective truth of any theory, and he argued that it would be more productive to arrive at a compromise between skepticism and the various dogmas in currency at the time. Gassendi's defense of the theory of God in the second section of the Syntagma and his defense of Epicurean happiness in the third section would seem to have put him in the Pyrrhonian camp of skeptical philosophers, but his defense of empiricism as a compromise between skepticism and dogmatic philosophy primarily aligned him with the Academic school.

In the spirit of Bruno, Spinoza (1632-77) proposed in THE ETHICS (1677) a pantheistic model of an infinite universe identical with the infinite powers of God. Spinoza believed in the historical Jesus, but rejected ghosts, miracles, and the anthropomorphic conception of an angry God. He went so far as to advocate in THEOLOGICAL POLITICAL TREASE (1670--translated into English in 1689) that the Scriptures must be challenged and submitted to critical examination like any other book.

As a friend of Spinoza who was later ashamed of their connection, Leibnitz (1646-1716) proposed a theory of "monads" (a term probably borrowed from Bruno) as a synthesis of Spinoza's pantheism, Democritus's atomic theory and Anaxorgas's theory of nous (or mind) imbedded in nature. Monads, Leibnitz explained, are atomic particles each of which is aware of all the rest, and the universe comprises the sum total of these particles. Leibnitz also maintained that God had created the best possible universe, once again calling into question the possibility of providential intervention. We live in "the best of all possible worlds," he argued, though God's benevolent intentions might not be obvious at all times.

At the age of thirty-one, the French mathematician Pascal (1623-62) experienced religious conversion as a Jansenist and spent the rest of his life obsessed with his religious faith. His PENSEES, published posthumously in 1670, has been a classic in Christian apologetics based on a strictly Pyrrhonian skepticism, identified as fideism, that limited ataraxia to the felt promise of salvation. Pascal's famous "wager" perfectly illustrates his so-called fideistic assumption derivative of Pyrrhonian skepticism, that belief is superior to disbelief because, if heaven exists (and nobody can be certain), believers can be confident of the possibility of salvation when they die, whereas disbelievers automatically consign themselves to hell; on the other hand, if heaven does not exist, both believers and disbelievers simply die, and with the only cost to believers that they had have led a virtuous life in the effort to avoid the alternative. Q.E.D., it is more prudent to believe. The flaw in this logic is simply that we cannot consider ourselves to be moralists as long as the terror of eternal perdition conditions our choice. Another problem is that Pascal's wager can be applied to all religions that promise an afterlife, so its acceptance for one particular religion necessarily precludes the worship of others. With which of the gods should we make our wager? Which of their respective hells is more fearful?

The comic playwright Moliere (1522-73) and his friend Cyrano de Bergerac (1620-1655) were both nonbelievers. In TARTRUFFE, Moliere satirized the clergy, in THE MISANTHROPE he quoted Lucretius (Act 2, scene 4, lines 723-24), and in DON JUAN he showed an atheistlose a religious debate despite making obviously better arguments. Moliere was able to continue writing plays only because of the personal protection of Louis XIV, and he was excommunicated by the time he died. Cyrano also risked prosecution with obviously impious lines, for example when he referred to gods in LA MORT D'AGRIPPINE, as "whom men made, and who did not make men." Here Cyrano referred to pagan gods in the plural, but with obvious heretical implications for contemporary French playgoers.

French authors associated with the so-called libertinage erudit (scholarly erudite) during the seventeenth century were critical of orthodox religion and sought alternatives in science and a return to ancient skepticism. These included, besides Gassendi, such figures as Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), Charles Sorel (c. 1597-1674), and Gabriel Naude (1600-1653). None of these is translated, so English readers are encouraged to consult Popkin's HISTORY OF SCEPTICISM, listed among secondary sources. Later untranslated French authors of the seventeenth century are discussed by Kors in ATHEISM IN FRANCE: 1650-1729, also listed among secondary sources.

THE HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DICTIONARY (1697), of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) was a milestone in French freethought that many argue set the stage for the French Enlightenment fifty years later. In a variety of topical and biographical articles, Bayle challenged the morality of the OLD TESTAMENT, argued that religious belief does not necessarily lead to moral behavior, that it is impossible to determine whether one enjoy's God's grace, that neither Judaism nor Christianity explains the presence of evil in the world, that religious beliefs cannot be supported by reason, and that mankind has shown no signs of making any progress under Christianity. Bayle concluded most such discussions by calling upon readers to abandon reason and accept religion on faith, but his sincerity in making this appeal was doubted both by supporters and detractors.

Though neither a skeptic nor freethinker, John Locke (1632-1704) was of major importance in advancing philosophy from seventeenth century cosmology to the deism and finally the atheism of the eighteenth century. In AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1689), Locke sought to bring scientific method into epistemology based on distinctions already suggested by Epicurus between ideas of sense and ideas of reflection, between simple and complex ideas, and between primary and secondary qualities. Reminiscent of Carneades, Locke warned against "demand[ing] certainty, where probability only is to be had." He explained, "If we will disbelieve everything because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much-what as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly." On the other hand, he warned, if we extend our inquiry beyond our capacity, "it is no wonder that [we] raise questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to continue and increase [our] doubts, and to confirm them at last in perfect scepticism" (see CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, abridged and edited by A.S. Pringle-Pattison, London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1924, pp. 12-14). Locke accordingly emphasized the pursuit of science through a careful use of the senses, more or less as Cicero had called for the analysis of perceived data by skeptical philosophers. Locke also promoted parliamentary democracy and an increased political toleration except for Catholics and atheists. Locke's late essay THE REASONABLENESS OF CHRISTIANITY (1695) proposed an ethical justification of religion, thereby setting him apart from contemporary deists.

5. Primary Sources: English Deism and the Eighteenth Century French Enlightenment.

Deism was a major step toward atheism and agnosticism, since it consisted of belief in God qualified by a rejection of Christ's divinity, of God's direct intervention in human affairs, and even, among some deists, of the prospects of immortality in either heaven or hell. Servetus and the sixteenth century Socinian movement anticipated deism, and later precursors included Montaigne and Charron of France. However, deism principally emerged as a seventeenth century British movement initiated by such authors as Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), author of DE VERITATE (1624), as well as Hobbes and Charles Blount (1654-93). CHRISTIANITY NOT MYSTERIOUS (1696), by John Toland (1670-1722), provoked intense public controversy, followed by two equally provocative books of Anthony Collins (1676-1729), ESSAY TOWARD THE USE OF REASON (1707) and DISCOURSE OF FREETHINKING (1713). Other early eighteenth century deists included Wollastson (1659-1734), Tindal (1656-1733), Mandeville (1670-1733), Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Chubb (1679-1747), and Annet (1693-1769), who was pilloried twice and sent to prison for criticizing the Pentateuch. Woolston (1670-1733) turns out to have been England's principal deist martyr, having died in prison to which he had been sentenced for his deist publications. The notorious Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751) was a deist, a mentor of both Voltaire and Pope (1688-1744), having inspired the latter to write his ESSAY ON MAN (1734) as a deist manifesto in heroic couplets. England's three most eminent eighteenth century statesmen, Walpole (1676-1745), Pitt (1708-78), and Fox (1749-1806) were likewise deists. However, deism was effectively challenged by Berkeley (1685-1753), Butler (1692-1752), and Dodwell (d. 1784), among others, and by the early seventeen-forties it lost its momentum. There are no full modern editions of deist authors, and today their prose is considered unnecessarily cumbersome despite its major importance in the advance of modern freethought.

During his exile in England in 1726-29, Voltaire (1694-1778) was converted to deism by Lord Bolingbroke and others. When Voltaire returned to France, he engaged in iconoclastic partisanship as a dramatist, historian, and popular philosopher, and he was primarily responsible for inspiring the French Enlightenment that began at mid-century. Today his most accessible deist text is PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY (1764; BASIC BOOKS, 2 vols., trans. by Peter Gay, 1962), especially his treatment of such topics as "fanaticism," "miracles," "resurrection," "soul," and "supreme good." The best available collection of Voltaire's writings is edited by Paul Edwards, VOLTAIRE: SELECTIONS (MacMillan, 1989). The best biographical critiques are Edwards' entry in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNBELIEF, pp. 713-33, and A.J. Ayer's VOLTAIRE (Random House, 1986). Useful supplementary volumes are Andrew Morehouse's VOLTAIRE AND JEAN MESLIER (Yale, 1936) and Edna Nixon's VOLTAIRE AND THE CALAS CASE (Vanguard, 1961). As a deist, Voltaire was usually hostile to outright atheism, but his famous slogan, Ecrasez l'enfame ("eradicate the disgrace") was specifically addressed to the Catholic Church. One should beware the effort of Christian apologists to whitewash his iconoclastic challenge to orthodox Christianity.

Jean Meslier (1664-1729), MEMOIRE (translated as MY TESTAMENT or SUPERSTITION IN ALL AGES, the latter by Anna Knoop in 1878)--the lucid and undiluted reflections of a simple village priest found after his death in three handwritten manuscripts. Composed in passion and with consummate lucidity, this was the first uncompromising atheistic manifesto in modern European times. Voltaire published selections to support the deist cause; later, to promote atheism, d'Holbach and Marechal published the text in its entirety.

Julien de La Mettrie (1709-51), L'HOMME MACHINE (1747)--today translated both in MAN A MACHINE AND MAN A PLANT (Hackett, 1994)--and MACHINE MAN AND OTHER WRITINGS (Cambridge, 1996). A relatively simplistic mid-18th century manifesto in materialism that set the stage for d'Holbach's SYSTEM OF NATURE.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Confessions of a Savoyard Priest," in EMILE (1762; trans. by Allan Bloom for Basic Books, 1979), pp. 266-313. Rousseau's deism was relatively conservative as compared to the views of most of his contemporaries among French philosophes.

Denis Diderot, "Letter on the Blind" (1749), "On the Interpretation of Nature" (1753); "D'Alembert's Dream (1869); and "Conversation with a Christian Lady" (1774)--included in DIDEROT'S SELECTED WRITINGS, ed. by Lester Crocker (MacMillan, 1966). Diderot began as a deist, then drifted into outright atheism through his friendship with d'Holbach.

Baron Paul Henri d'Holbach, SYSTEM OF NATURE (1770; trans. 1868, repr. by Lenox Hill, 1970)--362 pp. of tiny print in double columns. This was the most notorious atheist manifesto of the French Enlightenment--according to some the Bible of the French Revolution. Goethe reported that it had felt too contaminated to handle when he first picked it up. D'Holbach also published over a dozen other books in the same vein, most, if not all, of which remain untranslated into English. He used various pseudonyms in order to protect his identity as a contributor to Diderot's Encyclopedia as well as his status as perhaps France's most successful host for banquets and soirees of the intellectual elite. Both Hume and Diderot were personal friends, and such British figures as Sterne, Gibbon, and even Wilkes, the mayor of London, were welcome guests to d'Holbach's countless parties. There is no evidence how many were aware of his double role--perhaps none.

David Hume (1711-76), THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION (1757); DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION (1779); and "Essay of Miracles," in AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1748)--all of which are included in DAVID HUME: WRITINGS ON RELIGION, ed. by Anthony Flew (Open Court, 1992). Hume may be described as the unofficial epistemologist of the French Enlightenment, having lived in France a few years and having kept up his ties with leading French philosophes. In A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE (1748; Oxford, 1964) p. 183, Hume explained that "all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are deriv'd from nothing but custom," and concluded, ". . . I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion as even more probable or likely than any other." In Section 10 of his Enquiry, Hume challenged the truth of miracles; in section 11 he challenged the argument of design as proof of God's existence; and in section 12 he advocated "mitigated skepticism," in essence the Academic skepticism of Carneades as opposed to the "excessive skepticism" of Pyrrhonists. Hume's essays, "Of Miracles" and "Of the Immortality of the Soul," his NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION (1757), and his DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION (1779) were critical of religion but without identifying Hume as an atheist or agnostic. In his late essay, "Of the Immortality of the Soul," Hume similarly argued that "by the mere light of reason it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the Soul," that "every thing is in common between soul and body," that the souls of animals "bear so near a resemblance to the souls of men, that the analogy from one to the other forms a very strong argument," and that it is difficult to believe that human consciousness, "seemingly the frailest of any [capacity], and from the slightest causes, subject to the greatest disorders, is immortal and indissoluble." See "Of the Immortality of Soul," in ESSAYS: MORAL, POLITICAL, AND LITERARY, ed. by Eugene Miller (Liberty Classics, 1987), pp. 690, 596-97.

The atheistic writings of such figures as Helvetius (1715-71) among the later philosophes and Charles Dupuis and Sylvain Marechal during the French Revolution remain untranslated into English.

Robespierre (1758-94), the demogogue who led the 1794 Reign of Terror that reduced the French Revolution to a nightmarish blood bath, was a theist hostile to atheism, but Napoleon (1769-1821) may be identified as having been an outspoken atheist. In James Haught's 2000 YEARS OF DISBELIEF, pp. 108-111, some of Napoleon's atheistic remarks are recorded: "All religions have been made by men"; "I do not think Jesus Christ ever existed"; "Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet"; "The popes set Europe in flames," etc. With Napoleon's defeat in 1815, a major reaction occurred in France as well as the rest of Europe against what was judged a triple-catastrophe: the French Enlightenment followed by the French Revolution, then Napoleon--all of which could be blamed on Voltaire. The freethought movement terminated in France except as a furtive subtext among novelists and poets, for example Stendhal, who wrote his friend, the poet Merimee, also an atheist, "What excuses God is that he doesn't exist." This avoidance of the issue has persisted into the twentieth century with the notable exception of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-80), who described his conversion to atheism at the age of twelve in his autobiography THE WORDS (1964) and later wrote his major existential text BEING AND NOTHING (1943) to describe the plight of the individual without God.

5. Primary Sources: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century German Atheists:

Kant (1724-1804) began his career identified with the Enlightenment. In his GENERAL NATURAL HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE HEAVENS (1755), Kant anticipated LaPlace's nebular hypothesis of the solar system's origin with a materialistic vision of the universe as a phoenix that repeatedly consumes itself only to rise again from its ashes. Worlds perish, Kant argued, once they have exhausted themselves, but new worlds incessantly emerge in other regions of the heavens to repeat the process. However, Kant only achieved fame and importance when he published CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (1781) to use Hume's skepticism against itself by proposing the existence of transcendent truths--God included--that elude empirical verification. Kant reduced the realm of uncertainty from all perceptual experience as argued by ancient skeptics to the relatively limited zone of the noumenon (thing-in-itself, or Ding an sich), the unknowable "stuff" of non-sensuous intuition. In Kant's opinion, skepticism played a useful, if limited, role in offsetting simple dogmatism, but only as long as it was restricted to its proper function as a method that aims at certainty through the exploration of contradictions. Without certainty in God's existence, Kant argued, morality loses all validity. In his final book, RELIGION WITH THE BOUNDARIES OF MERE REASON (1794), Kant asserted that "Everything man does to please God apart from a moral way of life is mere religious delusion and spurious worship of God" (quoted by Frederick Copleston, A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (vol. 6, p. 344). Kants' arguments seemed blasphemous at the time, so Frederick II, King of Prussia, took the extraordinary step of banning his book from being taught at German universities, and Kant responded by retiring from the academic world and withdrawing from public life.

German metaphysicians influenced by Kant included Herder (1744-1803), who emphasized the dynamics of becoming; Fichte (1762-1814), whose concept of the "I" advanced subjectivism to a new level; Schlegel (1772-1829), who explored nature as the ground for universal identity, and Schelling (1775-1864), who argued, among other things, that nature is a sudden "leap" into existence through God's authority and that its essence is therefore to return to God. The theologian Schleiermacher (1768-1834) likewise used Kant as a point of departure by fully exploring the ramifications of the assumption that religious faith could be justified as "a matter of feeling." In his old age, even the poet Goethe (1749-1832) seems to have accepted the Kantian defense of Christianity. In 1829, he argued, for example, in his CONVERSATIONS WITH ECKERMAN, compiled by Eckerman (1836-48), that "the period of doubt is past," and he expressed his gratification "that men now doubt as little the existence of a God as their own."

Hegel (1770-1831) formulated a strictly idealistic theory of the universe that limited religion's defensible core to Absolute Idea as embodied or symbolized by orthodox Christian mythology. Like Kant, Hegel stressed the importance of intellectual freedom, but he limited this freedom to the pursuit of godhead through absolute knowledge as transcendent self-realization. Hegel justified religion as Vorstellung, or a pictorial image of Absolute Idea that justifies worship as a return of the isolated mind into identity with God through the renunciation of unique individual experience. Especially important for this purpose, Hegel argued in PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND (1807), was the Christian belief in the incarnation of God in Christ that symbolizes the more basic synthesis between Absolute Idea and mankind's concrete Christian faith. In Hegel's opinion, this crucial analogy justifies orthodox Christianity.

As a Hegelian theologian, David Strauss (1808-74) wrote the pivotal study, LEBEN JESU, 2 vols. (1835-36; translated by George Eliot as LIFE OF CHRIST in 1846). Expanding upon the so-called Higher Criticism of such German theologians as Reimarus (1694-1768), Semler (1725-91), Eichhorn (1757-1827), and Baur (1792-1860), Strauss devoted over 800 pages to exposing numerous internal and historical inconsistencies of the four Gospels in order to promote a more flawless religious worship emphasizing the Hegelian concept of religion as Absolute Idea. In his short book, IN DEFENSE OF MY LIFE OF JESUS AGAINST THE HEGELIANS (1837; Archon, 1983), Strauss explained this purpose on a strictly metaphysical basis, but, contrary to his expectations, his Biblical documentation encouraged among readers a return to atheism after almost a half century of intellectual reaction. Strauss's final book, THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW (1873) was no less controversial as his final and disarmingly honest testament upon having converted to atheism in response to the Darwinian theory of evolution. With sweeping analysis, Strauss showed that he was able to explain the metaphysical implications of current scientific findings with as much facility as he had the metaphysical implications of Biblical inconsistencies.

As a protege of the eminent theologian Schleiermacher, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) wrote THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY (1841; trans. by George Eliot in 1854) to explain Christianity as the anthropomorphic projection of human qualities upon a mythical God in order to gratify human needs. Among the qualities projected in this fashion, Feuerbach included thought, knowledge, observation, emotion, love, morality, and benevolent fatherhood as well as egotism and vindictiveness. The problem, however, Feuerbach argued, is that mankind cheats itself by doing this: "God is the highest subjectivity of man abstracted from himself; hence man can do nothing of himself, all goodness comes from God. The more subjective God is, the more completely does man divest himself of his subjectivity, because God is, per se, his relinquished self" (p. 31). Even more controversial than Strauss, Feuerbach went on to challenge all religion in THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION (1845), and then he simplified his argument and confessed his atheism in a series of public lectures that he later published as LECTURES ON THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION (1851; trans. by Ralph Manheim for Harper & Row. 1967). In combination, Strauss and Feuerbach's arguments effectively answered German metaphysics and renovated the secular vision of the French Enlightenment among European intellectuals.
Ludwig Bu"chner (1824-99), FORCE AND MATTER (1855, with 20 additional revisions as Bu"chner kept modifying his text to keep up with the very latest advancements in science). Bu"chner offered a lucid materialist explanation of the secular implications of current advances in both the physical and biological sciences. To explain the eternal self-sufficiency of the physical universe independent of divine authority, he emphasized the conservation of both matter (first discovered by Lavoisier in 1792) and energy (first discovered by Helmholtz and Mayer in 1842). It should also be noted, however, that Bu"chner devoted the final half of his book to a thorough exploration of current research upon the brain as a repository of human consciousness whose structure is essentially identical with that of animals. He concluded that the human mind (or "soul") is an evolutionary achievement only quantitatively different from animal intelligence and therefore unlikely to gain immortality upon death.

As Germany's preeminent biologist committed to the Dawinian theory of evolution, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) authored almost fifty books upon the topic. By far the most famous of these, having sold about three million copies in over twenty languages, was THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE (1899), in which Haeckel explored many historical and philosophical implications of evolutionary doctrine. Haeckel covered much the same territory as Bu"chner's, but with a more thorough Darwinian perspective that is still especially useful in his explanation of the numerous stages of evolution in the animal brain that culminated with human intelligence. Haeckel's particular version of freethought has been identified with pantheism, but Haeckel made his intentions absolutely plain when he declared that pantheism is "merely a polite way of giving the Lord God his conge (in idiomatic French, his encouragement to depart--p, 291). Bu"chner and Haeckel often referred to each other in their texts, and in fact they very effectively supplement each other.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the first major philosopher in modern times both to declare himself an atheist and to propose an essentially godless philosophy. In his essay, "Religion: A Dialogue" (1851), included in SCHOPENHAUER'S ESSAYS (Willey, no date), section 3, pp. 2 and 18, he went so far as to describe religion as a "metaphysics of the masses" and as "a necessary evil, its necessity resting on the pitiful imbecility of the great majority of mankind . . ."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) took an even more hostile view of Christianity than Schopenhauer, incessantly challenging its ethics, its metaphysics, and its authority as a source of the truth. As with Voltaire's "Ecraissez l'enfame," Nietzsche made his slogan the repeated claim that God was dead. Nietzsche also shared Schopenhauer's elitist disdain for the average mind, arguing that all ignorance, but especially Christian ignorance, does not result from deprivation as much as mankind's willful aversion to genuine knowledge. Nietzsche accordingly defined "man's truths" as "his irrefutable errors," in other words those of his countless mistaken beliefs that elude refutation because they are neither provable nor disprovable. "What is needed above all," he argued in THE WILL TO POWER ed. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 221, "is an absolute skepticism toward all inherited concepts." In his book-length diatribe THE ANTICHRIST (1895; trans. by H.L. Mencken, Knopf, 1918), pp. 629-30, written in fall, 1888, a few months before he went insane, and belatedly published by his sister in 1895, Nietzsche declared that Pontius Pilate's unanswered query to Christ, "What is truth?" (John, 18.38) was the "only saying [in the New Testament] that has value--one which is its criticism, even its [i.e. the Bible's] annihilation." [italics in the original] Nietzsche also argued that a hatred of reality is "the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity," that holy scriptures had been "concocted" as a "giant literary fraud," and that "whatever a theologian regards as true must be false." Nietzsche concluded THE ANTICHRIST by arguing that the Christian church "has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul." As a result, he argued, the Christian church has become "the one immortal blemish on the human race" (p. 181).

In contrast to Strauss, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, all of whom more or less conceded religion's importance as a psychological crutch for the ordinary mind, Karl Marx (1818-83) identified religion as an "opium of the people" that must be eliminated before mankind can realize its full potential. Inspired by his early exposure to Feuerbach's arguments, Marx criticized him in his 1845 "Theses on Feuerbach" for emphasizing individual experience without acknowledging the relevance of his theory to collective ideology. First came personal liberation from religion, Marx felt, then collective liberation from social oppression. In CONTRIBUTION TO CRITIQUE OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT (1844), portions of which are included in MARX ENGELS ON RELIGION (Progress, 1957), p. 38, Marx explained, "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is required for their real happiness," since the rejection of illusions serves as a demand "to give up a condition which needs illusions." In other words, "The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason." In the end, Marx argued, the criticism of heaven would be "transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics." Marx's hostility to religion dominated Marxism through the twentieth century and became a fixed tenet of communist doctrine. However, it fared poorly in the Soviet Union. Lenin was fully supportive, and atheism became official dogma, but Stalin (who had spent five years of his youth as a seminarian) relaxed state controls during World War II to improve public support for the war effort. With the collapse of the Soviet government in 1991 there was no further pretence and large numbers of Russians openly resumed practice as Orthodox Russian Catholics.

Like both Feuerbach and Marx, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) maintained that religion bears a harmful psychological impact. He identified religious experience as a kind of neurosis in both MOSES AND MONOTHEISM (1937) and NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES (1932), and argued in sweeping terms that religion may be compared to a "neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity." See Lecture 35 of NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES, in THE COMPLETE INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHOANALYSIS, (Norton, 1966), p. 632. In CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS (1929; Norton, 1961), pp. 11, 19, and 28, Freud also described religion as a mass delusion whose "oceanic" sense of eternity is best explained as a vestigial fixation of infant helplessness. In THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION (1927; Norton, 1961, trans. by James Strachey), pp. 29, 43, Freud more specifically argued that religion functions as an obsessional neurosis, effectively a fairy tale that encourages "every possible sort of dishonesty." The primary value of religion for Christians, Freud explained, is that "their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one" (p. 44). However, as with personal neurosis, Freud argued that the cost is too high. Freud ended his manifesto with a simple aphorism, "No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere" (p. 56). As a lapsed protege of Freud, Jung (1875-1961) embraced religion, and throughout the twentieth century there was an understood division between atheistic Freudians and Jungians amenable to "oceanic" religious speculation.

Many twentieth century intellectuals sought a synthesis between Marx and Freud, including Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), Adorno (1903-69), and Marcuse (1898-1979). Most took atheism for granted and did not bother to articulate their assumptions. As an exception to this rule, Erich Fromm (1900-80) elaborated his own Marxist-Freudian synthesis in his essay, "The Dogma of Christ," included in THE DOGMA OF CHRIST AND OTHER ESSAYS ON RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE (Holt, 1963), pp. 3-91. Fromm explained, for example, "Fantasy satisfactions have the double function which is characteristic of every narcotic: they act both as an anodyne and as a deterrent to active change of reality. The common fantasy satisfactions have an essential advantage over individual daydreams: by virtue of their universality, the fantasies are perceived by the conscious mind as if they were real. An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality. The oldest of these collective fantasy satisfactions is religion" (p. 20).

The physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was ambivalent about his religious beliefs. In Clifton Fadiman's collection of personal testaments, I BELIEVE, (Simon and Schuster, 1931), p. 27, Einstein praised religion as insight into "the mystery of life," but he rejected the concepts of an afterlife and a providential God: "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbour such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism." In OUT OF MY LATER YEARS (Philosophical Library, 1950), pp. 21-23, Einstein included two later personal manifestos, of 1939 and 1941, in which his opinions seem to have shifted somewhat. In his 1939 statement, Einstein argued, "The scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other." As a result, Einstein concluded, the individual must be "able to place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind" as mandated by "the highest principles for our aspirations and judgements . . . given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition" (pp. 21-23). In his 1941 statement, however, Einstein took a more balanced stance. He declared that religion "deals only with evaluations of human thought and action" and "cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts." In contrast, he argued, "science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be." As a result the two human endeavors, science and religion, are absolutely complementary: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" (pp. 25-26). However, Einstein repeated his objections to prayer, the concept of sin, and the orthodox belief in a personal god as conventions that should be eliminated from modern religious practice.

Philosophers supportive of the Nazi cause could be more generous in their judgment of religion. In FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 2 vols. (John Lane Company, 1899). Houston Chamberlain (1855-1927), the elder philosopher of Nazi ideology, declared his support of religious belief that excludes the church from public service (as for example in the United States). He quoted Kant's words, "Religion we must seek in ourselves, not outside ourselves," and "To have religion is the duty of man to himself." "God is not an experience, but a thought," Chamberlain added, and "To have religion is the duty of man to himself" (vol. 2, pp. 484, 487, and 492). In THE MYTH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, (1930; Noontide, 1982), Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946--executed at Nurenberg) concurred with Chamberlain about excluding traditional religion from government. He conceded that nothing should be done to disrupt orthodox Christians who are set in their ways, but he also advocated that young Germans in pursuit of "another mythos" should be steered to participate in the coming "German Volk Church" that would dilute Catholicism and Protestantism in a manner acceptable to Nazi ideology. Rosenberg recommended abolishing the Old Testament and featuring the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament in order to encourage more activistic values among worshippers (pp. 393-95). He also criticized the Vatican for its "worldly arm," and praised Mussolini's 1929 Concordat for having deprived the Catholic Church of the right to exercise this "arm" in political activity (pp. 398-99).

Hitler (1889-1945) needed to be more pragmatic than Rosenberg. He had been raised a Catholic and nominally remained a Catholic throughout his life. According to Ernst Helmreich's THE GERMAN CHURCHES UNDER HITLER (Wayne State, 1979), p. 123, Hitler faithfully paid his tithes, listed himself as a Catholic in the Nazi Party Handbook, and neither renounced Catholicism nor was excommunicated from the church during his lifetime. In MEIN KAMPF (1925; Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), Hitler argued, "The great masses of a people do not consist of philosophers, and it is just for them that faith is frequently the sole basis of a moral view of life" (p. 365). His principal concern was the cooperation of Catholics and Protestants in support of his national policies, for, Hitler argued, "What is important for the earth's future is not whether Protestants vanquish Catholics or Catholics vanquish Protestants, but whether Aryan humanity maintains itself or dies out" (p. 827). Hitler could be hostile to Christianity in private conversations ("You are either a Christian or a German," he said at one point, "You cannot be both"), but he made it his public policy to make an accommodation with both the Catholic and Protestant religions. See John Cornwell's HITLER'S POPE: THE SECRET HISTORY OF PIUS XII [Viking, 1999), pp. 105-6. As Cornwell also demonstrates, Hitler sought and obtained the Vatican's support in his effort to become the dictator of Germany, apparently in exchange for the August, 1933, Concordat with the Vatican, but he later ignored the Concordat and fell into a hostile relationship with the Vatican. One suspects that, despite his protestations otherwise on certain occasions, Hitler shared Rosenberg's desire for a "German volk church" to supplant orthodox Christianity. Useful references upon Hitler's national strategy pertaining to religion include, besides Helmreich and Cornwell's book already cited, Michael Power's RELIGION IN THE REICH (Longmans, 1939), Klaus Scholder's THE CHURCHES AND THE THIRD REICH (Fortress Press, 1977), and chap. 5 of Joseph McCabe's THE PAPACY IN POLITICS TODAY (Watts, 1937, rev. 1951).

Today, more than fifty years later, the German public pretty much ignores the religious issue. Intellectuals keep their agnosticism to themselves, just as rural Bavarian villagers avoid making an issue of their continuing Christian faith.

6. Primary Sources: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Freethought.

Bentham (1748-1832), the founder of Utilitarianism, wrote over 650 pages of anonymous tracts opposed to religion, including THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND CATECHISM EXAMINED (1788), A FEW SELF-CONTRADICTIONS OF THE BIBLE, and ANALYSIS OF THE INFLUENCE OF NATURAL RELIGION ON THE TEMPORAL HAPPINESS OF MANKIND, in which he argued, "People who do not believe in life after death do not fear being dead, but believers fear punishment more than they hope for bliss. Religion speaks well of God, but assumes otherwise! God is, after all, an unknown and incomprehensible entity from whom inconsistent and unintelligible actions are believed to flow" (p. 17-18). See Delos McKown's useful biographical account and bibliography in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNBELIEF, pp. 55-57.

As a close friend, James Mill (1773-1836) shared Bentham's views on religion but without having published anything to assert them. Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiography (Columbia, 1924), pp. 28-30--the very beginning of chap. 2) that his father considered religion to be "the greatest enemy of morality: first by setting up fictitious excellences,--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human-kind,--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues." He also found it "impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with pefect goodness and righteousness." In his opinion this was a "wicked" representation of God, in fact "the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise." Since evil obviously exists, Mill argued, such an Author probably does not.

Thomas Paine wrote much of THE AGE OF REASON (1794-95), a vigorous critique of the Bible while imprisoned in the Bastille in order to promote deism as belief in God's authority free of Biblical mythology. It should be noted that Paine's book was published a half century after the deist movement had collapsed in England, and that, contrary to much Biblical criticism, it continues to remain highly readable today.

Richard Carlile (1790-1843) went to jail for nine years for having published Paine's THE AGE OF REASON, and he thereafter fell into the early leadership of England's increasingly visible populist freethought movement. He was succeeded in this role by Robert Owen (1771-1858), George Holyoake (1817-1906), and Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891), each of them having taken a more "radical" stance than his predecessor in his rejection of religious orthodoxy. As an uncompromising atheist, Bradlaugh was the most controversial, and he can be credited with the most publications supportive of atheism, ninety of which are listed by Gordon Stein in GOD: PRO AND CON. Stein also lists many (but probably not all) of the books, pamphlets, and leaflets by the other three. According to J.M. Robertson, the freethought movement thrived during Bradlaugh's lifetime because of his energetic leadership, then began to fall into decline after his untimely death.

Contemporaries linked with Bradlaugh included Joseph Levy and Annie Besant (1847-1933), the latter having co-authored with Bradlaugh and Charles Watts (1836-1906) the FREETHINKER'S TEXT-BOOK, 3 vols. (Freethought Publishing Co., 1877. Besant's portion, vol. 2, THE ATHEIST VIEWPOINT, repr. by Arno Press, 1972), provided an excellent historic critique of Christianity through the fifteenth century.

Successors influenced by Bradlaugh included George Foote (1850-1915) and Chapman Cohen (1868-1964), successive editors of the important atheist journal FREETHINKER, as well as J.M. Robertson (1856-1933) and Joseph McCabe (1867-1955), the two dominant freethought scholars listed among secondary sources at the end of this bibliography. Foote succeeded Bradlaugh as chairman of the National Secular Society, and Robertson, something of a polymath, remained closely aligned with this group as well as being an active member of Parliament, a well-published Shakespearean scholar, and apparently Britain's leading authority on free trade. In contrast, McCabe played an increasingly divisive role and was finally ostracized by the freethought movement in 1928. During the thirties he became a communist sympathizer. Today, in retrospect, Robertson, Foote, and McCabe are to be valued strictly based on the quality of their publications rather than their various rivalries in the freethought movement. Most, but not all, of these publications are listed in Stein's GOD: PRO AND CON.

English romantic poets sympathetic with the French Revolution and therefore to be examined as freethinkers included Wordsworth, Coleridge, and later Byron, Shelley, and Keats. However, Keats avoided the issue, and Wordsworth, whatever his early beliefs, became a staunch orthodox Christian by the end of his life. Shelley (1792-1822) may be counted an atheist because of his slender unreadable pamphlet, THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM, which he tried to distribute in 1811 at Oxford University (see SHELLEY'S PROSE, ed. by David Clark (New Amsterdam, 1988), pp. 37-39. In his mature years, Coleridge (1772-1834) enjoyed the reputation as one of England's outstanding conservatives, but his theism was inconsistent and he occasionally fell into arguments supportive of freethought. In AIDS TO REFLECTION (1824), for example, he said, "He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all." By the end of his life, J.M. Robertson explains, Coleridge was "essentially a heretic, believing or disbelieving just what he chose, and just as much as he chose." He was quoted as having said, "Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an atheist." Coleridge's posthumous essay, "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," was denounced for its "tendencies towards the subversion of faith." See J.M. Robertson's A HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, vol. 1, pp. 95-98.

By the mid-nineteenth century the tide of opinion in England dramatically shifted from Christian orthodoxy to freethought. The ultra-conservative Oxford Movement had collapsed by 1841, Strauss and Feuerbach bore a substantial impact translated into English by the novelist George Eliot, continental Europe's 1848 Revolution terminated the anti-democratic thrust of Metternichian diplomacy, and, not least, Darwin's ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, published in 1859, finally gave evolution a credible explanation based on the principle of natural selection. As a result, many respectable Victorian authors and poets were drawn into the freethought movement on a relatively casual basis. For example, the novelist Dickens (1812-70), confided in a personal letter, "As to the church, my friend, I am sick of it. The spectacle presented by the indecent squabbles of priests of most denominations, and by the exemplary unfairness and rancor with which they conduct their differences . . . utterly repel me" (quoted by Haught, 2000 YEARS OF DISBELIEF, p. 133). George Eliot (1819-90) asked the rhetorical question, "Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, what will be the remainder?" (Haught, p. 143) And the novelist and poet George Meredith (1828-1909) confessed, "When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks. . . . But I have never since swallowed the Christian fable" (Haught, p. 186). In IN MEMORIAM, published in 1850, the poet Tennyson confided, "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds," and in "Maud" (1855) he complained that the churches "have killed their Christ" (Haught, p. 188). Similarly, the poet Robert Browning (1812-89) confessed, "I am no Christian" (Haught, p. 182), and the poet Swinburne (1837-1909) became famous for his lines in "Hymn to Proserpine," "For there is no god found stronger than death; and death is sleep." Likewise, the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) expressed in "Hap" his suspicion that "Crass Casualty" (i.e., chance) dominates human destiny rather than "some vengeful god," and in "The Impercipient" that "faiths by which my comrades stand seem fantasies to me." Of course such excellent poets as Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins remained devout Christians, but the overall trend among poets--and in fact in literature as a whole--was toward secularization.
As England's dominant mid-century philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806-73) tried to avoid religious issues, and he mostly ignored the philosophical implications of Darwinian evolution. However, in ON LIBERTY (1859; PREFACES TO LIBERTY, ed. by Bernard Wishy, pp. 278 and 283), Mill did stress the importance of continuous debate, since "on every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons" (p. 278). Otherwise, Mill argued, orthodoxy sets in, and idea degenerates into received opinion, which he described as hereditary creed that does nothing for the mind or heart "except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant" (p. 283). In A SYSTEM OF LOGIC (Harper, 1843), Mill elaborated a modern theory of induction supportive of science, and in AN EXAMINATION OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY (1865; Toronto, 1979), p. 103, he challenged the Christian idea of a vindictive God: "I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go." In his posthumous essay, "Utility of Religion," written between 1850 and 1858, in ESSAYS ON ETHICS, RELIGION AND SOCIETY (Toronto, 1969), p. 423, he similarly criticized the mental "torpidity" of worshippers who ignore God's responsibility for "so clumsily made and capriciously governed a creation as this planet." However, in his final posthumous essay, "Theism," written between 1868 and 1870, he proposed the possible existence of a benign if limited God pitted against evil, and with this "indulgence of hope" he adduced the benefits of Christianity as an inducement to the highest moral behavior.

Thomas Huxley (1825-95), friend and defender of Darwin in public debate (he was described as "Darwin's bulldog"), shifted his emphasis to the critique of religion in his two collections of essays, SCIENCE AND HEBRAISM and SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION (Macmillan) both published in 1894. As Huxley explained in his essay, "Agnosticism and Christianity," included in SCIENCE AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION, he had invented the word agnosticism in 1869 to describe a skeptical method of inquiry. However, Spencer later simplified the concept to specify the belief that God's existence can be neither proved nor disproved. In his article, Huxley insisted, "that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty," and that he therefore regarded as immoral "the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions" (p. 310). Huxley concluded, "We have not the slightest objection to believe anything you like, if you will give us good grounds for belief; but, if you cannot, we must respectfully refuse, even if that refusal should wreck morality and insure our own damnation several times over. We are quite content to leave that to the decision of the future. The course of the past has impressed us with the firm conviction that no good ever comes of falsehood, and we feel warranted in refusing even to experiment in that direction" (p. 318). By the late nineteenth century there was a broad shift among British freethinkers to identifying themselves as agnostics. By the end of his life even Darwin could describe himself as an agnostic.

The poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822-88), Huxley's friendly inlaw (Huxley's son having been the husband of Arnold's niece), is often viewed as having been Victorian England's most formidable advocate of religion and traditionalist values. However, in his two volumes, LITERATURE AND DOGMA (1873) and GOD AND THE BIBLE (1875), Arnold conceded his acceptance of Huxley's concept of agnosticism, if with the caveat that the religious needs of the public at large could not be neglected. In his Preface to LITERATURE AND DOGMA Arnold argued that the traditional interpretation of the Bible had become "absolutely and forever impossible!--as impossible as to restore the feudal system, or the belief in witches." In his opinion, the entire Christian doctrine could be ignored beyond its code of behavior in "mildness and sweet reasonableness."

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), the father of Virginia Woolf, edited and authored most of England's DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY as well as the standard two-volume secular history of the eighteenth century cited among secondary sources. Among his many other books were two influential collections of essays supportive of agnosticism: ESSAYS ON FREETHINKING AND PLAIN SPEAKING (1873) and AN AGNOSTIC'S APOLOGY (1893). Huxley had invented the word agnostic, but it was Stephens's title to his second collection that gave the word worldwide currency. Stephen was fully as articulate as Huxley, so the two of them, more or less supported by Arnold, dominated the Victorian critique of religion.

The brilliant young Cambridge mathematician, William Clifford (1845-79), argued in his most influential essay, "The Ethics of Belief" (1876), that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." As a general principle, Clifford argued in the last sentence of his essay, ". . . where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe." See LECTURES AND ESSAYS (MacMillan, 1879), vol. 2, pp. 186 and 211. In another essay, "Body and Mind," also included in LECTURES AND ESSAYS, Clifford demonstrated based on current discoveries in brain physiology by Helmholtz and others that thinking is entirely a function of the brain, so the soul (or mind) terminates when the body dies.

As England's most eminent metaphysician, F.H. Bradley (1846-1924) declared in his monumental exposition of Hegelian metaphysics, APPEARANCE AND REALITY (1893), pp. 448 and 396-97, that a future life is decidedly improbable and argued, "We may say that God is not God, till he has become all in all, and that a God which is all in all is not the God of religion." In other words, a God vast enough to preside over the universe as we know it is simply too big, too abstract and too elusive in its conception to be of providential benefit to mankind.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was England's dominant and most celebrated philosopher during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, having joined Alfred North Whitehead in writing the massive PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA (1910-13) as a synthesis of logic and mathematics that permitted the integration of science and philosophy. Russell also published many dozens of books and articles that featured both materialism and epistemology (the two dominant foci of freethought in ancient Greece) as well as various political issues. In his more popular iconoclastic writings, Russell time and again rejected orthodox religious belief based on the premise, as expressed in the very first sentence of his collection, SKEPTICAL ESSAYS (1928), p. 11, "that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." Russell's collections of iconoclastic essays included SCEPTICAL ESSAYS (1928), MYSTICISM AND LOGIC (1929), RELIGION AND SCIENCE (1935), IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS (1935), UNPOPULAR ESSAYS (1950), THE WILL TO DOUBT (1958), and WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN (1957), supplemented by ATHEISM: COLLECTED ESSAYS, 1943-49 (Arno, 1972). Perhaps Russell's most basic assumption, as explained in his title essay, "Why I am not a Christian," p. 16, was that religion is mostly the product of fear: "Fear is the basis of the whole thing--fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand."

Two other eminent philosophers, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) and John McTaggart (1866-1925), also challenged orthodox religion. In his single essay on religion, "The value of religion," published in INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS, vol. xii (1902), p.88, Moore argued, "I am an infidel, and do not believe that God exists; and I think the evidence will justify my disbelief. But just as I think there is no evidence for his existence, I think there is also no evidence that he does not exist. . . . I do not believe that he does exist, but also I do not believe that he does not exist." McTaggart, a friend of Moore, elaborated his own vision of atheism in SOME DOGMAS OF RELIGION (1906), STUDIES IN HEGELIAN COSMOLOGY (1918), and THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE (1921, 1927). Paradoxically, McTaggart supported the Church of England and declared his belief in immortality and the non-existence of matter. But he also rejected the orthodox Christian idea of God with a variety of intricate arguments, perhaps the simplest of which was that the Absolute is not God, and in consequence there is no God.

The intellectual rivals, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, were no less unpredictable in their treatment of religion. In GOD THE INVISIBLE KING (1917), Wells (1866-1946) proposed a diluted theism that might help to consolidate public opinion in support of the war effort against Germany, but he soon recanted, and many years later, in EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1934), p. 576, he made an effort to justify himself with the argument, "At no time did my deistic phrasing make any concessions to doctrinal Christianity. If my gestures were pious, my hands were clean. I never sold myself to organized orthodoxy. At its most artificial my religiosity was a flaming heresy and not a time-serving compromise."

Shaw (1856-1950) rejected immortality and instead tried to identify God with the Bergsonian elan vital, or Life Force, which he felt had much the same impact on human destiny as Christian providence. However, Shaw also warned of the destructive impact of excessive candor in matters of religion: "To change a credulous peasantry to a sceptical one by inculcating a negative atheism plus a science beyond the reaches of their brains may make an end of civilization, not for the first time." And indeed, the French Revolution and the Communist cause during the twentieth century might be seen to have justified this warning. See Warren Sylvester Smith's SHAW ON RELIGION: IRREVERENT OBSERVATIONS BY A MAN OF GREAT FAITH (Dodd, Mead, 1967), p. 236.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) also paid tribute to religious experience, but his extravagant impiety in THE PLUMED SERPENT (1926), THE MAN WHO DIED (1929) and APOCALYPSE (1931) can only offend the average Christian. In APOCALYPSE (Cambridge, 1980), p. 200, his last major text before he died, Lawrence concluded: "God, what is God? The cosmos is alive, but it is not God. Nevertheless, when we are in touch with it, it gives us life. . . . And whoever can come into the closest touch with the cosmos is a bringer of life and a veritable Ruler; but whoever denies the Cosmos and tries to dominate it, by Mind or Spirit or Mechanism, is a death-bringer and a true enemy of man." Lawrence accordingly considered both science and orthodox religion to be denials of the cosmos and therefore death bringers and true enemies of man.

Logical Positivists including Carnap (1871-1970), Neurath (1882-1945), Schlick (1882-1936), and Nagel (1937 ) took a scientific approach to religious issues with an emphasis on verifiability. They generally accepted the assumption that God's existence could neither be proven nor disproven, and could therefore be ignored. Their most lucid exponent, A.J. Ayer (1910-89), explained in his highly popular first book, LANGUAGE, TRUTH, AND LOGIC (1936; Dover, 1946), "We cannot deduce the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. For we know that the reason why a priori propositions are certain is that they are tautologies. And from a set of tautologies nothing but a further tautology can be validly deduced. It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of God" (pp. 114-15). In another context: "If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it" (p. 118). In his later book, THE CENTRAL QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), Ayer devoted chap. 10, "The Claims of Theology," to a discussion of traditional religious questions on this positivist basis, and in the three final chapters of his last book, THE MEANING OF LIFE (Scribners, 1990), Ayer described his stoic vision of atheism of his last years. It should also be mentioned that Ayer transcribed his 1959 debate with Father Copleston in chap. 2, just as Russell had transcribed his 1948 debate with Copleston in chap. 13 of WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN.

Late twentieth century British poets willing to criticize religion in their published verse have included Stevie Smith (1902-71), Philip Larkin (1922-85) and Ted Hughes (1930-99). The novelist John Fowles (1926- ) has expressed comparable views in personal essays, and the most outspoken philosopher, Anthony Flew, has published two books, GOD AND PHILOSOPHY (Harcourt, 1966) and, as a co-editor with Alasdair MacIntyre, NEW ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY (SCM Press, 1955). Both of of these studies are what might be described as uncompromisingly analytical.

7. Primary sources: the United States.

American civilization--to the extent that we have one--began with Puritanism as epitomized by the example and teachings of Increase Mather (1639-1723 and his son Cotton Mather (1660-1728). Later, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), author of the sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), intensified religious demands even further, and revivalist movement s have recurred throughout later American history. However, there was a period of relative secular freedom during the late eighteenth century that culminated at the time of the American Revolution and the framing of the American Constitution. In 1725, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), at the age of nineteen, wrote a deist manifesto, A DISSERTATION ON LIBERTY AND NECESSITY, PLEASURE AND PAIN, as did the Vermont revolutionary hero, Ethan Allen (1738-89) in his 1784 book REASON, THE ONLY ORACLE OF MAN. The first six presidents of the United States--Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams--may also be identified as having been deists (see their quotations to this effect in Haught's 2000 YEARS OF DISBELIEF, pp. 77-101). Adams and Jefferson were especially skeptical of Christian dogma in their correspondence with each other during the final decades of their lives. Among later presidents, only Lincoln seems to have been a deist, having written a tract upon religion in 1834 that was thrown into a stove by one of his friends, Samuel Hill, to prevent any difficulties in his later political career (see Haught, p. 126). Theodore Roosevelt illustrates this orthodox tendency among later American politicians, having argued in his 1888 biography of Gouverneur Morris that Paine was "a filthy little atheist."

Emerson (1803-82) retired from his Unitarian ministry in 1832 because he could not accept its doctrine of transubstantiation. He continued to pursue his readings of such mystics as Boehme and Swedenborg, but he rejected orthodox conventions by emphasizing radical individuality. In probably his most militant freethought manifesto, "Self Reliance," Emerson argued, "Whoso would be a man must be a noncomformist" (EMERSON; ESSAYS AND LECTURES [New York: The Library of America, 1983], p. 262). He lamented, "If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument," and explained that to be predictably orthodox was to possess knowledge whose "every truth is not quite true" (p. 264). When asked as a child to adhere to the doctrines of the church, he had rejected them, arguing, "But if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil" (p. 262), for, as he explained, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind" (p. 52). Emerson also complained of orthodox Christians, "Their virtues are penances," and declared his preference, "I do not wish to expiate, but to live" (p. 263). Unfortunately, Emerson's final essay "Immortality," published in 1875, affirmed his mature and relatively orthodox faith in the hereafter. "My idea of heaven," he said, "is that there is no melodrama in it at all; that it is wholly real" (LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS [Houghton Mifflin, 1875], p. 327).

As Emerson's protege, Thoreau (1817-62) seems to have limited himself to the assumption earlier suggested by Epicurus, "I say that there are gods but they care not what men do." (C.J. Woodbury, TALKS WITH EMERSON, pp. 93-94--cited by McCabe's A RATIONALIST ENCYCLOPEDIA, p. 583).

America's most outspoken nineteenth century iconoclast was Robert Ingersoll (1833-99), an Illinois Republican politician who began in 1860 to lecture before large audiences in defense of atheism. Ingersoll argued, for example, "Eternal punishment is eternal revenge, and can be inflicted by only an eternal monster." and he described the Old Testament's God as "A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant infamous and hideous--such is the God of the Pentateuch." Ingersoll also ridiculed salvation: "It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey." He similarly mocked religion's anti-intellectual tendencies: "The Church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff or a thief