I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off

religious belief, but never had it.... This point in my early education had however

incidentally one bad consequence deserving notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to

that of the world, my father thought it necessary to give it as one which could not

prudently be avowed to the world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself, at that

early age, was attended with some moral disadvantages.

—JOHN STUART MILL, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.

(The eternal silence of these infinite spaces makes me afraid.)

—BLAISE PASCAL, PENSÉES

T he book of Psalms can be deceiving. The celebrated opening of psalm 121, for example—“I

shall lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”—is rendered in English as a

statement but in the original takes the form of a question: where is the help coming from?

(Never fear: the glib answer is that the believers will be immune from all danger and suffering.)

Whoever the psalmist turns out to have been, he was obviously pleased enough with the polish

and address of psalm 14 to repeat it virtually word for word as psalm 53. Both versions begin

with the identical statement that “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” For some

reason, this null remark is considered significant enough to be recycled throughout all religious

apologetics. All that we can tell for sure from the otherwise meaningless assertion is that

unbelief—not just heresy and backsliding but unbelief—must have been known to exist even in

that remote epoch. Given the then absolute rule of unchallenged and brutally punitive faith, it

would perhaps have been a fool who did not keep this conclusion buried deep inside himself, in

which case it would be interesting to know how the psalmist knew it was there. (Dissidents used

to be locked up in Soviet lunatic asylums for “reformist delusions,” it being quite naturally and

reasonably assumed that anybody mad enough to propose reforms had lost all sense of self

preservation.)

Our species will never run out of fools but I dare say that there have been at least as many

credulous idiots who professed faith in god as there have been dolts and simpletons who

concluded otherwise. It might be immodest to suggest that the odds rather favor the

intelligence and curiosity of the atheists, but it is the case that some humans have always

noticed the improbability of god, the evil done in his name, the likelihood that he is man-made,

and the availability of less harmful alternative beliefs and explanations. We cannot know the

names of all these men and women, because they have in all times and all places been subject

to ruthless suppression. For the identical reason, nor can we know how many ostensibly devoutpeople were secretly unbelievers. As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in

relatively free societies such as Britain and the United States, unbelievers as secure and

prosperous as James Mill and Benjamin Franklin felt it advisable to keep their opinions private.

Thus, when we read of the glories of “Christian” devotional painting and architecture, or

“Islamic” astronomy and medicine, we are talking about advances of civilization and culture

some of them anticipated by Aztecs and Chinese—that have as much to do with “faith” as their

predecessors had to do with human sacrifice and imperialism. And we have no means of

knowing, except in a very few special cases, how many of these architects and painters and

scientists were preserving their innermost thoughts from the scrutiny of the godly. Galileo might

have been unmolested in his telescopic work if he had not been so unwise as to admit that it had

cosmological implications.

Doubt, skepticism, and outright unbelief have always taken the same essential form as they

do today. There were always observations on the natural order which took notice of the

absence or needlessness of a prime mover. There were always shrewd comments on the way in

which religion reflected human wishes or human designs. It was never that difficult to see that

religion was a cause of hatred and conflict, and that its maintenance depended upon ignorance

and superstition. Satirists and poets, as well as philosophers and men of science, were capable

of pointing out that if triangles had gods their gods would have three sides, just as Thracian

gods had blond hair and blue eyes.

The original collision between our reasoning faculties and any form of organized faith,

though it must have occurred before in the minds of many, is probably exemplified in the trial of

Socrates in 399 BC. It does not matter at all to me that we have no absolute certainty that

Socrates even existed. The records of his life and his words are secondhand, almost but not

quite as much as are the books of the Jewish and Christian Bible and the hadiths of Islam.

Philosophy, however, has no need of such demonstrations, because it does not deal in

“revealed” wisdom. As it happens, we have some plausible accounts of the life in question (a

stoic soldier somewhat resembling Schweik in appearance; a shrewish wife; a tendency to

attacks of catalepsy), and these will do. On the word of Plato, who was perhaps an eyewitness,

we may accept that during a time of paranoia and tyranny in Athens, Socrates was indicted for

godlessness and knew his life to be forfeit. The noble words of the Apology also make it plain

that he did not care to save himself by affirming, like a later man faced with an inquisition,

anything that he did not believe. Even though he was not in fact an atheist, he was quite

correctly considered unsound for his advocacy of free thought and unrestricted inquiry, and his

refusal to give assent to any dogma. All he really “knew,” he said, was the extent of his own

ignorance. (This to me is still the definition of an educated person.) According to Plato, this great

Athenian was quite content to observe the customary rites of the city, testified that the Delphic

oracle had instructed him to become a philosopher, and on his deathbed, condemned to

swallow the hemlock, spoke of a possible afterlife in which those who had thrown off the world

by mental exercise might yet continue to lead an existence of pure mind. But even then, he

remembered as always to qualify himself by adding that this might well not be the case. The

question, as always, was worth pursuing. Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by

analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astonomy takes the place of astrology.

From Socrates, also, we can learn how to argue two things that are of the highest

importance. The first is that conscience is innate. The second is that the dogmatic faithful can

easily be outpointed and satirized by one who pretends to take their preachings at face value.

Socrates believed that he had a daimon, or oracle, or internal guide, whose good opinion was

worth having. Everybody but the psychopath has this feeling to a greater or lesser extent. Adam

Smith described a permanent partner in an inaudible conversation, who acted as a check and

scrutineer. Sigmund Freud wrote that the voice of reason was small, but very persistent. C. S.Lewis tried to prove too much by opining that the presence of a conscience indicated the divine

spark. Modern vernacular describes conscience—not too badly—as whatever it is that makes us

behave well when nobody is looking. At any event, Socrates absolutely refused to say anything

of which he was not morally sure. He would sometimes, if he suspected himself of casuistry or

crowd-pleasing, break off in the very middle of a speech. He told his judges that at no point in

his closing plea had his “oracle” hinted at him to stop. Those who believe that the existence of

conscience is a proof of a godly design are advancing an argument that simply cannot be

disproved because there is no evidence for or against it. The case of Socrates, however,

demonstrates that men and women of real conscience will often have to assert it against faith.

He was facing death but had the option, even if convicted, of a lesser sentence if he chose to

plead for it. In almost insulting tones, he offered to pay a negligible fine instead. Having thus

given his angry judges no alternative but the supreme penalty, he proceeded to explain why

murder at their hands was meaningless to him. Death had no terror: it was either perpetual rest

or the chance of immortality—and even of communion with great Greeks like Orpheus and

Homer who had predeceased him. In such a happy case, he observed drily, one might even wish

to die and die again. It need not matter to us that the Delphic oracle is no more, and that

Orpheus and Homer are mythical. The point is that Socrates was mocking his accusers in their

own terms, saying in effect: I do not know for certain about death and the gods—but I am as

certain as I can be that you do not know, either.

Some of the antireligious effect of Socrates and his gentle but relentless questioning can be

gauged from a play that was written and performed in his own lifetime. The Clouds, composed

by Aristophanes, features a philosopher named Socrates who keeps up a school of skepticism. A

nearby farmer manages to come up with all the usual dull questions asked by the faithful. For

one thing, if there is no Zeus, who brings the rain to water the crops? Inviting the man to use his

head for a second, Socrates points out that if Zeus could make it rain, there would or could be

rain from cloudless skies. Since this does not happen, it might be wiser to conclude that the

clouds are the cause of the rainfall. All right then, says the farmer, who moves the clouds into

position? That must surely be Zeus. Not so, says Socrates, who explains about winds and heat.

Well in that case, replies the old rustic, where does the lightning come from, to punish liars and

other wrong-doers? The lightning, it is gently pointed out to him, does not seem to discriminate

between the just and the unjust. Indeed, it has often been noticed to strike the temples of

Olympian Zeus himself. This is enough to win the farmer over, though he later recants his

impiety and burns down the school with Socrates inside it. Many are the freethinkers who have

gone the same way, or escaped very narrowly. All major confrontations over the right to free

thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form—of a religious attempt to

assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one.

In essence, the argument with faith begins and ends with Socrates, and you may if you wish

take the view that the city prosecutors did right in protecting Athenian youth from his

troublesome speculations. However, it cannot be argued that he brought much science to bear

against superstition. One of his prosecutors alleged that he had called the sun a piece of stone

and the moon a piece of earth (the latter of which would have been true), but Socrates turned

aside the charge, saying that it was a problem for Anaxagoras. This Ionian philosopher had in

fact been prosecuted earlier for saying that the sun was a red-hot piece of rock and the moon a

piece of earth, but he was not as insightful as Leucippus and Democritus, who proposed that

everything was made of atoms in perpetual motion. (Incidentally, it is also quite possible that

Leucippus never existed, and nothing important depends on whether or not he actually did.) The

important thing about the brilliant “atomist” school is that it regarded the question of first cause

or origin as essentially irrelevant. At the time, this was as far as any mind could reasonably go.

This left the problem of the “gods” unresolved. Epicurus, who took up the theory ofDemocritus concerning atoms, could not quite disbelieve in “their” existence, but he did find it

impossible to convince himself that the gods played any role in human affairs. For one thing,

why would “they” bother with the tedium of human existence, let alone the tedium of human

government? They avoid unnecessary pain, and humans are wise to do likewise. Thus there is

nothing to be feared in death, and in the meantime all attempts to read the gods’ intentions,

such as studying the entrails of animals, are an absurd waste of time.

In some ways, the most attractive and the most charming of the founders of antireligion is

the poet Lucretius, who lived in the first century before Christ and admired the work of Epicurus

beyond measure. Reacting to a revival of ancient worship in his own day, he composed a witty

and brilliant poem entitled De Rerum Natura, or “On the Nature of Things.” This work was nearly

destroyed by Christian fanatics in the Middle Ages, and only one manuscript survived, so we are

fortunate even to know that a person writing in the time of Cicero (who first discussed the

poem) and Julius Caesar had managed to keep alive the atomic theory. Lucretius anticipated

David Hume in saying that the prospect of future annihilation was no worse than the

contemplation of the nothingness from which one came, and also anticipated Freud in ridiculing

the idea of prearranged burial rites and memorials, all of them expressing the vain and useless

wish to be present in some way at one’s own funeral. Following Aristophanes, he thought that

the weather was its own explanation and that nature, “rid of all gods,” did the work that foolish

and self-centered people imagined to be divinely inspired, or directed at their puny selves:

Who can wheel all the starry spheres, and blow

Over all land the fruitful warmth from above

Be ready in all places and all times,

Gather black clouds and shake the quiet sky

With terrible thunder, to hurl down bolts which often

Rattle his own shrines, to rage in the desert, retreating

For target drill, so that his shafts can pass

The guilty by, and slay the innocent?

Atomism was viciously persecuted throughout Christian Europe for many centuries, on the

not unreasonable ground that it offered a far better explanation of the natural world than did

religion. But, like a tenuous thread of thought, the work of Lucretius managed to persist in a few

learned minds. Sir Isaac Newton may have been a believer—in all sorts of pseudoscience as well

as in Christianity—but when he came to set out his Principia he included ninety lines of De Rerum

Natura in the early drafts. Galileo’s 1623 volume Saggiatore, while it does not acknowledge

Epicurus, was so dependent on his atomic theories that both its friends and its critics referred to

it as an Epicurean book.

In view of the terror imposed by religion on science and scholarship throughout the early

Christian centuries (Augustine maintained that the pagan gods did exist, but only as devils, and

that the earth was less than six thousand years old) and the fact that most intelligent people

found it prudent to make an outward show of conformity, one need not be surprised that the

revival of philosophy was often originally expressed in quasi-devout terms. Those who followed

the various schools of philosophy that were permitted in Andalusia during its brief flowering—a

synthesis between Aristotelianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were permitted to

speculate about duality in truth, and a possible balance between reason and revelation. This

concept of “double truth” was advanced by supporters of Averroes but strongly opposed by the

church for obvious reasons. Francis Bacon, writing during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, liked to

say—perhaps following Tertullian’s assertion that the greater the absurdity the stronger his

belief in it—that faith is at its greatest when its teachings are least amenable to reason. Pierre

Bayle, writing a few decades later, was fond of stating all the claims of reason against a givenbelief, only to add “so much the greater is the triumph of faith in nevertheless believing.” We can

be fairly sure that he did not do this merely in order to escape punishment. The time when irony

would punish and confuse the literal and the fanatical was about to dawn.

But this was not to happen without many revenges and rearguard actions from the literal

and the fanatical. For a brief but splendid time in the seventeenth century, the staunch little

nation of Holland was the tolerant host of many freethinkers such as Bayle (who moved there to

be safe) and René Descartes (who moved there for the same reason). It was also the birthplace,

one year before the arraignment of Galileo by the Inquisition, of the great Baruch Spinoza, a

son of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewry who had themselves originally emigrated to Holland

to be free of persecution. On July 27, 1656, the elders of the Amsterdam synagogue made the

following cherem, or damnation, or fatwa, concerning his work:

With the judgment of the angels and of the saints we excommunicate, cut off, curse, and

anathematize Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of the elders and of all this holy

congregation, in the presence of the holy books: by the 613 precepts which are written

therein, with the anathema wherewith Joshua cursed Jericho, with the curse which Elisha

laid upon the children, and with all the curses which are written in the law. Cursed be he by

day and cursed be he by night. Cursed be he in sleeping and cursed be he in waking, cursed

in going out and cursed in coming in. The Lord shall not pardon him, the wrath and fury of

the Lord shall henceforth be kindled against this man, and shall lay upon him all the curses

which are written in the book of the law. The Lord shall destroy his name under the sun,

and cut him off for his undoing from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the

firmament which are written in the book of the law.

The multiple malediction concluded with an order requiring all Jews to avoid any contact

with Spinoza, and to refrain on pain of punishment from reading “any paper composed or

written by him.” (Incidentally, “the curse which Elisha laid upon the children” refers to the highly

elevating biblical story in which Elisha, annoyed by children who teased him for his baldness,

called upon god to send some she-bears to rend the children limb from limb. Which, so says the

story, the bears dutifully did. Perhaps Thomas Paine was not wrong in saying that he could not

believe in any religion that shocked the mind of a child.)

The Vatican, and the Calvinist authorities in Holland, heartily approved of this hysterical

Jewish condemnation and joined in the Europe-wide suppression of all Spinoza’s work. Had the

man not questioned the immortality of the soul, and called for the separation of church and

state? Away with him! This derided heretic is now credited with the most original philosophical

work ever done on the mind/body distinction, and his meditations on the human condition have

provided more real consolation to thoughtful people than has any religion. Argument continues

about whether Spinoza was an atheist: it now seems odd that we should have to argue as to

whether pantheism is atheism or not. In its own expressed terms it is actually theistic, but

Spinoza’s definition of a god made manifest throughout the natural world comes very close to

defining a religious god out of existence. And if there is a pervasive, preexisting cosmic deity,

who is part of what he creates, then there is no space left for a god who intervenes in human

affairs, let alone for a god who takes sides in vicious hamlet-wars between different tribes of

Jews and Arabs. No text can have been written or inspired by him, for one thing, or can be the

special property of one sect or tribe. (One recalls the question that was asked by the Chinese

when the first Christian missionaries made their appearance. If god has revealed himself, how is

it that he has allowed so many centuries to elapse before informing the Chinese? “Seek

knowledge even if it is in China,” said the Prophet Muhammad, unconsciously revealing that the

greatest civilization in the world at that time was on the very outer rim of his awareness.) As

with Newton and Galileo building on Democritus and Epicurus, we find Spinoza projected

forward into the mind of Einstein, who answered a question from a rabbi by stating firmly thathe believed only in “Spinoza’s god,” and not at all in a god “who concerns himself with the fates

and actions of human beings.”

Spinoza de-Judaized his name by changing it to Benedict, outlasted the Amsterdam

anathema by twenty years, and died with extreme stoicism, always persisting in calm and

rational conversation, as a consequence of the powdered glass that entered his lungs. His was a

career devoted to the grinding and polishing of lenses for telescopes and medicine: an

appropriate scientific activity for one who taught humans to see with greater acuity. “All our

modern philosophers,” wrote Heinrich Heine, “though often perhaps unconsciously, see through

the glasses which Baruch Spinoza ground.” Heine’s poems were later to be thrown on a pyre by

gibbering Nazi bully-boys who did not believe that even an assimilated Jew could have been a

true German. The frightened, backward Jews who ostracized Spinoza had thrown away a pearl

richer than all their tribe: the body of their bravest son was stolen after his death and no doubt

subjected to other rituals of desecration.

Spinoza had seen some of this coming. In his correspondence he would write the word Caute!

(Latin for “take care”) and place a little rose underneath. This was not the only aspect of his

work that was sub rosa: he gave a false name for the printer of his celebrated Tractatus and

left the author’s page blank. His prohibited work (much of which might not have survived his

death if not for the bravery and initiative of a friend) continued to have a subterranean

existence in the writing of others. In Pierre Bayle’s 1697 critical Dictionnaire he earned the

longest entry. Montesquieu’s 1748 Spirit of the Laws was considered so dependent on Spinoza’s

writing that its author was compelled by the church authorities in France to repudiate this

Jewish monster and to make a public statement announcing his belief in a (Christian) creator.

The great French Encyclopédie that came to define the Enlightenment, edited by Denis Diderot

and d’Alembert, contains an immense entry on Spinoza.

I do not wish to repeat the gross mistake that Christian apologists have made. They

expended huge and needless effort to show that wise men who wrote before Christ were in

effect prophets and prefigurations of his coming. (As late as the nineteenth century, William

Ewart Gladstone covered reams of wasted paper trying to prove this about the ancient Greeks.)

I have no right to claim past philosophers as putative ancestors of atheism. I do, however, have

the right to point out that because of religious intolerance we cannot know what they really

thought privately, and were very nearly prevented from learning what they wrote publicly. Even

the relatively conformist Descartes, who found it advisable to live in the freer atmosphere of the

Netherlands, proposed a few lapidary words for his own headstone: “He who hid well, lived well.”

In the cases of Pierre Bayle and Voltaire, for example, it is not easy to determine whether

they were seriously irreligious or not. Their method certainly tended to be irreverent and

satirical, and no reader clinging to uncritical faith could come away from their works without

having that faith severely shaken. These same works were the best-sellers of their time, and

made it impossible for the newly literate classes to go on believing in things like the literal truth

of the biblical stories. Bayle in particular caused a huge but wholesome uproar when he

examined the deeds of David the supposed “psalmist” and showed them to be the career of an

unscrupulous bandit. He also pointed out that it was absurd to believe that religious faith caused

people to conduct themselves better, or that unbelief made them behave worse. A vast

accumulation of observable experience testified to this common sense, and Bayle’s delineation

of it is the reason why he has been praised or blamed for oblique, surreptitious atheism. Yet he

accompanied or bodyguarded this with many more orthodox affirmations, which probably

allowed his successful work to enjoy a second edition. Voltaire balanced his own savage ridicule

of religion with some devotional gestures, and smilingly proposed that his own tomb (how these

men did rattle on about the view of their own funerals) be built so as to be half inside and half

outside the church. But in one of his most celebrated defenses of civil liberty and the rights ofconscience, Voltaire had also seen his client Jean Calas broken on the wheel with hammers, and

then hanged, for the “offense” of trying to convert someone in his household to Protestantism.

Not even an aristocrat like himself could be counted safe, as he knew from seeing the inside of

the Bastille. Let us at least not fail to keep this in mind.

Immanuel Kant believed for a time that all the planets were populated and that these

populations improved in character the farther away they were. But even while beginning from

this rather charmingly limited cosmic base, he was able to make convincing arguments against

any theistic presentation that depended upon reason. He showed that the old argument from

design, then as now a perennial favorite, might possibly be stretched to imply an architect but

not a creator. He overthrew the cosmological proof of god—which suggested that one’s own

existence must posit another necessary existence—by saying that it only restated the

ontological argument. And he undid the ontological argument by challenging the simpleminded

notion that if god can be conceived as an idea, or stated as a predicate, he must therefore

possess the quality of existence. This traditional tripe is accidentally overthrown by Penelope

Lively in her much-garlanded novel Moon Tiger. Describing her daughter Lisa as a “dull child,”

she nonetheless delights in the infant’s dim but imaginative questions:

“Are there dragons?” she asked. I said that there were not. “Have there ever been?” I said

all the evidence was to the contrary. “But if there is a word dragon,” she said, “then once

there must have been dragons.”

Who has not protected an innocent from the disproof of such ontology? But for the sake of

pith, and since we do not have all our lives to waste simply in growing up, I quote Bertrand

Russell here: “Kant objects that existence is not a predicate. A hundred thalers that I merely

imagine, he says, have all the same predicates as a hundred real thalers.” I have stated Kant’s

disproofs in reverse order so as to notice the case, recorded by the Inquisition in Venice in 1573,

of a man named Matteo de Vincenti, who opined on the doctrine of the “real presence” of Christ

in the Mass that: “It’s nonsense, having to believe these things—they’re stories. I would rather

believe I had money in my pocket.” Kant did not know of this predecessor of his among the

common people, and when he switched to the more rewarding topic of ethics he may not have

known that his “categorical imperative” had an echo of Rabbi Hillel’s “Golden Rule.” Kant’s

principle enjoins us to “act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a

general natural law.” In this summary of mutual interest and solidarity, there is no requirement

for any enforcing or supernatural authority. And why should there be? Human decency is not

derived from religion. It precedes it.

It is of great interest to see, in the period of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, how

many great minds thought alike, and intersected with each other, and also took great care to

keep their opinions cautiously expressed, or confined as far as possible to a circle of educated

sympathizers. One of my choice instances would be that of Benjamin Franklin, who, if he did not

exactly discover electricity, was certainly one of those who helped uncover its principles and

practical applications. Among the latter were the lightning rod, which was to decide forever the

question of whether god intervened to punish us in sudden random flashes. There is no steeple

or minaret now standing that does not boast one. Announcing his invention to the public,

Franklin wrote:

It has pleased God in his Goodness to Mankind, at length to discover to them the Means of

Securing their Habitations and other Buildings from Mischief by Thunder and Lightning. The

Method is this....

He then goes on to elaborate the common household equipment—brass wire, a knitting needle,

“a few small staples”—that is required to accomplish the miracle.

This shows perfect outward conformity with received opinion, but is embellished with a small

yet obvious dig in the words “at length.” You may choose to believe, of course, that Franklinsincerely meant every word of it, and desired people to believe that he credited the Almighty

with relenting after all these years and finally handing over the secret. But the echo of

Prometheus, stealing the fire from the gods, is too plain to miss. And Prometheans in those days

still had to be watchful. Joseph Priestley, the virtual discoverer of oxygen, had his Birmingham

laboratory smashed by a Tory-inspired mob yelling “for Church and King,” and had to take his

Unitarian convictions across the Atlantic in order to begin work again. (Nothing is perfect in

these accounts: Franklin took as strong an interest in Freemasonry as Newton had in alchemy,

and even Priestley was a devotee of the phlogiston theory. Remember that we are examining

the childhood of our species.)

Edward Gibbon, who was revolted by what he discovered about Christianity during the labor

of his massive Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dispatched an early copy to David Hume,

who warned him that there would be trouble, which there was. Hume received Benjamin Franklin

as a guest in Edinburgh, and traveled to Paris to meet with the editors of the Encyclopédie.

These sometimes flamboyantly irreligious men were at first disappointed when their careful

Scottish guest remarked on the absence of atheists and therefore on the possible absence of

such a thing as atheism. They might have liked him better if they had read his Dialogue

Concerning Natural Religion a decade or so later.

Based on a Ciceronian dialogue, with Hume himself apparently (but cautiously) taking the

part of Philo, the traditional arguments about the existence of god are qualified a little by the

availability of more modern evidence and reasoning. Borrowing perhaps from Spinoza—much of

whose own work was still only available at second hand—Hume suggested that the profession

of belief in a perfectly simple and omnipresent supreme being was in fact a covert profession of

atheism, because such a being could possess nothing that we could reasonably call a mind, or a

will. Moreover, if “he” did chance to possess such attributes, then the ancient inquiry of Epicurus

would still stand:


Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing?

Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Atheism cuts through this non-quandary like the razor of Ockham. It is absurd, even for a

believer, to imagine that god should owe him an explanation. But a believer nonetheless takes

on the impossible task of interpreting the will of a person unknown, and thus brings these

essentially absurd questions upon himself. Let the assumption lapse, though, and we shall see

where we are and be able to apply our intelligence, which is all that we have. (To the inescapable

question—where do all the creatures come from?—Hume’s answer anticipates Darwin by saying

that in effect they evolve: the efficient ones survive and the inefficient ones die out.) At the

close, he chose, as had Cicero, to split the difference between the deist Cleanthes and the

skeptic Philo. This could have been playing it safe, as Hume tended to do, or it could have

represented the apparent appeal of deism in the age before Darwin.

Even the great Thomas Paine, a friend to Franklin and Jefferson, repudiated the charge of

atheism that he was not afraid to invite. Indeed, he set out to expose the crimes and horrors of

the Old Testament, as well as the foolish myths of the New, as part of a vindication of god. No

grand and noble deity, he asserted, should have such atrocities and stupidities laid to his charge.

Paine’s Age of Reason marks almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion

was openly expressed. It had a tremendous worldwide effect. His American friends and

contemporaries, partly inspired by him to declare independence from the Hanoverian usurpers

and their private Anglican Church, meanwhile achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented

thing: the writing of a democratic and republican constitution that made no mention of god and

that mentioned religion only when guaranteeing that it would always be separated from the

state. Almost all of the American founders died without any priest by their bedside, as also didPaine, who was much pestered in his last hours by religious hooligans who demanded that he

accept Christ as his savior. Like David Hume, he declined all such consolation and his memory

has outlasted the calumnious rumor that he begged to be reconciled with the church at the end.

(The mere fact that such deathbed “repentances” were sought by the godly, let alone

subsequently fabricated, speaks volumes about the bad faith of the faith-based.)

Charles Darwin was born within the lifetime of Paine and Jefferson and his work was

eventually able to transcend the limitations of ignorance, concerning the origins of plants and

animals and other phenomena, under which they had had to labor. But even Darwin, when he

began his quest as a botanist and natural historian, was quite sure that he was acting in a way

that was consistent with god’s design. He had wanted to be a clergyman. And the more

discoveries he made, the more he tried to “square” them with faith in a higher intelligence. Like

Edward Gibbon, he anticipated a controversy upon publication, and (a bit less like Gibbon) he

made some protective and defensive notes. In fact, he at first argued with himself very much as

some of today’s “intelligent design” boobies are wont to do. Faced with the un-arguable facts of

evolution, why not claim that those prove how much greater is god than we even thought he

was? The discovery of natural laws “should exalt our notion of the power of the omniscient

Creator.” Not quite convinced by this in his own mind, Darwin feared that his first writings on

natural selection would be the end of his reputation, equivalent to “confessing a murder.” He

also appreciated that, if he ever found adaptation conforming to environment, he would have to

confess to something even more alarming: the absence of a first cause or grand design.

The symptoms of old-style between-the-lines encoded concealment are to be found

throughout the first edition of The Origin of Species. The term “evolution” never appears, while

the word “creation” is employed frequently. (Fascinatingly, his first 1837 notebooks were given

the provisional title The Transmutation of Species, almost as if Darwin were employing the

archaic language of alchemy.) The title page of the eventual Origin bore a comment,

significantly drawn from the apparently respectable Francis Bacon, about the need to study not

just the word of god but also his “work.” In The Descent of Man Darwin felt able to push matters

a little further, but still submitted to some editorial revisions by his devout and beloved wife

Emma. Only in his autobiography, which was not intended for publication, and in some letters to

friends, did he admit that he had no remaining belief. His “agnostic” conclusion was determined

as much by his life as by his work: he had suffered many bereavements and could not reconcile

these with any loving creator let alone with the Christian teaching concerning eternal

punishment. Like so many people however brilliant, he was prone to that solipsism that either

makes or breaks faith, and which imagines that the universe is preoccupied with one’s own fate.

This, however, makes his scientific rigor the more praiseworthy, and fit to be ranked with Galileo,

since it did not arise from any intention but that of finding out the truth. It makes no difference

that this intention included the false and disappointed expectation that that same truth would

finally resound ad majorem dei gloriam.

After his death, Darwin too was posthumously insulted by fabrications from a hysterical

Christian, who claimed that the great and honest and tormented investigator had been

squinting at the Bible at the last. It took a little while to expose the pathetic fraud who had felt

that this would be a noble thing to do.

WHEN ACCUSED OF SCIENTIFIC PLAGIARISM, of which he was quite probably guilty, Sir Isaac Newton

made the guarded admission—which was itself plagiarized—that he had in his work had the

advantage of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It would seem only minimally gracious, in

the first decade of the twenty-first century, to concede the same. As and when I wish, I can use

a simple laptop to acquaint myself with the life and work of Anaxagoras and Erasmus, Epicurus

and Wittgenstein. Not for me the poring in the library by candlelight, the shortage of texts, or

the difficulties of contact with like-minded persons in other ages or societies. And not for me(except when the telephone sometimes rings and I hear hoarse voices condemning me to death,

or hell, or both) the persistent fear that something I write will lead to the extinction of my work,

the exile or worse of my family, the eternal blackening of my name by religious frauds and liars,

and the painful choice between recantation or death by torture. I enjoy a freedom and an

access to knowledge that would have been unimaginable to the pioneers. Looking back down

the perspective of time, I therefore cannot help but notice that the giants upon whom I depend,

and upon whose massive shoulders I perch, were all of them forced to be a little weak in the

crucial and highly (and poorly) evolved joints of their knees. Only one member of the giant and

genius category ever truly spoke his mind without any apparent fear or excess of caution. I

therefore cite Albert Einstein, so much misrepresented, once again. He is addressing a

correspondent who is troubled by yet another of those many misrepresentations:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being

systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but

expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the

unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Years later he answered another query by stating:

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an

exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

These words stem from a mind, or a man, who was rightly famed for his care and measure

and scruple, and whose sheer genius had laid bare a theory that might, in the wrong hands,

have obliterated not only this world but also its whole past and the very possibility of its future.

He devoted the greater part of his life to a grand refusal of the role of a punitive prophet,

preferring to spread the message of enlightenment and humanism. Decidedly Jewish, and exiled

and defamed and persecuted as a consequence, he preserved what he could of ethical Judaism

and rejected the barbaric mythology of the Pentateuch. We have more reason to be grateful to

him than to all the rabbis who have ever wailed, or who ever will. (Offered the first presidency of

the state of Israel, Einstein declined because of his many qualms about the way Zionism was

tending. This was much to the relief of David Ben-Gurion, who had nervously asked his cabinet,

“What are we going to do if he says ‘yes’?”)

Wreathed in the widow’s weeds of grief, the greatest Victorian of all is said to have appealed

to her favorite prime minister to ask if he could produce one unanswerable argument for the

existence of god. Benjamin Disraeli hesitated briefly before his queen—the woman whom he had

made “Empress of India”—and replied, “The Jews, Ma’am.” It seemed to this worldly but

superstitious political genius that the survival of the Jewish people, and their admirably

stubborn adherence to their ancient rituals and narratives, showed the invisible hand at work. In

fact, he was changing ships on a falling tide. Even as he spoke, the Jewish people were

emerging from two different kinds of oppression. The first and most obvious was the

ghettoization that had been imposed on them by ignorant and bigoted Christian authorities. This

has been too well documented to need any elaboration from me. But the second oppression

was self-imposed. Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, had with some reservations removed the

discriminatory laws against Jews. (He may well have hoped for their financial support, but no

matter.) Yet when his armies invaded Russia, the rabbis urged their flock to rally to the side of

the very czar who had been defaming and flogging and fleecing and murdering them. Better

this Jew-baiting despotism, they said, than even a whiff of the unholy French Enlightenment.

This is why the silly, ponderous melodrama in that Amsterdam synagogue was and remains so

important. Even in a country as broad-minded as Holland, the elders had preferred to make

common cause with Christian anti-Semites and other obscurantists, rather than permit the finest

of their number to use his own free intelligence.

When the walls of the ghettos fell, therefore, the collapse liberated the inhabitants from therabbis as well as “the gentiles.” There ensued a flowering of talent such as has seldom been

seen in any epoch. A formerly stultified population proceeded to make immense contributions to

medicine, science, law, politics, and the arts. The reverberations are still being felt: one need

only instance Marx, Freud, Kafka, and Einstein, though Isaac Babel, Arthur Koestler, Billy Wilder,

Lenny Bruce, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and countless others are also the product

of this dual emancipation.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion

that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once,

instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians

in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi

Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland

solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal

“multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah

Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which

the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded

the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews

of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early

multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek

literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept

at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by

the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition

mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the

old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to

have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the

unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to

make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few

years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly

circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered

even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the

less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the

scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the

imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet

another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared

the whole thing.

No doubt there would still have been much foolishness and solipsism. But the connection

between Athens and history and humanity would not have been so sundered, and the Jewish

people might have been the carriers of philosophy instead of arid monotheism, and the ancient

schools and their wisdom would not have become prehistoric to us. I once sat in the Knesset

office of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a vicious racist and demagogue among whose supporters

the mad Dr. Baruch Goldstein and other violent Israeli settlers were to be found. Kahane’s

campaign against mixed marriages, and for the expulsion of all non-Jews from Palestine, had

earned him the contempt of many Israelis and diaspora Jews, who compared his program to

that of the Nuremberg laws in Germany. Kahane raved for a bit in response to this, saying that

any Arab could remain if he converted to Judaism by a strictly halacha test (not a concession,

admittedly, that Hitler would have permitted), but then became bored and dismissed his Jewish

opponents as mere “Hellenized” riffraff. [To this day, the Orthodox Jewish curse word for a

heretic or apostate is apikoros, meaning “follower of Epicurus.”] And he was correct in a formal

sense: his bigotry had little to do with “race” and everything to do with “faith.” Sniffing this

insanitary barbarian, I had a real pang about the world of light and color that we had lost solong ago, in the black-and-white nightmares of his dreary and righteous ancestors. The stench

of Calvin and Torquemada and bin Laden came from the dank, hunched figure whose Kach

Party goons patrolled the streets looking for Sabbath violations and unauthorized sexual

contacts. Again to take the metaphor of the Burgess shale, here was a poisonous branch that

should have been snapped off long ago, or allowed to die out, before it could infect any healthy

growth with its junk DNA. But yet we still dwell in its unwholesome, life-killing shadow. And little

Jewish children celebrate Hannukah, so as not to feel left out of the tawdry myths of

Bethlehem, which are now being so harshly contested by the more raucous propaganda of

Mecca and Medina.