By the mid seventeenth century one finds a remarkable mixture of unbelief, and the word “atheist” often used as a term of abuse against persons whose beliefs differed from one’s own. We saw in the section on classical and medieval unbelief how “atheist” was sometimes bandied between early church Christians and classical pagans – depending upon whether one believed in one God or in many gods – and this recurred in the seventeenth century. The entertainingly acidic Oxford diarist and antiquarian Anthony à Wood included “atheists” in one of his spectacular catch-all sentences to express his disapproval of the times in which he lived:
… Whores and harlots, pimps and panders, bawds and buffoons, lechery, treachery, atheists and papists… (Life and Times of Anthony Wood, II, ed. A. Clark (Oxford, 1892), p. 125: under 1st December 1667)
Wood was not especially interested in science, though it is true that as a young man in 1659 he had paid to attend a course of private subscription chemistry lectures in Oxford, delivered by John Clerk. He was by instinct a conservative and a traditionalist, treating both Puritan fanatics and Roman Catholics with equal rancour and staunchly defending the Church of England and the king. And for Wood, like so many of his fellow Oxford dons, the term “atheist” could be justifiably flung at anyone believed to be rocking the boat of church and state. In Wood’s world of Oxford, Cambridge, and London learned gentlemen, however, there was a growing number of persons whose spirituality was considered to be suspect. They might “worship” the Pope (and be led down the same treasonable path as the Yorkshireman Guy Fawkes); or be like Socinus or the “Mohammetans”, and believe that God was a singular and distant being, with Christ no more than a natural man, and grace and the Holy Spirit a fiction; or they might worship their own spiritual conceit like the Puritans, or their own cleverness, or even – as in the case of drunkards and gluttons – “their bellies”. They might even openly proclaim their admiration of Thomas Hobbes! And all of them would qualify for the insult “atheist” from Anthony Wood and men of his ilk.
Yet insults apart, the seventeenth century saw burgeoning shades of unbelief around the traditional Judeo-Christian tradition, and many of them derived from new scientific styles of thinking, if not necessarily from science itself. Massively influential here was the Iberian-Dutch former Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Far from his being an atheist as such, however, what made so many people see red regarding Spinoza was his actual conception of God. For Spinoza’s deity was neither the God of Abraham nor Christ nor the Holy Spirit. Rather, it (not he) was everything. Nature itself was divine, and everything was connected to everything else in a sort of pantheism. And while this might seem benign given the stridency of many modern-day secularists, it offended both Jews and Christians in the seventeenth century, primarily because Spinoza depersonalized God and turned him into a universal yet amorphous thing.
And if many saw Spinoza as already well down the slippery slope towards atheism, they were no happier with the deists proper, with their insistence that reason must be the sole arbiter of religion, and that all forms of revelation were no more than outdated folk delusion. Hobbes probably belonged to this category in so far as he seems to have been happy with a creator and probably even a designer of the universe, but probably not with a being who was actively engaged with the running of his creation. For surely, if God were kind and answered the prayers of the sick or shipwrecked, he must have got the big design of the universe wrong in the first place, otherwise he would not need to intervene and tinker with it to save lives or relieve distress. The God of the deists, therefore, was a remote being who had drawn back from his creation and let the great laws of his devising have full play, and regarded the deaths of children as just minor anomalies in the magnificent scheme of things. A God who was especially appealing to well-off, healthy, tidy-minded intellectuals who already had it all. And he still is!
The seventeenth century saw much debate about miracles, and the deists were firmly convinced that such things could not take place. For even if God were tender-hearted and heard the cries of suffering humanity, he could do nothing about them, for the sheer perfection of his original creation, seen in its grandest form in the iron laws of planetary motion and physics, placed an impenetrable wall of glass between God and the creation. Indeed, this was one of the points discussed between the great German mathematician Gottfried Leibnitz and Newton’s protégé Samuel Clarke in the early eighteenth century. And as in the case of Spinoza, while the deists did not deny the possible existence of God, he was nonetheless a vastly diminished figure when seen alongside the psalmist’s God who rode on the wings of the wind, or the compassionate Suffering Servant of the Gospels. And because of this, it was not infrequent to find deists regarded as little better than “atheists”.
Emerging in the seventeenth century, and closely related to deism, is what came to be called “natural religion”, a form of spiritual expression, indeed, not to be confused with “natural theology” and the argument from design. For while natural theology grew up very much within scholarly Anglicanism, was deeply theistic, and was encapsulated in that style of Christianity displayed by the Hon. Robert Boyle, Bishops John Wilkins, Seth Ward, and Thomas Sprat, Archbishop John Tillotson, and other leading Fellows of the Royal Society – arguing that one could trace the hand of a loving creator in the carefully designed structures of the natural world – natural religion, by contrast, went far beyond traditional Christianity.
Instead of devoutly “tracing God’s thoughts after him” in nature, natural religion put man and the rational human intellect at the heart of religion. For did not the scientific men of the late seventeenth century, knowing things about the cosmos, the earth, and the microscopic realm undreamt of by the simple followers of Jesus, have insights into the truth that made miracles, spiritual wonders, and even grace seem redundant? Rather, should not the critical rational intellect set the standard?
In the 1690s, one writer in particular published a book that gave this natural religious deism something of a new profile for English readers. John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1695) argued that what appeared miraculous to the writers of the Bible really derived from inadequate observation and understanding. Toland did not deny that miracles existed as events; rather he argued that they were the product of natural agencies operating by complex laws unknown in the days of Moses or Jesus. In short, both God and his revelation were comprehensible by means of human reason, and mystery and miracle were no more than the products of ignorance and priestcraft. And as a baptized Irish Roman Catholic who had become a Protestant on his way towards rationalist deism, Toland was keen to attribute all manner of “priestcraft” subterfuges and mischiefs to the Catholic Church.
In the wake of Toland’s controversial writings came another high-profile English deist: an ex-Oxford don, sometime Roman Catholic convert, and full-time controversialist, who at the age of seventy-five published a work which was to become the “Bible” of English deism and natural religion. For even the title of Matthew Tindal’s book leaves you in no doubt where he is coming from: Christianity as old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730). In it Tindal argues that there is an unchanging law running through all things, Reason, which can set us free from superstition, and that the Christian Gospels do no more than reiterate this ancient law. The Gospels, to Tindal, added nothing new to natural reason and natural goodness, and, needless to say, miracles were no more than misunderstandings of nature, or plain superstitious deception.
It was this unfolding of scepticism in its various forms – much of it apparently stimulated by recent scientific discovery – that led the Hon. Robert Boyle to found and endow an annual lecture to be delivered in St Mary-le-Bow Church, London, with the explicit purpose of refuting atheism and demonstrating the harmony of the Christian faith with modern scientific discovery: the “natural theology” of the early Royal Society. Indeed, as the so-called “father of modern chemistry” and an experimental scientist whose name and discoveries still get into today’s science textbooks, the devoutly Christian Boyle was well placed to review the relationship between science and Christianity. And in his theological and scientific writings, and afterwards in the lectures which he endowed, Boyle became one of the first great apologists for Christianity in the face of “scientific” atheism and deism.
The lectures were extremely well endowed by seventeenth-century standards, paying the lecturer £50 and intending to attract speakers of the highest talent and integrity, and were administered through a trust. Richard Bentley delivered the first Boyle Lecture in 1692, appropriately entitled “A Confutation of Atheism” (before in subsequent years going on to attack the English freethinker Anthony Collins). The Boyle Lectures continued pretty well every year for over 200 years, dealing with a variety of topics in Christian apologetics. Then in 2004, after being redundant for much of the twentieth century, they were restarted and re-endowed through Gresham College and the Worshipful Company of Mercers in the City of London, and have continued with vigour, packing the large and spacious church of St Mary-le-Bow, often to standing room only. (I have attended all the post-2004 lectures, and can testify both to the intellectual distinction of the lecturers and to the topicality of modern confutation of atheism.)
So let us be sceptical and doubting when the New Atheists try to hoodwink us into believing that what they have to say is especially new or radical. In fact, a very great deal of it is little more than a rehash of the deist/atheist speculation that Robert Boyle and his fellow FRSs would have heard being bandied about quite openly in the coffee houses of late seventeenth-century London. With the exception, that is, of the monkey origins of the human race, which we will address shortly.