THE AGE OF REASON

INTRODUCTION.
The eighteenth century has been called the Age of Reason. It was given this name as the result of the system of mechanics that was discovered by Isaac Newton (1642-1727) at end of previous century. By the middle of the eighteenth century the Newtonian system was widely accepted, not only in England, but also in Europe, particularly in France. In his Principia (1687) Newton set forth, not only a system of terrestrial mechanics, but also of celestial mechanics; the solar system is governed by the same laws of mechanics as are the bodies on earth. Newton's work was not only the end of geocentric view of Ptolemy, but of Aristotelian view of physical reality as two separate realms, the terrestrial and the celestial, each with their own mechanics. It was the beginning of a new view of the universe that established, not only the heliocentric system, but an universal system of physical laws. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo advocated the heliocentric system, but they were unable to overcome the Aristotelian dualism of two separate realms; Kepler discovered the three laws of planetary motion but he could not explain their motion. Galileo discovered the law of falling bodies, but he did not apply it to the motion of the moon in the heavens. Newton saw this application and extended the three law of motion he had discovered to heavens. For some time it was believed that there was a force that governed the motion of the planets and Gilbert, Kepler and Descartes proposed that the sun was the origin of that force. Newton discovered the law, the Law of Universal Gravitation, which explains the motion of the heavenly bodies by the force of gravitational attraction between them as well as the motion of falling bodies on earth. Thus Newton's work was a grand synthesis in two senses:
(a) it brought together the work of Kepler and Galileo, and
(b) it brought together the terrestrial and celestial realms, both govern by one set of physical laws.
This new vision of nature and its laws captured the imagination of Newton's contemporaries and they produced a flood of adulation for Newton, such as was expressed by Alexander Pope's famous lines,
"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be: and all was light,"
and by Edmond Halley's ode to Newton, which ended with the line,
"Nearer to the gods no mortal may approach."

Newton's Principia was not easy reading, but its ideas could be easily understood, unlike the concepts of twentieth century physics, relativity and quantum theory. Many popular explanations of Newton's ideas were written. Five editions of Benjamin Martin's A Plain and Familiar Introduction to Newtonian Philosophy and seven editions of James Ferguson's Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles were published by the middle of the century. Voltaire's Elements de la Philosophie de Newton, which was published in French, was translated into English. Count Algorotti's Newtonianism for the Ladies, originally written in Italian, was translated into French and English.
RATIONALISM.
A high optimism about mankind and about what his reason could accomplish swept over Europe, England and America. In Germany it was called Aufklarung, The Enlighment, and in France the Age of Reason. As a philosophical movement of the eighteenth century it called for a critical examination of all previously accepted doctrines and institution from the point of view of rationalism.
This rationalism of eighteenth century was, not only an epistemology that held that reason, the universal and necessary, was the criterion of knowledge and that the deductive method, reasoning from innate truths, was the method for discovering the laws of Nature, but it also held that reality or Nature was governed by laws, both physical and moral, and that man could achieve happiness by discovering those laws and living by them. This philosophy was not limited to the intellectuals and academics; the mathematical deductive method of Descartes was widely understood and used. As Morris Kline says, in his Mathematics in Western Culture (Oxford University Press, New York, 1953, p.107),
"The mathematical interpretation of nature became so popular and fashionable by 1650 that it spread throughout Europe, and dainty, expensively bound accounts by its chief expositor, Descartes, adorned ladies' dressing tables."

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was the founder of modern epistemological rationalism. His method of doubt, whereby the truth of every idea was doubted that did not meet the criterion of "clear and distinct" ideas, led many of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment to question the metaphysical and theological views of the medieval period, in order to rebuild philosophy, religion, literature, art, political and social life on a new basis, reason. Using this method of doubt, Descartes rejected sense perceptions because they are unreliable and are subject to deceptions. He found that there is only one thing that he could not doubt, his own existence. "I think, therefore I am." [Cogito, ergo sum.] He took this fact as his first truth that could not be doubted. Since his existence was implied by his own thinking, he concluded that he existed as a thinking being or substance. Upon further rational investigation, he found that the mind has clear and distinct ideas of duration, of number, of causality, and of a perfect being, God. Descartes accepted these ideas as innate. The idea of God, for example, as a perfect being could not come from sense perceptions, since they could not be acquired from an imperfect world. Similarly for such attributes of God as eternity, omniscience, and omnipotence. And since every effect has a cause and the effect could not be greater than the cause, then there must be a God, who caused the idea of God to appear in the human mind. Using this form of the ontological argument, Descartes concluded that God does exist. The mind also contains the idea of an external world. Does the external world exist? Of course it does, because a perfect Being would not deceive man. The same argument guarantees the reality of extension, motion, and the principles of geometry; that is, these clear and distinct ideas and their reality comes from God. Descartes also considered whether the ideas arrived at by pure reason would agree with the physical world and he concluded that the God who made and sustained man and the universe had caused them to agree.
EMPIRICISM.
Not every philosopher of the seventeenth century agreed with Descartes. Galileo and Newton did not begin with innate truths; they inferred general principles from experience. Facts were original, not the general principles. Galileo and Newton were not rationalist like Descartes, neither were the most of English philosophers. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) the English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704) undertook to determine the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge. Unlike Descartes, Locke denied that there are any innate ideas that man is born with; he asserted that the mind at birth is a blank tablet (tabla rasa). Experience, through the senses, writes simple ideas on the passive tablet of the mind. Some of these ideas are exact images of qualities actually inherent in the objects; these are the primary properties of extension, figure (shape), solidity, number, and motion or rest. Other ideas produced by sensation are the effects of the real properties of the objects on the mind, but do not correspond to real properties in the object; these are secondary properties of color, touch, taste, smell, and sound. God does not endow man with truths, but has given men faculties which enable man to discover all he needs to know, that is, sensation and thinking. The mind cannot invent simple ideas, but it does have the power to reflect on, compare, distinguish, and unite simple ideas into complex ideas. Complex ideas consist of the agreement and disagreement of ideas, and relationships between ideas of before and after, cause and effect, and the coexistence of ideas, like yellow and heavy in gold. The mind also has the power to form abstractions such as space and time. It can also make judgments and it can will. Thus, although Locke rejects innate ideas, he does not reject innate powers to work with ideas coming from sensation. Locke also held that the mind does not know reality directly, but only of ideas of reality; knowledge is concerned only with ideas and their connection, like agreement or disagreement. This view is called critical empiricism and raises the problem: how do we know that are ideas correspond with world of things and how do we know there is a world of things which corresponds to our ideas? Locke's answer amounts to the assertion that we just know the difference when we are dreaming of being burned and when we are really being burned. In addition to the ideas that come from sensation, Locke recognizes ideas from intuition and demonstration. Intuition is the perception of self-evident truths such as our own existence. Demonstration establishes the truth of other ideas by showing their connections. Thus using demonstration, the existence of God can be established. Locke accepted truths arrived at by demonstration and among them he preferred mathematical truths, because they were to him the clearest and most reliable. Also mathematics established necessary connections, and the mind understands such connections best.
PROTESTANT SCHOLATICISM.
The success of Newtonian method raised the old problem of revelation and reason: which has supremacy in the theory of knowledge, revelation or reason? A different but related problem is the relation of reason to faith; this problem is often confused with previous one. The problem of revelation and reason is really two problems: the problem of the source of knowledge and the problem of the criterion of knowledge. After debating the problem for centuries, the Roman Church decided at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to follow the solution proposed by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274); reason and revelation are both sources of knowledge but revelation has supremacy over reason as the criterion of knowledge. To Aquinas reason, as the source of knowledge, was Aristotelian philosophy and revelation was the Bible and tradition which included the Church Fathers. These complement each other, and when they differ, revelation, being from God, has the supremacy. The Protestant Reformation did not reject this solution, except to deny that revelation included tradition; the Bible was the sole source of revelation. This attempted synthesis of Protestantism with Aristotelian philosophy is called Prostestant scholaticism.
Now the success of the Galilean-Newtonian science challenged the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy. Since the Roman Church had accepted this Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy as the truth about the physical world, they were faced with a challenge to their authority. This was the situation in France in the eighteenth century. In England, as a Protestant country that did not recognize the authority of the Roman Church, the Protestant Church was not faced with this challenge. The English Protestant Christians abandoned the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy for the new science. Robert Boyle, for whom the gas law is named, said,
"I look upon the metaphysical and mathematical principles... to be truths of a transcendental kind that do not properly belong to philosophy [science] and theology."
Boyle was an ardent Christian who dismissed the Aristotelian metaphysics in favor of the new science. Newton, who also was a devout Christian, considered the strengthening of the foundations of the Christian faith more important than his mathematical and scientific studies, for the latter was restricted to finding evidences of God's design in natural world. Newton saw everywhere evidences of God's majestic design and of God's continuous effort to keep the universe running according to plan. He wrote,
"The main purpose of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and deduce causes from effects, till we come to the very first cause, which is certainly not mechanical...And these things being rightly dispatched, does it not appear from the phenomena that there is a being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who, infinite in space, as it were in his sensory, sees things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehend them wholly by their immediate presence to himself."

In the General Scholium in his Principia, Newton concludes,
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and all powerful Being... This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God, pantokrator, or Universal Ruler, for God is a relative word, and has respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God;.... And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present; and, by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space.... In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresent of God... As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of anything is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colors, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surface, we smell only the smells, and taste the savors; but their inward substance are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act our minds: much less than, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate or Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing...."

For Newton there is no conflict between revelation and reason. In fact he believed that reason was a general revelation of the same God that made himself known in the special revelation recorded in the Bible. And Newton was not alone; well into the eighteenth century there were scientists that were thoroughly satisfied that God's existence was securely established. Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), the great Swiss mathematician, believed that God's existence could be proved directly by means of the principles of mathematics and physics and that one could dispense with the indirect argument from the marvelous design of the universe. But situation in France was different; the Roman Church forced a choice between revelation and reason, between the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic interpretation of Biblical revelation and the new Newtonian view of the physical world discovered by reason. The French intellectuals chose reason and the Newtonian view. In England some intellectuals sympathized with this choice, like David Hume (1711-1776), who spend three years (1734-1737) in France working on his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), which fell, according to Hume himself, "dead-born from the press." His Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which appeared in 1748, had a similar reception, probably because of the skeptical conclusions about human knowledge. In 1779 his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion appeared in which he criticized the arguments for existence of God. Its purpose was to argue for skepticism concerning the knowledge of God.
COMMON SENSE REALISM.
Common sense realism was the theory of knowledge of a school of Scotish thinkers founded by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) which attempted to set up a theory of knowledge which whould support the realistic belief of the man on the street. This is that form of naive realism tending toward dualistic realism. This theory held that we perceive the external world directly and that the sense-data either do not exist or play subordinate role in perception. In Aristotle's psychology, common sense is the faculty by which the common sensibles are perceived. Aristotle probably attributed to this faculty the functions of perceiving what we perceive and of uniting the data from the different senses into a single object. In his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principle of Common Sense (1795), Reid took this concept to emphasize that the common consciousness of man is basic. He held that all humans possess, by nature, a common set of capacities - both epistemological and ethical - through which they could grasp the basic realities of nature and morality. Reid opposed the theory of ideas of Berkeley and Hume that the perception of ideas are our sole source of knowledge of the world.
This theory is due to the influence of John Locke on Modern Western thought. When some philosophers, following John Locke, made sense-knowledge more complicated by interposing "ideas" between our minds and the real world, so that these ideas, they said, were the immediate objects in our minds, and hence we do not have immediate direct knowledge of the objects, but only of the ideas in our minds. David Hume raised the question of how do we know that these ideas correspond with what is actually there. The answer of Thomas Reed was akin to Samuel Johnson's kicking a rock to refute the similar theory proposed by Bishop Berkeley. Reed answered that only philosophers would take seriously this skeptical doctrine of ideas with its absurd implications. Everyone in his senses believes such truths as the existence of the real world, cause and effect, the existence and the continuity of the self; they believe that the mind has the ability to know such things. If philosophers question such truths, so much the worst for the philosophers. The common-sense of mankind, whether of the man behind the plow or the man behind the desk, is the surest guide to the truth.
This theory was developed in the writings of Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Dugald Steward, Thomas Brown, and James Beattie, who had, since 1750, been busily at work in Scotland creating what came to be known as Scotish School of Realism. Its prime purpose was to counter the skepticism, atheism, infidelity of the Age of Reason by redefining the sensational philosophy of John Locke in terms which were just as reasonable but eminently more Christian than anything concocted by the deistic and rationalistic writers of that century. They provided irrefutable proof of the existence of God against the claims of skeptics and because in answering these skeptics they provided equally sound evidence for the truths of evangelical religion as found in the Scritures. Reacting against the empirical psychology and epistemology of John Locke, the Scotish philosophers derived proof of God's moral laws not only from the design of Nature but also from man's consciousness or common sense of his own frailty, immortality, and spiritual necessities.
It was from their emphasis upon "common sense" in refuting Berkeleyan idealism and Humean skepticism that these philosophers acquired their name. They held that from his own innate common sense, man could "intuitively" derive, beyond a shadow of doubt, the validity of such abstract ideas as immortality, the existence of the soul, and the concept of rewards and punishement after death. The Scotish philosophers claimed to be using an empirical or inductive method of deriving the truth of these moral laws because they were scientically obsering man's inner consciousness (the working of the faculties of the mind) just as astronomers or biologists scientifically observed the external world. Newtonian science had demonstrated the architectural design of the universe, thereby making the existence of a Great Architect or Creator "self-evident." His benevolence toward His creation and creatures, particularly man, could logically be deduced not only from "the natural order of things" which provided man with food, shelter, and other creature conforts for his survival and advancing civilization, but also by His having imbedded in man certain instinctive affections or feelings. But to Scottish philosophers the three most important of God's gifts to man were the social affections, which made man want and need to live in groups, the moral faculty or "moral sense," commonly called conscience, by which man derived his feelings of right and wrong, guilt and remorse, and the power of reasoning by which man could, on the basis of experience and consciousness, intuit God's ommiscience, justice, mercy and deduce His natural laws regarding economics, sociology, psychology and political science.
DEISM.
Others, also sympathizing with the choice of reason against revelation, believed that Natural Theology could prove the existence of God, rejecting Hume's skepticism. They believed that God had created the universe as a vast machine, like a clock, and set it in motion to operate according to the natural laws that God had put into it; since it is a perfect machine, God has not interfered with its operation; thus God has no need to reveal himself; thus the Bible is not a revelation of God, but is a book full of myths and folk tales. Though admirable for its moral teachings, the Bible is not to be taken seriously as a historical record. This view is called Deism. This view had wide influence, not only in England, but also in France and America. In France Voltaire lead the deistic movement. Among the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, has been said to be deists.
MECHANISM.
Descartes was also the founder of mechanism. In his search for clear and distinct ideas he concluded that nothing better satisfied this criterion than the concept of the machine. Hence he sought to interpret the world as a machine and became convinced that he had proved that it was. He gave a thoroughly mechanical view of the origin and movement of the planets in his work entitled The World, which he completed in 1633, but he did not publish it because he heard of Galileo's condemnation by the Roman Church. He published a revised version in his Principles of Philosophy in 1644. He argued that the world was formed from matter whirling about fixed centers, smaller particles collecting together into larger ones. Smaller bodies were swept about larger ones by vortices or whirlpools of ether. Thus the planets were carried about the sun and the moon about the earth. Descartes used this idea of vortices to explain light, heat, gravity, and lighting. But Newton showed that the vortex theory of planetary motion was inconsistent with the way fluids actually behave. But this did not destroy the mechanical view of nature; the whirlpools were replaced with a more machine-like mechanism governed by the laws of motion and gravity, the clock; both Newton and Huygens used this analogy and references to the universe as a clock became widespread and popular. At this time much technical and scientific effort was expended in improving the accuracy and portability of clocks; by 1700 good clocks were available and excited admiration. Accordingly the likening of the universe to a clock was also an expression of their admiration for the wonderful mechanism of the universe. The Newtonian mechanical model was not limited to the physical sciences; it was also applied to political and social theory. For example, J. B. Desogulier published in 1728 his work entitled The Newtonian System of the World the Best Model of Government. The French physician Julien O. de la Mettrie (1709-1751) published in 1748 his work entitled Man the Machine. La Mettrie was not only an exponent of the new Newtonian world view but of mechanism which he believed could explain everything, and in particular, man. On the basis of his physiological studies he was sure that all human mental processes could be explained on the basis of mechanical principles. Thinking could be explained by the motion of particles in the brain and thoughts by the arrangement of those particles. This philosophy of mechanism was widely accepted and has had many followers since the eighteenth century, even to today. Of course, the mechanical model has been modified to include electricity, magnetism and the quantum mechanical theory of atoms and molecules.
DETERMINISM.
The most important implication of mechanism is determinism, for a machine operates precisely according to physical laws, that prescribe exactly what the machine will do. That is, mechanism implies that the present positions and motions of its individual parts determine the future positions and motions. Now since the whole universe functions according to precise laws, then the course of world is determined. For each event there is a fixed preceding and consequent events. As the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827) put it in his Essai philosophique des probabilities (A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities) (1814),
"We may regard the present state of universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future like the past would be present before its eyes."
That is, an omniscient mind knowing the state of the universe at any instant could, by applying the laws of mathematics and physics, recreate the past and predict the future. The destiny of everything is established with a certainty as sure as two times two is four. Mathematics describes this destiny, for everything in the universe is determined by number, motion, and force. In a mechanized, determined world there is no ends or purposes; everything just goes on existing. Ideas, volitions, and actions are the necessary effect of matter acting on matter. The human will is determined by external physical and physiological causes. There is no free will; it is a meaningless conjunction of words. The will is bound fast in the fetters of matter in motion. Chance is also nothing but a word invented to express the known effect of an unknown cause. This is a very disturbing conclusion that even the materialist tried to modify its severity. Some said that man's actions, not just his thoughts, were determined. This dualism is not very satisfactory; it makes thinking useless because it can not determine one's action; man remains an automaton. Others reinterpreted the meaning of freedom, in order retain some semblance of it; Voltaire wrote, "To be free means to be able to do what we like, not to be able to will what we like." Or as Spinoza (1632-1677) concluded: freedom is simply a matter of accepting the universe because you understand its necessity. If this is done, one has peace of mind, free from anxiety about what one can not change.
MATERIALISM.
Associated with the philosophy of mechanism was the philosophy called materialism. Materialism held that everything in the universe is reducible to matter and they can be explained as matter in motion. Matter is the sole reality. Every phenomena in the physical world, such as heat, light, electricity and magnetism, could be explained in terms of matter in motion. The matter that constituted heat was called caloric and that which constituted fire was called phlogiston. Electricity and magnetism were believed to be material fluids. The matter that carried light could not be detected and was called imponderable, which meant that its particles could not be weighed. What is matter? In order to define matter the early modern philosophers formulated the doctrine of primary and secondary properties. The properties or qualities of physical matter were divided into two kinds. Those properties that are basic were called primary properties, such as extension, solidity, and motion. Those properties such as color, taste, smell, temperature, and hardness, which depend upon the human observer and do not exist in nature, are called secondary properties. Properties that are independent of man and are external to him are primary. Galileo and, independently of him, Descartes formulated this doctrine of primary and secondary properties. Descartes was a mathematician and he believed that the primary properties are repersentable mathematically (In his day mathematics was primarily geometry). Thus Descartes held that the essence of matter was the primary property of extension (which included shape and size). Matter was extended substance. All real differences in physical objects are differences in extension and motion of physical bodies. Descartes was not a materialist; he believed that there were other substances in addition to matter: mind which is thinking substance and God who is an infinite substance. Mind and Matter are finite substances but God is an infinite substance. Materialism eliminated and denied the existence of all other substances except matter; thinking was reduced to matter in motion in the brain and that infinite substance does not exist. (Some materialist held that matter is an infinite substance, since space is infinite.)
The doctrine that everything is composed of matter was expressed forcefully by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his Levinthan (1651):
"The universe, that is, the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breath, and depth; also, every part of body is likewise body, and hath the like dimensions, and consequently every part of the universe is body, and that which is not body is no part of the universe; and because the universe is all, that which is the part of it is nothing; and consequently nowhere."
That is, a body is something that occupies space, is divisible, movable, and behaves mathematically. Only matter in motion exists, and the world consists entirely of the motion and mechanical interactions of bodies. Hence the mathematical laws describing the physical world are the principles of all reality. In the eighteenth century the doctrine of materialism, though more or less widely held, was most enthusiastically embraced in France. The leading French materialists, whose writings were very influential, was Paul Heinrich Detrich, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), a German by birth but French in education. His System of Nature (1770) was called the Bible of materialism. He rejected all nonmaterial conceptions, spiritual beings, God, and the soul and "explained" all things in terms of matter and motion. Thought as well as consciousness were no more than molecules in motion. The mind is just the brain and perishes with the body. The French physician Julien O. de la Mettrie (1709-1751), whose Man is a Machine was published in 1745, interpreted his mechanism materialistic. He held that all mental processes reduced to material ones. Matter can think and thoughts are pattern of particles in the brain.
ATHEISM.
The clear implication of materialism is atheism. If matter is the sole reality, then God as an infinite spiritual substance does not exist. And this atheistic conclusion was drawn by the materialist of eighteenth century. For the English materialist, Thomas Hobbes, since everything that exists consists of solely of matter, there could be no soul and God. Such incorporeal entities are incomprehensible. Therefore religion arises as the product of ignorance and fear. Hobbes described formal religions as accepted bodies of superstitions. He says, "Reason is not to be folded in the napkin of an implicit faith, but employed in the purchase of justice, peace, and true religion." Hobbes wanted to make religion to conform to reason and was willing to use the authority of the Church to maintain civil government. The French Encyclopedists declared open warfare on the doctrines and influences of established religions, and the Roman Church in particular. This group of French philosophers, known as les philosophes who, motivated by the view that evils of society could be eliminated through the spread of knowledge, collaborated in the project of composing an Encyclopedie of all knowledge. Started 1751 and finished in 1780, it consisted of thirty-five volumes in French. The editor was Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who wrote most of the articles on religion, ancient history, and political theory. His coeditor was the mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783), who wrote the introductory essay and many of its mathematical and literary articles, but he withdrew as editor before the project was finished. Both of them wrote philosophical subjects. Among those who contributed articles to the project were Rouseau, Voltaire, Duclos, Quesnay, Targot, d'Holbach, and Toussaint. Hampered by conflicts with the defenders of the Roman Church and the court as well as the Sorbonne, the Encyclopedie was suppressed in both 1752 and 1759 while it was being published. It was also attacked in pamphlet and play. The cause of these difficulties was the skepticism that its authors believed to be inherent in their commitment to reason. Diderot stood fast through these difficulties and brought the publication of its first seventeen volumes in 1772. In his Philosophic Thoughts (1746) Diderot said,
"Thanks to the works of great men, the world is no more God's; it is a machine which possesses wheels, ropes, pulleys, springs, and weights."
He held that anyone who is not satisfied with the visible and seeks the invisible causes of visible effects is no wiser than a peasant who attributes the motion of clock to a spirit concealed in it. Thus he rejected theism and its attempts to prove the existence of God; and Deism was also unacceptable. To Diderot Deism was a weak compromise between Theism and Atheism. He went on to maintain that the influence of revealed religion on society has been disastrous. It sows dissensions and hatred between man and man and nations and nations. The Encyclopedists accused these religions of having been a hindrance to intellectual progress and lacking the capacity to build a genuine morality and a just political and social order, that is, by reason.
The French materialists, d'Holbach and la Mettrie, attacked all religious beliefs. D'Holbach's System of Nature (1770) was also called the Bible of atheism and his Common Sense (1772) gained immense popularity. They contended that religion was a system invented by imagination and ignorance to conciliate fictitious powers. The idea of God has no correspondence to anything real. God is nature and soul is just body. They considered the concept of a spiritual substance a self-contradictory and useless hypothesis. This and other absurd notions were the foundations of the priesthood, temples, altars, religious authority, and dogmas. They held that Christian dogma were myths, no different from the myths of pagan religions. They maintained that religion was useful only to priests and politicians. In their lust for power the clergy exploited man's naive assumptions that spirits are the cause of unexplained events. By teaching them to fear invisible tyrants, the leaders of religion make them slaves of earthly ones. Far from guaranteeing morality, religious leaders stir up war in the name of God. Now since man has come to understand nature, he has no need for such primitive superstitions. He who succeeds in destroying the notion of God would be mankind's greatest friend. La Mettrie said that the world would never be happy until it decided to become atheistic.
The often told story is that the French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) was one of the scientist that Napoleon took with him on the expedition to Egypt. Napoleon, when presented with a copy of Laplace's Mecanique Celeste (Celestial Mechanics), asked him that if it was true that he had nowhere in the work mentioned the Creator. Laplace is reported to have answered, "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis." The universe of Laplace was infinite and eternal, hence no place for the Creator. When the great Italian mathematician and his colleague, Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), on hearing the story, commented, "Ah, but that is a beautiful hypothesis. It explains so many things."
MORALISM.
But this attack on religion raised the problem of ethics, why should a man be good, honest, charitable, and kind to others? The attack on religion called into question the foundations of morals which Christianity obviously provided: God requires morality. Those who obey God must follow his moral commands.
"Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself." (Matt. 22:37, 39; cf Deut. 6:5).
"Love one another as I have loved you." (John 15:12).
Not only did atheism and materialism destroyed the foundation of ethics in the will of God but determinism removed the basis for ethics by denying free will. D'Holbach pointed out that all phenomena are necessary; hence no being can act otherwise than he does. The order of nature does not permit any part to deviate from the certain and necessary laws of that order. The will is bound fast in a predetermined behavior of matter. Man is not a free agent and hence is not responsible for his actions. Hence there is no good or evil. This meant the abandonment of all standards of morality and ethical values; and without these no society could survive. Faced with these ethical implications, the Enlightenment philosophers sought to provide a new basis of ethics, independent of religion. Some believed that reason alone could discover moral standards, the moral law, as reason discovered natural laws. They believed that an analysis of human nature could discover a system of morals that was natural. Hobbes, for example, chose to base ethics on the impulse or instinct of self-preservation. This impulse, he asserted, is a fact of human nature. But, he argued, that this desire of man to preserve himself bring him in conflict with others. Thus men through need and fear war against each other. Thus the natural state of man is strife and conflict.
Faced with this condition of man, reason moves man to seek a better way of self-preservation. Hence man of his own free will (which Hobbes earlier denied) enters into a social contract to preserve each other selves. If he lives in a society, each individual must renounce certain rights he possessed in the natural state, and agree to live together in peace and harmony. These agreements are like "scientific law" from which other laws can be deduced. Thus it follows from this law of the "Social Contract" that fidelity, gratitude, courtesy, forbearance, and justice must be practiced; pride and arrogance must be avoided; and arbitration must be accepted as the means of reducing strife among individuals. Then at this point Hobbes brings in religion. Natural moral law is the will of God, for reason was bestowed on man and nature by God. Christ, the apostles, and the prophets proclaimed the very laws that can be deduced by reason on the basis of the social contract.
Later Voltaire held that the design of nature included moral laws as well as physical laws. He asked,
"Should nature everywhere have aimed at unity, order, and complete regularity, and have missed only the case of its highest creation, man? Should nature rule the physical world according to general and inviolable laws only to abandon the moral world completely to chaos or whim? Just as the law of gravity is not confined to this planet but extends throughout the cosmos and connects every particle of matter with every other, so the fundamental laws of morality prevail among all peoples. The moral nature of man is immutable. Man has uniform inclinations, instincts, and appetites. Nature as she realizes herself without hindrance or fetters will realize the true and the good."
All these attempts to provide a basis for morality independent of religion led in many systems of thought to some support for established religion. But religion is important because it supported the principles and practices of morality. In these systems morality is more important than God. But if one must believe that God exists, then it is because of the moral obligation within man.
CONCLUSION.
These ideas had wide influence, particularly in France. The philosophers became critics, attacking in the name of reason the medieval distortions of Christianity in the Roman Church. These attacks led to the French Revolution in which the authority of the French kings and the Roman Church was overthrown in the name of Reason. At the height of French Revolution the goddess of Reason, in the person of a well-known actress, was enthroned in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Our Lady of Reason in the Temple of the Queen of Heaven. Thus the age of reason ended in this curious episode as a symbol and summation of the century. Atheism becomes the religion of Reason. This shows that atheism is not possible for man; man is a religious animal and he must have a God; he only replaces one god by another, and the true God by a false god.