Today’s post will simply provide a few brief observations about two more Enlightenment thinkers: Voltaire and David Hume.
Voltaire, Natural Religion, and Self-Evident Truths
Along with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire (1694-1778 AD) was another major philosophical voice of the Enlightenment in France leading up to the French Revolution. And like Rousseau, Voltaire harbored a deep-seeded hatred of organized religion, namely Christianity as embodied in the Catholic Church. He found any and everything related to religious belief to be irrational foolishness, useful for only one thing: to be used as kindling in the great revolution that wiped out Christianity. Or as Voltaire himself said, “Wipe out the infamy!”
In place of organized religion, Voltaire espoused what he called, natural religion—the over-arching moral principles that the entire human race has in common. Simply put, Voltaire believed that morality was just a part of the natural order, and therefore was common to all human beings, just as one’s ears or eyes were. For Voltaire, “The only gospel one ought to read is the great book of nature, written by the hand of God and sealed with his seal. It is as impossible that this pure and eternal religion should produce evil as it is that the Christian fanaticism should not produce it.”
The problem, of course, for men like Voltaire, is the faulty notion that morality is self-evident. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” Well, are they? If one travels around the world, one will quickly find out that the moral truths that were so “self-evident” to men like Jefferson and Voltaire, are not, in fact, so “self-evident” as they supposed. For all the corruption and faults of the Catholic Church, and for all the corruption and divisiveness brought about by the Protestant Revolution, the Christianity that both Catholicism and Protestantism attempted to proclaim and live out had a tremendous positive impact on Western culture.
In fact, Christianity shaped Western culture so thoroughly that men like Voltaire and Jefferson just assumed that the moral teachings of Christianity were simply “self-evident” and derived “from nature.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As Tennyson wrote, “nature is red in tooth and claw”—what is, in fact, self-evident is that nature is not moral. It cannot give moral direction. It was the teachings of Christ that raised the human race up, above the barbarism and “natural” beast-like behavior that characterized much of the pagan world.
Therefore, for all its faults, the Church bore witness (and indeed continues to bear witness) to a Christ-like morality that elevates the natural man to a son of God. As we will see, the emerging philosophy of the Enlightenment that falsely attributed morality to the natural world and rejected Christianity outright ended up putting Western culture on a path—a return path—to the barbarism, and “natural” beast-like “morality” of the pagan world.
David Hume, Deism, and Miracles
As Rousseau and Voltaire were busy writing the propaganda of the so-called Enlightenment in France, David Hume (1711-1776 AD) was busy in England. He basically argued that miracles do not happen, because the natural world is completely governed by natural laws. Therefore, miracles, as understood to be violations of the laws of nature, where impossible. Furthermore, since the natural world was all that existed, the disciplines of theology and metaphysics were useless endeavors that should be “committed to the flames.” Instead, the only kind of genuine knowledge was to be found in mathematics and the experimental disciplines.
The effect of men like Hume was that there arose in Europe at this time the idea of deism. It was sort of a “kinder and gentler” form of religion (at least that’s how it was portrayed). It acknowledged that there was a creator God, but it turned around and denied that the creator God had any direct dealings with the human race. As N.T. Wright puts it, deism was simply a re-packaged form of Epicureanism. It taught that the creator God built the universe much like a watchmaker makes a watch—complete with natural mechanisms (i.e. natural laws) that keep it running along smoothly. Therefore, there simply is no need for the creator God to interfere with his creation. And since he doesn’t interfere with his creation, the notion of “miracles” was concluded to be irrational nonsense (as Hume went about arguing).
Of course, we must point out that the way in which the so-called Enlightenment set up the argument regarding the possibility of miracles was an example of loading the dice from the get go. Enlightenment thinkers defined the very issue in a way that the biblical writers would never have recognized. Let’s tease this out…
The first assumption deists had was that the created order is a giant mechanism (like a watch). Science has now showed such a view of the natural world to be woefully inadequate. There is more going on in nature than these so-called Enlightenment thinkers could ever imagine. What we call “natural laws” are really just descriptions of what we’ve been able to figure out. Therefore, to equate all of nature with something like a machine is to vastly over-simplify the complexity of nature. Simply put, the so-called Enlightenment thinkers depicted “natural laws” as mechanisms that govern nature, rather than explanations for what we can observe in nature: explanations are far different than mechanical laws.
This leads to the second assumption. Since they believed nature was governed by these “natural laws,” by limiting their definition of reality to the material world alone, they assumed that nothing could go against these “natural laws.” Therefore, to claim that Jesus healed lepers or was raised from the dead was to claim something that went against these “natural laws.” And since deists didn’t want to deny God altogether, they simply shoved him to another corner of the universe, and said that God couldn’t (or wouldn’t) violate the “natural laws” that he set up.
This leads to the third assumption. Deists assumed that God had nothing to do with his creation. He wound it up like a watch and then left it to run itself. They viewed “creation” as something that happened “back then and there.” What they failed to notice (and it should be blindingly obvious to anyone who cares to see) is that creation is on-going.
Simply put, if the natural world is nothing more than a wound-up watch, then the deists are right: there is no need for God to “interfere” and hence no rational basis for miracles. But if the natural world is much more complex than a watch, and if creation isn’t just a “back then and there” one time phenomenon, then the deist depiction of God as an absentee landlord is woefully naïve and inadequate…
…and that opens the door to reconsidering “miracles,” but in a different light. Instead of seeing Jesus’ healing of a leper or raising from the dead as a “miracle” (i.e. a supernatural violation of mechanistic “natural laws”), perhaps we should see such things as examples of deeper mysteries and goings-on within nature that we do not understand. In fact, it should be noted, that the word “miracle” is not even in the Bible. What is translated as “miracle” literally means “dynamic deed.” The ancients did not view the natural world in the same mechanized way as the people of the Enlightenment did, and therefore they did not see so-called “miracles” as “miracles” at all—they didn’t violate “natural laws.” They were unique demonstrations of God’s power within the natural world—yet God’s power was understood to be constantly manifest.
Tomorrow, I am going to introduce you to Immanuel Kant.
