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Lesson 1.7: The Great Erosion
10 Plays5 days ago
During the Age of Enlightenment, the tools of reason that had been used to support faith for centuries began to erode the very foundations of religious authority.
Topics Discussed:
- The Fragility of the Cartesian Bridge: Examining why Descartes' reliance on a benevolent God to escape skepticism left his project vulnerable to the "Great Erosion" of the 18th century.
- Naturalizing the Supernatural: The Enlightenment shift from divine intervention to naturalistic explanations for phenomena like lightning, witchcraft, and demonic possession.
- The Deep Time Crisis: How geological discoveries and "cooling experiments" challenged the traditional biblical chronology of James Usher.
- Biblical Criticism and Authorial Doubt: The birth of modern textual analysis as Spinoza, Newton, and Reimarus began to treat sacred texts as human historical records.
- The Rise of Materialism and Atheism: Analyzing the emergence of open atheism and materialism in the radical works of Jean Meslier and Baron d’Holbach.
Recommended
Transcript
Exploring Descartes' Knowledge Model
00:00:00
Speaker
In the last lesson, we decided we're going to stick with something like the Cartesian project. In other words, that model of knowledge that Rene Descartes initiated, we're going to try to explore that a little bit further because there's lots of appealing components to it.
00:00:23
Speaker
First and foremost, the JTB theory of knowledge. That's been very intuitive to a lot of people for literally millennia. There's also the foundationalism, which means there's a method for blocking skeptical argumentation.
00:00:38
Speaker
And then there is the rationalism. Rationalism is a view that knowledge is rooted in reason. And once you you know develop your model of the world, you can have guaranteed certainty in your beliefs. So rationalism, because it guarantees certainty, very appealing.
00:01:00
Speaker
Now, there is a problem that we face if we decided to you know continue with the Cartesian project or something like it, right something that has sort of the flavor of Descartes.
00:01:17
Speaker
And that is that, well, if we're taking Descartes as a model, we need to start from the foundational beliefs and take them all the way to our beliefs about the world itself. In other words, sort of the big issue for Descartes is that, yeah, sure, let's assume that he establishes his four foundational beliefs.
00:01:43
Speaker
Remember, there are four of them. And let's say now that you want to work your way to defending everything else that you know. How are you going to go from those four beliefs to defending the view that um what my eyes see actually
God's Role in Descartes' Philosophy
00:02:00
Speaker
matches the world itself? And I am currently not in a dream. And whatever else you want to, you know, um all your other everyday beliefs how are you going to get there it's a little bit here's a weird metaphor or is it a simile i don't know but it's a little bit like if you're trying to build a skyscraper and a skyscraper is the typical you know ah visual version that i give of descartes philosophy but you're trying to build a skyscraper and they tell you okay here you go here's a hammer
00:02:33
Speaker
Here is an Allen wrench. Here is a spoon and a compass. Go. How are you going to build a skyscraper from those four things?
00:02:46
Speaker
That's sort of the you know situation that Descartes is in How are you going to go from your beliefs about the world from just your foundational beliefs that you established? Well, that's when Descartes brings in God.
00:03:00
Speaker
Remember that it is in an attempt to bridge the gap between his core foundational beliefs and knowledge of the world as we know it, that Descartes invokes God's existence.
Arguments for God's Existence
00:03:14
Speaker
since god is benevolent god would not let you be deceived about what you think you are seeing right that's the way that descartes vindicates our everyday beliefs he says hey we know god exists and we know he's all good and we know that means he wouldn't let us think for example that we're currently in a dream when we're actually you know or think we're actually in the real world when we're currently in a dream we wouldn't be deceived in that way god wouldn't let that happen and he certainly wouldn't let an evil demon be deceiving us through some weird artifice right so that is descartes basic uh uh the necessity of god and descartes basic project
00:04:00
Speaker
Okay, well, here is an issue and that arises. Descartes' argument for God's existence, his ontological argument, we talked about this before, not typically considered very persuasive.
00:04:16
Speaker
And so this doesn't mean, should say that the Cartesian project is untenable, or at least if we're being sticklers, like, you know,
00:04:28
Speaker
Maybe Descartes project isn't work going to work, but something like Descartes project could work, I guess. So what we need to do then is to search for more adequate arguments for God's existence.
00:04:43
Speaker
Okay, so what do we do? Well, The Catholic Church has a rich history of apologetics. If you don't know what that is, it's basically a bunch of reasoned defenses and explanations of the Catholic faith.
00:04:59
Speaker
So you can go to those and they're from, you know, late antiquity, even from the Roman Empire. They're from the Middle Ages, right? There's a lot to choose from there. And if you're going to go there, well, kind of have, you know, sort of a shining star that you can, you know, probably naturally gravitate toward. His name is Thomas Aquinas, and he famously provided his five ways. These are five arguments for proving God's existence through reason and evidence.
00:05:34
Speaker
Now, a quick shout out to all the philosophers that came before Aquinas because Aquinas even admits this, right? He basically took a bunch of ideas from earlier philosophers and just kind of put them together.
00:05:46
Speaker
So there's a bunch of Muslim philosophers and... other um Latin thinkers that Aquinas borrows from. But in any case, hey, why don't we do
The Teleological Argument and Its Critics
00:05:58
Speaker
that? Why don't we just grab a couple of Aquinas' arguments, establish God's existence, and presto pasta, we got ourselves a rationalist, foundationalist project that works, inspired by Descartes.
00:06:13
Speaker
Well, the problem is that, okay, sure, Aquinas was still super influential in this time period. Now we are in the, let's just say, 1700s, especially, by the way, after the Reformation. Aquinas, ah the Catholic Church sort of doubled down on Aquinas after the Reformation. So if you don't know about the Reformation, take a philosophy of religion course. i definitely cover it in mine. So anyway, Aquinas was influential.
00:06:43
Speaker
But a lot of thinkers in this time period, which by the way is sometimes called the Age of Enlightenment, they began to have religious doubts in this time period.
00:06:58
Speaker
And they began to speak out against um certain religious doctrines and you know certain religious explanations. So that's gonna sort of the situation that we're in right now.
00:07:13
Speaker
We're going to explore, you know maybe an argument for God's existence, But now there's a whole lot more pushback than there used to be a couple of centuries earlier.
00:07:24
Speaker
So to really establish God's existence, we're gonna have to sort of overcome those objections as well. So as I said, this period is known as the Age of Enlightenment.
00:07:37
Speaker
And it is a time period when many came many with the courage to reason began to dismantle the pillars of religious authority. And so...
00:07:48
Speaker
I wanna give you sort of a sense of what this was like. So let's begin with a little bit of food for thought. And hopefully it'll give you a feel for what I'm talking about.
00:08:01
Speaker
I guess for this to work out we have to first look at an argument for God's existence I'm gonna pick one of Aquinas's arguments and I'm gonna pick his fifth way it's typically known as the teleological argument but sometimes people call it something like the intelligent design argument or argument from intelligent design different versions of the name They are the same argument family, right? There's there's different versions of it.
00:08:31
Speaker
And to be honest, I'm actually um borrowing twice. This is basically Aquinas' argument, but I'm going to give you the version of someone named Paley, just because I think it's easier to understand. So yeah, a lot of borrowing here, but it's okay. We just need an argument for God's existence so that we can see the sort of critiques that get launched at it during this time period.
00:08:57
Speaker
Okay, so the teleological argument, here we go. Premise one, the world displays order, function, and design. Okay, yeah, it sort of seems like the world has some kind of function, namely to, you know, provide a space for us to live. It seems like our planet is just at the right place away from the sun so that it's not too cold, it's not too hot.
00:09:21
Speaker
And we get a nice ah night and day cycle, which lines up with our circadian rhythm so that we can rest sometimes. Okay, yeah, it looks looks like it fits us pretty well. So the world does display order, function and design.
00:09:39
Speaker
There's other things that display order, function, and design. For example, maybe watches are like this. If you were to be walking down the beach and you were to see a watch in the sand, you wouldn't say to yourself something like, ah oh man, this just this just happened, right? like It was just like lightning and waves crashing on sand and it made this watch. No, it seems to be...
00:10:04
Speaker
you know, having a specific function and it has a design, right? So all that sort of suggests that things that are, you know, displaying order, function, and design like watches, they do so because they were created by an intelligent designer, right? It isn't, again, just random waves and lightning crashing that make a watch a watch had to be designed and it had to be you know assembled in the right way for it to fulfill its function which is to tell time and so sure things that display order function and design they seem to have had some kind of creator
00:10:43
Speaker
Okay, well, therefore, the world displays order, function, and design because it was created by an intelligent designer or creator.
00:10:54
Speaker
And of course, we know this as God. So this has been an incredibly influential argument throughout the history of basically philosophy everywhere. You see these kind of arguments, um,
00:11:09
Speaker
crop up Western philosophy, Muslim philosophy. I've seen something like this in um Asian philosophy, Indian philosophy in particular. So anyway, very, very popular argument.
Hume's Skeptical Challenges
00:11:22
Speaker
But like I said, the point of this lesson today, at least, is that we are seeing that many thinkers from the age of enlightenment are now pushing back.
00:11:35
Speaker
And so I will give you the example of David Hume David Hume is not quite an atheist he would at least say he's not an atheist he would probably call himself just a skeptic you know he says I don't have beliefs about this um maybe you might want to call him an agnostic you might say well I don't know that we can know whether or not God exists okay you want to call him that.
00:12:02
Speaker
um Even he was ah pretty careful about his comments though. He actually didn't publish his dialogues concerning natural religion until after his death, even though by the end of his lesson we will meet some real atheists.
00:12:19
Speaker
A lot of them you know waited until they died to make their views known because, well, you know it wasn't necessarily safe for them yet. Maybe not necessarily for their safety, but their professional lives. you know They might not get jobs and all that because they are non-believers.
00:12:40
Speaker
In any case, in this work, Hume critiques the teleological argument and a lot of these objections are basically now considered standard objections to almost any argument from the um intelligent design family of arguments. So...
00:12:59
Speaker
I'm gonna begin mean really really there's no order to these i just kind of picked a few of my favorites but maybe I can say that I'm i'm starting with simpler ones and then I'm gonna build up to more complicated ones but let's begin with the regress problem which is kind of an obnoxious problem that Hume presents but here's what Hume says okay If complexity implies that there is a designer, then consider how complex God must be.
00:13:31
Speaker
It seems like God, since he is so complex, also had a designer. So the question is, who is this meta-God, this creator of gods? The basic... um idea here is that people who are putting forward the intelligent design argument, what they're really saying is like, look at the world, look at the planet, look at the universe.
00:13:55
Speaker
It looks like it was designed for us. It has order, it has a function. So that must mean that there is a creator, right, which we call God. Well, what hume is saying and is what Hume is saying is that, okay, well, you're looking at the universe, now I'm thinking about God.
00:14:13
Speaker
This being looks like it was designed because it literally has a function. It creates universes. That must be you know its own sort of orderly design. There must be someone that made that being that can literally make universes. It's so complex. It wouldn't just happen. right it wouldn't you know There must be an explanation for it.
00:14:38
Speaker
And so he says, maybe there's another God that created this this God that created the universe. Yeah, so that's sort of annoying. um It's not like a knockdown argument, but what Hume is trying to do here is create skeptical doubt. He's trying to say, well, how do you know that the book stops with Yahweh, right? How do you know there's not a God above that God?
00:15:01
Speaker
And this kind of you know skeptical objection, it really begins to undermine like how much you know about the supernatural.
00:15:13
Speaker
Alright, let's look at another argument from Hume. I call this one the problem of compatibility with polytheism. Basically, what Hume is saying is that if you were to take the intelligent design argument and just assume that it's sound, you know, or pretend it's sound, that does not necessarily prove the existence of a singular God.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's possible that many gods collaborated to create the universe. So again, if we're thinking about the universe, there's a lot of parts to it. ah There's you know stars, there's planets, there's black holes, there's assembl um assemblies of stars, right kind of constellations and and galaxies and all that.
00:16:02
Speaker
So, okay, there's a lot going on there. What do we know about um human-made artifacts that are very complex? Well, one thing that we know about something like, you know, maybe a skyscraper or a computer or something else, there's not one creator. There's actually quite a few different people that collaborated to bring about, for example, a skyscraper.
00:16:27
Speaker
And so the universe is pretty complicated. Doesn't it make more sense that a lot of gods kind of collaborated to make the the universe? Maybe one of them focused on stars and the other one on planets or whatever, right? And so now the question is, well, how do you know you got the right religion? It seems like a polytheistic religion.
00:16:49
Speaker
is the more likely candidate so there's another um sort of a obnoxious skeptical objection here's a if we're talking about obnoxious skeptical objections here's my favorite i love this one the infant deity hypothesis even if we accept that the universe has a designer we are only entitled to infer a cause proportional to the effect Let me pause right there. What does that mean?
00:17:19
Speaker
Well, you have to look at the quality of the universe. And if it's like a perfect universe, then you're like, oh, it must have been a perfect creator. But if it isn't a perfect universe, then you would say, ah, maybe it's a newbie, right? a guy that doesn't really know what they're doing yet.
00:17:36
Speaker
Well, what Hume is saying is that since the universe contains flaws, suffering, and botched designs, we cannot infer a perfect, omnipotent, or all-loving God.
00:17:52
Speaker
So I'm not exactly sure which flaws Hume was aware of, astronomically speaking, in the 1700s. But today we know a bunch of things about the universe.
00:18:06
Speaker
um For example, ah it's really only, you know, some parts of the universe, like at least our particular part of the galaxy, that are pretty stable. There's other parts of the universe that are kind of a mess.
00:18:21
Speaker
Like there's literally a bunch of galaxies crashing into each other. And so for any ah stars in those galaxies that might have planets on them, that that maybe have life on them,
00:18:34
Speaker
Well, it's it doesn't seem too orderly or stable, right? It looks like, you know, you're you're alive, your evolution's happening, and then your galaxy crashes into another galaxy and and it's gone. So that doesn't seem too, like, coherent. that's That's crazy. And there's also black holes, which are literally eating up certain planetary systems and solar systems and all
Influence of Enlightenment and Deism
00:18:59
Speaker
that. So that's another aspect that looks kind of chaotic.
00:19:04
Speaker
In some, you know, it doesn't look like the universe is anywhere near perfect. So maybe this flawed world was actually made by an infant deity.
00:19:17
Speaker
In other words, given how chaotic actually the universe is, it's like a baby God that made the universe, not an actual adult, mature, competent God.
00:19:30
Speaker
So there's another ah incredibly ah obnoxious objection. i like it though. I mean, there's something, how do you know God is perfect based on the universe, which does contain suffering. It does contain contain sort of counterintuitive arrangements.
00:19:51
Speaker
um How do you know that God is perfect? So there it is. Okay, let's get into, i have two more objections and these are a little headier. So, you know, make sure that you know, shake your head, make sure you you're you're awake awake for this one.
00:20:07
Speaker
Here we go. This is called breaking the analogy. Whenever you are dealing with analogical arguments, you have to make sure that you know the two things that you are comparing.
00:20:21
Speaker
For example, if you're gonna make an analog analogical argument about, i don't know, let's just say you're trying out a new drug for heart medication.
00:20:33
Speaker
and um you don't want to try it on humans yet but pigs have hearts that are very similar to humans so you're going to try it out on pigs first so you do it that and then it turns out that it works and so then you make an analog analogical argument you say okay well pig hearts are a lot like human hearts it worked for pigs so it will probably work for ah humans okay That's an analogical argument. Notice you know the two things you're you're comparing, the pig hearts and the human hearts.
00:21:07
Speaker
Well, now what Hume is saying is like, this is an analogical argument. You're comparing something like a watch, which has a designer, to the world, which the claim is that it also has a designer.
00:21:20
Speaker
ah Hume is saying, look, that analogy between human-made objects, like a watch, and the universe is incredibly weak. A watch is so not like the universe.
00:21:36
Speaker
I mean, for starters, they're very different in size, like literally one fits inside the other many billions of times over. Right. And so for that reason alone, you know, it's pretty hard to take this analogy seriously, says Hume.
00:21:55
Speaker
Here's another item for the reason, another reason for why we should think that watches are very unlike universes. Maybe you've seen a watch get made. That's a big maybe. i don't I don't think you have because I haven't. And so I don't think that people just go around watching watches get made. But I just say that you have.
00:22:16
Speaker
You for sure haven't seen a universe you know, be formed. And so you're comparing something that maybe you know how it's been made to something that you for sure don't know how it was made or how it happened, right? There's theories about it, but there's also a lot of disagreement about that. So...
00:22:36
Speaker
One more point that Hume makes, if you want to make a better analogy, the universe kind of resembles an organism. And he says a vegetable or animal.
00:22:47
Speaker
What he says, by and what he means by this is that the universe is is growing, right? And it sort of self-regulates and it has laws that govern it. And, you know, that's not like watches. It's more like a like a plant, right? That grows.
00:23:02
Speaker
So that is, you know, Hume's suggestion. And if that's the case, well, plants, you know, it's hard to say that they have ah a designer. i grow a bunch of plants and I'll tell you, they kind of grow on their own. I mean, you don't, I don't even water water them sometimes and they just grow on their own. So ah not exactly, you know, ah a good example of something that needs an intelligent designer.
00:23:30
Speaker
So to sum up, this is an analog analogical argument, the argument from intelligent design, and it compares two things that are very not similar. And so it doesn't work.
00:23:43
Speaker
And in fact, if you want to compare the universe to something a little closer to it that we are familiar with, maybe some kind of living organism, the intuition about appealing to an intelligent designer kind of goes away.
00:23:58
Speaker
And so, yeah, that is Hume's objection there. Again, this is actually a pretty strong objection that you need to consider a little bit before you really see, you know, the import of it. And why would that be a good analogy, right? so Anyway, that is one of Hume's stronger objections. I'll give you one more only because I like it so much or I like the effect that it had on people in the future. So I'm calling this the Epicurean hypothesis.
00:24:34
Speaker
And at some point, Hume considers this, which is way ahead of its time. But here's what he is saying. If matter is finite but time is infinite, particles in constant motion will eventually cycle through every possible arrangement.
00:24:54
Speaker
Once a stable ordered arrangement occurs, like our universe, it will persist simply because it is stable. And this will create the appearance of design without requiring a designer.
00:25:11
Speaker
Okay, so let me go through that first bit. If you just, you know, imagine a lot of time passing through, a lot of interesting things can happen once you consider, you know,
00:25:24
Speaker
billions of years, right? or you know, even trillions of years, right? Even more than that, especially if you go into infinity. For example, the very common example of this is if you grab, you know, a bunch of monkeys and have them type randomly on typewriters for infinity, eventually, even if it takes a really long time, they will, through their random typing, produce one of Shakespeare's plays.
00:25:50
Speaker
And so all you have to do is give it enough time, but randomness will eventually produce something that is, at least appears to be non-random. And so this stable ordered arrangement, that is what Hume says maybe happened to our universe.
00:26:08
Speaker
Maybe there's a bunch of atoms crashing into each other for a really long time, but eventually something like planets formed and they started floating in, i mean, floating isn't the right word, but they arranged themselves into something like solar systems and galaxies and all that. And simply over time,
00:26:30
Speaker
what we got is, you know at least in our neck of the woods, something like a nice solar system that looks like it was designed for us, but it's only the appearance of design. In reality, it was just you know random um ah collisions of atoms that eventually, over a long period of time, created this stable ordered arrangement.
00:26:55
Speaker
So that's, ah you know, to be honest, the view, or something like the view of some physicists today. And the reason why I really mentioned it, though, is because apparently these passages from Hume's work inspired about a century later,
00:27:13
Speaker
a man named Charles Darwin. So that's kind of interesting, right? And maybe you can kind of see the parallels there. i will leave that part up to you to check out the ah similarity between Darwinian reasoning and this view that I'm calling the Epicurean hypothesis from Hume.
00:27:33
Speaker
Okay, so we've seen that in the 1700s, now we have people that are more willing to argue against you know um common arguments for God's existence.
00:27:47
Speaker
Now, it's always been the case that people have been critiquing what people have been producing arguments for God's existence and other people have been critiquing them.
00:27:58
Speaker
But usually those other people are still believers. And what we see in Hume is someone who is committed to skepticism. And so that's that's new.
00:28:10
Speaker
Speaking of new, there's another orientation toward God that crops up in the Age of Enlightenment. And I want to talk about that one next in our story time.
00:28:28
Speaker
So we talked about Hume, who is a religious skeptic. There's another flavor of skeptic that comes around. and necessarily a skeptic, I suppose, but a different view of what God is. So one of the more influential and far reaching ideas during the Enlightenment was deism.
00:28:52
Speaker
Deism is a view that there is a supernatural God who created the world, but who is not concerned with humans and does not intervene in earthly affairs.
00:29:06
Speaker
What does that mean? Basically, a bunch of these deists, or what it meant to be a deist, is that you believe God exists, but he made the world and then dipped, right?
00:29:18
Speaker
So he doesn't listen to your prayers, right? He's never going to answer your prayers, that's for sure. And he doesn't really care what you do. He's gone, right? he God has abandoned ah you.
00:29:30
Speaker
And so, um you know, that's deism in a nutshell. Maybe I'm being a little histrionic, but that's that's roughly the view. And this was quite popular during this time period. It's even the case that Voltaire and his BFF, Frederick the Great of Prussia, were deists.
00:29:50
Speaker
Now, Voltaire is probably known to you. A lot of people read Voltaire's book Candide in high school. but he was a very influential French philosopher and very interesting that his one of his best friends was the king of Prussia known as Frederick the Great.
00:30:11
Speaker
And it seemed to be the case that enlightenment philosophy really had the effect on Frederick because he was one of these, they call them enlightened despots, basically ah you know absolute monarchs that kind of force their societies to be less brutal, more progressive, maybe is a way to put it.
00:30:37
Speaker
I'll give you an example. Frederick was one of the kings or monarchs in general that started to basically cut back on public executions.
00:30:48
Speaker
So in these days, there was such a thing as a public execution. You would be executed for I don't know what what seems to be, you know, not really terrible offenses sometimes, including, you know, blasphemy, ah in especially in Spain, apparently.
00:31:06
Speaker
in any case, um Frederick sort of made it tougher to have public executions. Now, he didn't get rid of them altogether. That sort of took a long time to happen.
00:31:18
Speaker
But that's sort of a step in the right direction because these public executions were sort of unimaginably brutal. i mean, it's essentially torture out in the town square and then you watch someone get killed and it's it's pretty ah pretty ghastly to to read about. So um in any case, ah a bunch of European Enlighteners were deists as were a group of elites who in 1776 fomented revolt of the American colonies against Great Britain. Who am I talking about?
00:31:59
Speaker
Who are these elites that made ah revolt happen against the UK or Great Britain? I'm speaking of none other than the American rebels who would eventually come to be known as the Founding Fathers.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yes, my friends, the founders were a bunch of deists and they were also committed to other ideas associated with deism, such as rational inquiry, an opposition to superstition, and the pursuit of happiness. So I will come back to the pursuit of happiness Later, let's talk about the opposition to superstition.
Transition to Naturalism
00:32:41
Speaker
Here pictured we have Ben Franklin and it's his very famous experiments with his you know kites during a a lightning storm. Why was he doing that?
00:32:53
Speaker
Oh, it's because he wanted to prove to people, provide evidence for people that storms are simply just, you know, they're a natural phenomenon. It's just electricity, really.
00:33:10
Speaker
Because at the time, a lot of people still believed that storms were like, you know, a message from God. God is upset. And that's why he he's showing his wrath through this lightning storm. And there's even very famous people like a man named Martin Luther who initiated the Reformation.
00:33:32
Speaker
who saw a storm as a message from God. Like he was thinking about doing one thing and then there was a lightning storm and he said, oh, God doesn't want me to do that. And so Benjamin or Franklin is trying to send a message to these people.
00:33:45
Speaker
That is not true, right? So this is being very much opposed to superstition. I'll talk about one more of these founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson.
00:33:58
Speaker
He actually compiled a version of the New Testament that had no mention of miracles. That's because he thought that Jesus was not the son of God, but just a great moral teacher.
00:34:14
Speaker
And so we definitely should know about him, but we should take out this superstitious stuff. And so that's why he published his particular version, or I guess he he didn't publish it, but he kind of um handed out his particular version of of the gospels, right? So, okay, so we have at least two types of ah non-religious people.
00:34:38
Speaker
We have the religious skeptic like David Hume, and then we have these deists, right? Now there is eventually during the latter part of the age of enlightenment, the first real modern atheists.
00:34:58
Speaker
So we have to set the stage for them a little bit. ah Let's do that next.
00:35:41
Speaker
Now, I mentioned earlier that we're gonna get to some real dyed-in-the-wool atheists at the end of this lesson. And that's because eventually in this course, we will cover some some of the most hardcore arguments against God's existence, because that is of course, something that we need to overcome if we're going to defend something like the Cartesian project.
00:36:07
Speaker
But what I want to do and what remains of this lesson is explain to you how slowly, you know, it took time, but slowly,
00:36:19
Speaker
this um anti-religious sentiment was able to be expressed. You had people like ah Hume who literally would hide you know their irreligiosity so that they won't wouldn't get to you know um setbacks in their professional lives.
00:36:39
Speaker
Eventually you had people who were very boisterous atheists. So I kinda wanna set that up for you a little bit. and the way i see it at least is that slowly religion lost its monopoly on explanation in other words for a long time the answer to almost every question that mattered had to do something had to do in some way with religion
00:37:11
Speaker
And eventually that went away and that's what paved the way for some people to really kind of um in a very bombastic way claim their atheism and you know declare religion to be irrational and all that.
00:37:29
Speaker
I call this process, by the way, the great erosion because it's not like it happened in one place at one time it just kind of happened slowly right so everything that I'm going to say right now it's just part of the story there's literally no way I can tell you the whole story but I'm going to give you just some important tidbits hopefully we'll get you to you know understand a little more clearly what was going on in this time period Step one, you know, the return of naturalism.
00:38:02
Speaker
So naturalism, we've already been exposed to it a little bit, is this, you know, rejection of supernatural explanations. It's basically the view that Maybe the most important thing when explaining something is empirical observation or science. Some people go even further and that's the only way to explain things through science. So that would be naturalism. Its official title is methodological naturalism.
00:38:34
Speaker
But I want to tell you about this story, about how naturalism came back. Unfortunately, got to teach you some words. So let's move into that. Here are some important concepts.
00:38:47
Speaker
Let's begin with eudaimonic ethics. So let's look at the root there. Eudaimonia, that is a Greek term that can be roughly translated as thriving or flourishing. Sometimes it's translated as happiness,
00:39:06
Speaker
but what the ancients meant by happiness is not what we mean by happiness. So thriving, I think is a better explanation or translation. I typically translate as that.
00:39:18
Speaker
And it just turns out that many of the moral systems of the ancient world, not all of them, but many of them, including that of Plato, Aristotle, the Pyronians, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, they were all aimed at eudaimonia, at this thriving.
00:39:36
Speaker
So put another way, they were eudaimonic ethical systems. Or I really like the way Julia Annas puts it. They were morality of happiness or moralities for thriving. And so that is the way it was in the ancient world. and Not everyone, again, but most ethicists, most you know people that were thinking about you know what you you should do,
00:40:02
Speaker
They were all trying to figure out um those set of behaviors, those character traits, those um situations that lead you to farewell, to flourish, to thrive. That's what being good was. Being good, you know, obviously it entailed being kind to other people, but mostly because being kind to other people leads to profitable outcomes for everyone. And so morality was about success, basically, personal success, which included not necessarily money, although for some of these people like Aristotle, that was a part of it, but just, you know, inner peace or some kind of different. Everyone had their own conception of thriving. So whatever
00:40:49
Speaker
That philosopher's conception of thriving was the good life or being good entailed working toward that. This is very different from another kind of moral discourse that was around you know in the ancient world too. We typically call this divine command morality or divine command theory.
00:41:14
Speaker
And divine command theory is the view that the very meaning of moral is what God has commanded of creation. So let me just kind of juxtapose these real quick.
00:41:26
Speaker
For divine command theorists, moral is just whatever God told you to do, right? It doesn't have to do with personal success or thriving or happiness.
00:41:37
Speaker
You have to do it because God told you to do it. That's what morality means to them. For the eudaimonic people, you might even want to call it eudaimonic morality, they use the word moral, but it didn't mean, you know, ah it's a rule imposed on you by God. They meant it as like, well, these are things that will get you to thrive.
00:41:58
Speaker
And so these are very different approaches to moral discourse. Even though they use the same words like morality, they meant very different things by it.
00:42:11
Speaker
So maybe the most important thing that I can harp on right now is that contrary to many of the moral systems of the ancient world, if you're a divine command theorist, you're not moral because it helps you thrive in this life. You're moral because God told you to do it.
00:42:30
Speaker
And maybe that'll make you worthy of some kind of reward in the next life. And so there's a ah this lifeness versus an other lifeness going on here, right? Eudaimonic ethics is about understanding the world. That's part one. So that you can thrive in it.
00:42:50
Speaker
And divine command morality is following these commands from God so that you can in the future and in the next life, maybe go to heaven. Right. So very different approaches to morality. If I could kind of sum it up, you know, in a nutshell here for you.
00:43:05
Speaker
Eudaimonic ethics is about taking actions that will lead to flourishing, happiness, well-being, etc. in this life. Divine command morality is about obeying the commands of God so that one may attain salvation from eternal damnation.
00:43:19
Speaker
Very different approaches. Notice that if you want to be successful in this life, like the eudaimonic ethicists, you have to like know stuff. You have to understand how the natural world works, how cities work. You have to basically inquire into what today we would call science. We have to know how things work.
00:43:41
Speaker
In divine command morality, you don't really need to know that. And so they tend to not focus so much on scientific inquiry. Sometimes they even see it as completely irrelevant. And so these are very different approaches to morality.
00:43:58
Speaker
Well, I bet you that, you know, you find one of these more intuitive than the other. I'm going to give you my two minute spiel on how that happened.
00:44:09
Speaker
In the ancient world, really eudaimonic ethics was sort of the thing. Philosophy was more like a way of life. So if you were a Stoic, you would you know adopt certain ways of acting and thinking, and that was so that you can thrive according to what the Stoics called thriving.
00:44:28
Speaker
And if you were a Pyronian, you adopted certain ways of you know behaving and thinking so you can thrive in the way the Pyronians met you know thought thriving was.
00:44:39
Speaker
And the same thing was for each school. It was everyone, every school of philosophy had their own approach to thriving. And basically, you just follow that way of life so that you can live the good life or what they called the good life.
00:44:53
Speaker
During this time period, divine command theory was around. There was a religion, you've probably heard of it, it's called Judaism, and they were divine command theorists, and they've been around for forever, right? and It's a very old religion.
00:45:07
Speaker
Then there was a guy named Jesus, and ah that was an offshoot of Judaism, and it became something called Christianity. and it was actually a couple of centuries after jesus died that a roman emperor decided to make the whole roman empire christian and then slowly but surely over several centuries uh divine command theory was basically imposed on you know, the Romans, any any um territories that the Romans um ruled over.
00:45:43
Speaker
And so it took a long time and it took a little bit of violence and they had to actually close down the schools of philosophy by force. But over time, divine command theory became the norm.
00:45:57
Speaker
What does that mean for us? Well, again, divine command theory doesn't necessarily you know involve personal success in this life. And so understanding how the world works ah doesn't really come into the picture.
00:46:13
Speaker
Some people like Augustine, St. Augustine, even thought that curiosity was a sin. So you you not only should you do not need to you know investigate the natural world,
00:46:26
Speaker
but it might even be like adjacent to sin. So totally different, right? Than the eudaimonic ethicists. And why am I telling you all this?
00:46:37
Speaker
Well, remember earlier, I mentioned the founding fathers and I talked about the pursuit of happiness. And I even said, hey, I'll come back to this. Well, ah what many of the founding fathers meant by the pursuit of happiness is is maybe best translated as the pursuit of thriving.
00:47:02
Speaker
So it turns out that a bunch of founding fathers loved eudaimonic ethics. So let me tell you the story as quickly as I can. And it has to do with a bunch of people named or dubbed humanists.
00:47:17
Speaker
And here we have pictured Poggio Bracchiolini. I don't know if that's actually how you pronounce it, but I do think it's fun to pronounce Italian names or try to at least.
00:47:30
Speaker
Anyway, Poggio was one of these humanists And what they would do is they would go around hunting for old manuscripts that contained um pieces of eudaimonic ethical works, right? So Pojo is very famous because he rediscovered a poem named De rerum natura, I guess in Latin, De rerum natura or something like that.
00:47:58
Speaker
That was in 1417 and this is a poem written by a man named Lucretius that defended Epicurean philosophy.
00:48:10
Speaker
Now Epicureanism is a philosophy for attaining sort of like an inner peace and there's all sorts of practices and it's a little anti-religion and there's this whole thing right but the point here is that people like pojo were going around and rediscovering all these ancient texts and they were translating them and they were you know getting the ball rolling on distributing them and it took centuries but by the time that we get to the age of enlightenment
00:48:45
Speaker
They were all the rage. Almost all the intellectuals from the Age of Enlightenment that we you know know of were basically enraptured by these recently rediscovered and translated writings of ancient eudaimonic ethicists, as were the founding fathers.
00:49:07
Speaker
In fact, I talked about Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson because we have records of them engaging in practices that were aimed at cultivating self-mastery and character. In other words, I mentioned earlier that ancient philosophy was more like a way of life. You had to behave and think a certain way.
00:49:29
Speaker
so it wasn't just, you know, like philosophers today that they just work at a university and that makes you a philosopher. You had to actually act and think in a certain way to count as a philosopher. And that's what Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were trying to do.
00:49:47
Speaker
And so the point of all this is that people were reading a bunch of ancient texts. And these ancient texts were about eudaimonic ethics, which emphasize that you have to understand how the world works so that you can succeed in it, right? So that you can thrive and flourish.
00:50:11
Speaker
And so the effect of all this was the eventual return of naturalism. Again, a move away from supernatural explanations toward natural ones.
00:50:23
Speaker
One very good example of this is that it was these enlighteners who were reading a bunch of eudaimonic ethics that were the first to recognize what today we see as mental illness, right?
00:50:39
Speaker
They recognize that it was a medical problem. Prior to this, there's all kinds of explanations about, you know, mental illness. Typically, it had to do with demonic possession or witchcraft or something like that.
00:50:53
Speaker
not necessarily a medical explanation but now the enlighteners were saying yeah i think this is a medical problem so that is a bit of naturalism there okay well naturalism comes back Bacon's views are becoming more popular and so now there's a whole lot more interrogating of nature.
00:51:16
Speaker
So what does that mean exactly? My favorite example of this, I like to call it the deep time crisis because it has to do with how old the earth is. Now if someone asked you, hey how old is the earth?
00:51:31
Speaker
Back in the day, what you would basically do is what James Usher did is that he went to the Bible and he figured out what dates he knew ah you know for the people in the Bible.
00:51:42
Speaker
And then he just you know meticulously counted the ages of the generations you know backward, everything listed in the Old Testament. And he made his way all the way back to Adam and Eve. And he's like, okay, I figured out how old the earth is.
00:51:56
Speaker
The earth was made. on October 23rd, 4004 BCE. e Those are, that's the actual figure, by the way. And that's how you figure it out how old the Earth is.
00:52:09
Speaker
Well, naturalism comes back and people are having different views about this. One person who had a very different view is Wilhelm Leibniz. And what he did is he studied fossils like shark's teeth and geological formations in caverns. I actually have a picture here of the Hartz district in Germany.
00:52:34
Speaker
Looks pretty cool. And from this interrogation of nature, he eventually came up with this new hypothesis. He said, i think the Earth was originally molten and it cooled very slowly. And it also went through cycles of cooling and warming, right, where it was ah contracting and expanding. And then it had occasional violent shifts.
00:52:59
Speaker
So this is long before modern tectonic plate theory. So now you know that there's a bunch of tectonic plates and they crash into each other and that causes ah mountain ranges, right? The Himalayas were caused by two tectonic plates crashing into each other.
00:53:18
Speaker
so were the Andes in South America. None of that was known at the time, but you can see Leibniz sort of stepping in that direction. He's just saying, you know, I feel like there's a lot of iron in the planet Earth and iron cools very slowly. There had been experiments by a guy named Leclerc that established that. So he's saying, I think the Earth earth is older than 6,000 years. think.
00:53:46
Speaker
well um Now people had some options, right? Eventually there was a discovery of a whale actually actually on a hillside. And so what do you do with that information? People discovered a whale basically in a mountain.
00:54:03
Speaker
How does a whale get there? There's two stories, right? You can say, well, you know, there was a flood, Noah's Ark, all of that. Or you can say, well, you know, Leibniz has this theory where the Earth kind of has like these violent moments where the, you know, one part of the Earth goes this way and another part of the Earth goes that way. and so things get moved around. Maybe that's how this fossil got moved around.
00:54:27
Speaker
Well, people began to do something that in prior decades, in centuries for sure, would have been unimaginable. They started going towards Leibniz's view, right? They're saying, I think that because of these fossils and and the way the earth looks, right? If you ever go see a fault line, you can see it looks like the earth is like being torn in half.
00:54:51
Speaker
How does that happen? what happens very slowly, only a few centimeters ah per year, and you wouldn't be able to get that sort of a distance when you see you know different fault lines shifting in just 6,000 years. It takes you know at least tens of thousands of years. And so people were moving more toward Leibniz view, where it just turns out that the earth is way older 6,000 years.
00:55:17
Speaker
And so more and more evidence accrued. And eventually a lot of enlighteners shifted away from that 6,000 year old view of Earth to a much older planet, even if they you know didn't precisely want to give it an age yet.
00:55:35
Speaker
And so this is a move away from the authority of sacred texts, right? It's not that the Bible has the ultimate say. More so toward moving toward the retrodiction of nature. You have to go look at nature itself and try to predict what happened through nature itself, right?
Emergence of Biblical Criticism
00:55:55
Speaker
So that is definitely a major shift. um Thanks to the return of naturalism, moving toward a point where you really have to go look at nature to figure things out. That is a ah big, big difference, right? Don't go look at the Bible anymore. go look at nature itself.
00:56:15
Speaker
speaking of the Bible, we also see the rise of biblical criticism around this time period. Now we can do this forever.
00:56:26
Speaker
i'm going to try to not do this forever. um But I'll just give you a couple of samples of this. Basically, ah couple of intellectuals felt that they were warranted in critiquing scripture itself.
00:56:44
Speaker
Let me give you some examples here. One philosopher named Baruch Spinoza questioned the view that Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
00:56:56
Speaker
Pentateuch being the first couple of books of the Bible and what was Spinoza's argument he basically pointed out that in the Pentateuch we see Moses's death and so you can't write how you died right like that's that's not possible uh you can speculate about how you're going to die but uh that you know that wouldn't work out in this case right it wouldn't be then you'd be calling the bible speculation anyway the point here is that spinoza was thinking to himself i don't think we should keep attributing authorship to these first five books of the bible to moses that doesn't make sense and that sort of questioning
00:57:39
Speaker
was not really allowed um you know previously. Didn't actually work out great for Spinoza, but like I said, some some people that had some doubts about religion you know ended up suffering some setbacks.
00:57:55
Speaker
Let's talk about Isaac Newton. You know him as a physicist, but he actually dabbled in a bunch of stuff, to be honest. He's kind of an interesting guy.
00:58:06
Speaker
One of the things that he mentions relating to the Bible is that he says that the Bible, the original Bible, before it was corrupted,
00:58:18
Speaker
it doesn't support belief in the holy trinity this whole you know god the father god the son got the holy spirit and what he did is he went to go find some old uh texts the oldest versions of various um ah books of the new testament and he said look if you go to the really old ones you don't find this certain comma And then later on, someone seems to have added a comma and that comma changes the meaning of this text to support belief in the Trinity.
00:58:54
Speaker
But it was added and that means we shouldn't believe in the Trinity. What we what most of us read is this text with a comma and that's a corruption of the original text. Now, if you want to get into this whole controversy, look up the Johannine comma or just Isaac Newton and the Holy Trinity. And that's a fun rabbit hole to ah spend a couple of hours on. but yeah, basically questioning whether the Bible is accurate or not, whether it was accurately transcribed and whether what people believe now is a result of bad translations of the Bible.
00:59:35
Speaker
interesting uh one more person here herman samuel ramaris i don't think that i pronounced that correctly but in any case he used mathematics to show that the physical numbers of exodus are simply not possible so in the book of exodus you have the jews escaping from egypt and you get all this the full story right you get uh this number of jews left egypt at this time and they you know left uh or they crossed this uh amount of land and etc etc right well ramaris said none of that is even remotely possible like this number of people can't move this far in and this amount of time and so he is questioning there the veracity of the bible this
01:00:27
Speaker
It's pretty serious, right? And this was not really the norm ah in the Middle Ages. This is something that's that's new. It's a new sort of intellectual environment where this is allowed.
01:00:40
Speaker
Now, there's a bunch of things that I'm not even covering, right? I just want you to know a couple of the highlights that I like. I'll give you one more that you know kind of shows the intellectual climate here.
01:00:53
Speaker
because it comes from Ramaris again. Ramaris and others pointed out that several of the patriarchs that we see in the Bible, including Abraham and Jacob and David, they were extremely cruel. They were just cruel.
01:01:10
Speaker
not good people, it seems like. And what Ramirez said is that, look, I know ah enlightened secular people, in other words, non-religious people that are clearly better than these people in the Bible.
01:01:27
Speaker
And so that's a little um perplexing and troublesome, right? If you meet a religious person that's basically indistinguishable from an atheist, well, that's a problem, right? But if you're saying, no, I actually know atheists that are better than these religious people.
01:01:48
Speaker
That is really starting to say something, right? So in any case, this is the environment, the intellectual milieu that sort of allowed certain people to enter the scene and over some time, openly declare themselves as atheists.
Rise of Early Modern Atheism
01:02:11
Speaker
And so we have some of the first modern atheists popping up. um Again, it's a minority. Most enlighteners I feel were deists, right? That's sort of like the the number one approach to religion by these enlighteners.
01:02:28
Speaker
But there were some that went into full blown, it's called materialism. That's when you deny the existence of the soul. And atheism, of course, you deny the existence of God.
01:02:41
Speaker
Two people that I'll mention now are Jean Meslier and Baron Holbach. Meslier is a very interesting character because he was actually a French priest who, when he died, they found a book that he wrote where he promoted materialism and atheism.
01:03:02
Speaker
And so that's ah interesting. But again, he was dead when that when that book was discovered. So he didn't suffer... um Any negative setbacks? ah I mean, as far as I know. um Baron Holbach, though, was alive when he was ah promoting his atheism.
01:03:21
Speaker
And, you know, he's calling the Trinity a logical contradiction. He's saying that this idea of a incorporeal father, a non-physical God is an absolute absurdity.
01:03:34
Speaker
And so I want you to know that this is the scene that we're in now. Now, most people are still fairly polite and you know they're not um attacking religion very openly, but we do get some.
01:03:51
Speaker
And we will eventually cover an atheistic argument against God's existence. But let's consider for a second what it must have been like to be in this space.
01:04:09
Speaker
You have on the one hand, some people arguing that we need God for knowledge, right? On the other, you have people that are finally saying, you know, I don't believe in any of this.
01:04:23
Speaker
And then you have people in between who say, well, there is a God, but he doesn't care about you. What do you believe? What should you believe?
01:04:35
Speaker
And how do you arrive at a conclusion? you got so many options here. And to be honest, you can kind of think of yourself as, you know making maybe the most important decision of your existence.
01:04:55
Speaker
If you believe, bet on the wrong belief, then you might get eternal damnation, right? And so you are like in a gigantic metaphysical roulette wheel.
01:05:11
Speaker
And the question is, what do you bet on? Do you bet on God or do you bet against?