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The Desolation of Reality: Voltaire & Co. vs. Tradition
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19260 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
5,918 Words |
| Author
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Ernest van den Haag
Ernest van den Haag, recently retired as John M. Olin
Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy at Fordham
University, is currently a distinguished scholar at the
Heritage Foundation. This is a revised version of a paper
first read in January 1990 at a conference on "The Ambiguous
Legacy of the Enlightenment" held at the Claremont Institute
in Claremont, California, to be published in a forthcoming
book. |
The Enlightenment--particularly the French version on which I concentrate--meant to liberate the world from obscurantist customs that had become stifling in the eighteenth century and from traditional ideas cultivated by the Roman Catholic Church. In this the Enlightenment succeeded.
Although the philosophes--the intellectuals who created the Enlightenment--were quite antiecclesiastical, most of them thought of themselves as theists, or even as anticlerical christians. However, their Christianity was super-Pelagian and hardly Christian at all. They did not believe in the Trinity, in Original Sin, in grace, and in salvation. They thought of God as a philosophe. Still, with the major exception of Diderot, Helvetius, and the Baron d'Holbach, the philosophes did not think of themselves as atheists. But it was the anticlericalism, Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame", not the theism, that marked their historical role.
The theism of the philosophes was weak to begin with. To paraphrase Voltaire: since God tolerated evil, He either was not benevolent (if He could do otherwise) or not omnipotent (if He could not do otherwise). Thus Voltaire's God was stripped of the traditional divine characteristics. Still, Voltaire thought God had to exist: the existence of a clock--the world--implies that of a clock maker. This, it may be said, is a remarkably weak version of the medieval argument from design. The existence of a human artifact does indeed imply an artificer. As David Hume pointed out, this conclusion rests on the human experience of how artifacts are produced. It can hardly be applied to the universe unless it is first assumed that the universe is like a clock made by a clock maker, God--rather a circular argument. To analogize the world with a human artifact is an anthropomorphic speculation that begs the actual question: Is nature designed teleologically by a designer as a clock is designed to show what time it is? Or is nature (including humans) the product of causal but nonteleological forces? Theoretically chance, the unintended, can produce everything, given enough time.
Voltaire was typical of the Englightenment, not least in his cleverness and almost total ambivalence. Candide, the work on which his fame so largely rests now, is a legitimate satire of the rosy view of the world promoted by some of his colleagues. Yet it also rests on a willful misinterpretation of Leibniz' famous insistence that this is the best of all possible worlds--which certainly it must be, if, as Leibniz thought, God is omnipotent and benevolent. How could He be both and create a less than optimal world? However, Voltaire pretended that the great
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