At the Origins of Modern Atheism

by Michael J. Buckley

Michael J. Buckley traces the argument that informed the rise of modern atheism, finding that this unprecedented denial of God developed out of the very strategies employed to counter it.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Atheism, Philosophy, History, Christianity

460 pages, Hardcover

First published August 29, 1990

About the author

Michael J. Buckley, SJ (1931–2019) was Bea Professor of Theology at Santa Clara University. Prior to holding this position, he taught philosophical theology at Boston College, the University of Notre Dame, and the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. His publications include Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism and What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise.

Reviews

[Enoch Kuo · Rating 5 out of 5]

In attempting to answer the illusory question "What is modern atheism?", intellectual historian Michael Buckley takes the reader through a whirlwind tour of the theological, philosophical, and scientific developments of the 17th century in which the transition between the Medieval and Modern eras were really effected. For Buckley, the roots of the dialectic of atheism began with the decision of a certain Leonard Leys, Lessius in Latin, who, instead of addressing the problem of those who were distancing themselves from confessional religion - so-called "atheists", despite the fact that they were Christian - as if they were reviving classical philosophical disputes. In doing so, he introduces a novel new interpretation of the distinction between "faith and reason", with "faith" dealing with the dictates of "revelation" and belonging to the discipline of theology and "reason" dealing with the study of nature and the existence of God and belonging to the discipline of philosophy. From there, the beginning of the end began, as philosophers and theologians continued to build on this distinction formidable edifices to defend the existence and nature of God. When the Universal Mechanics of Isaac Newton and the Universal Mathematics of Rene Descartes found their culmination in a system of science that no longer required God as an explanatory hypothesis, modern atheism was born. For the first time in human history, atheism was not merely a polemical term, but a badge of honor. For Buckley, the existence of atheism cannot be understood apart from the theism which it purports to reject, and modern atheism is no exception. It was the abandonment of religion - appealing to philosophy instead of Christology or Pneumatology - of its own sphere for that of philosophy that caused the downfall of religion as philosophy came into its own. Theologians willingly gave up the defense of theology to do philosophy, and so theology languished.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://sacredpage.wordpress.com/2012/...

[William Bies · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one would transcend the sterile polemics surrounding the New Atheists and their antics, it could only be by a sedulous return to the sources in the early modern period that might throw light upon that most momentous transformation the religious world has witnessed in millennia, namely, the rise of a principled atheism during the heyday of the French Enlightenment. From ancient times there have indeed been sporadic thinkers who proclaim seemingly atheistic views – for instance, the traditional listing of Diogenes of Apollonia, Hippon of Rhegium, Protagoras, Prodicus, Critias, Diagoras of Melos, Theodore of Cyrene, Bion of Borysthenes, Euhemerus and Epicurus (though one has to take care that the attribution of atheism by the ancient scholiasts can be very ambiguous and could have little overlap with what we mean by the term today) – but one could scarcely say that they entered the mainstream of intellectual culture, as the obscurity of their names in comparison to guiding stars such as Aristotle and Plato attests (even Lucretius comes short of denying the very existence of the gods, though he discounts them as irrelevant to human affairs). Thus, the disbelief of modern times poses as an altogether unprecedented phenomenon. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it gained ground among the limited class of the learned but only in the twentieth did professed atheism become a mass phenomenon with the advent of Soviet Communism. Even in Western democracies, it is doubtful whether one can speak of religious faith being much of a factor after the so-called Great Awakening of the 1730’s. If we take our soundings from Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830, it is safe to say that by then in England at least, religious belief as anything more than a formality had become a dead letter, not only among aristocrats but also among commoners. For sure, since John Dewey in the early decades of the twentieth century, left-wing progressive thought in America has been defined by a conscious rejection of God, though the anti-theistic crusading zeal of the woke movement of late figures as a novel, albeit not entirely illogical or unexpected, departure – which we note but shall not attend to in the remainder of this review, for what excites our curiosity at the moment are its origins and not the ultimate fate of the atheistic mentality.

Thus, it has now been more than three centuries since religious belief held any prominence as an animating principle behind the progress of modern civilization – what is truly impressive, in view of the centrality of religion to the culture of all primitive, ancient and medieval societies! An event of such astonishing magnitude calls for rumination and an attempt at explanation, yet, for all its undeniable import in structuring virtually every aspect of the life of contemporary man, it will come as a surprise that comparatively little scholarly energy has been devoted to investigating the question of what may have brought about the birth of atheism as the predominant force informing the modern world.

Precisely this, however, has formed the signature of the career of the intellectual historian Michael J. Buckley, SJ, who in his well-received monograph At the Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale University Press, 1987) offers the educated public a feast of immense erudition and palatable scholarship, well written and critical in tendency yet the antithesis of cheap polemic. To paraphrase: he traces the origin and subsequent rise of atheism to the problematic situation prevailing in the sixteenth century when, in his judgment, religion conceded its intellectual bankruptcy by implicitly abandoning its spiritual patrimony, which underlay the supreme achievement of the patristic to medieval periods, in an attempt to engage a largely illusory foe, viz. militant atheism, on its own ground. Hence, Buckley draws an arc from Lessius to the French Enlightenment two centuries later, in which the contradictions inherent in this initial position manifest themselves and eventuate in the generation of what was so feared by everyone, a deliberate denial of God. Yet the trajectory was scarcely a direct one, for wasn’t the sixteenth century a time of religious renewal (in many quarters) and wasn’t the seventeenth century revolution in the natural sciences the product of the pursuit of a self-consciously theological agenda? So, Buckley has some work to do. In chapter two he investigates how his thesis plays out in Descartes and Newton, who dramatically alter the intellectual landscape with the introduction of a universal mechanics and the accompanying mathematization of physics. From here, it is but a short segue to Samuel Clarke in chapter three and to Diderot and the Baron d’Holbach in chapters four and five.

But chapter six is the most pertinent to us for here Buckley sets forth his dialectical argument, that is, an aetiological account of why given the constellation just portrayed, atheistic views could have acquired a force they never possessed before. For Buckley, the turn of the nineteenth century marks the ‘end of the beginning’, the characteristic feature of which being the final elimination of theology from physics (Laplace) – for in the seventeenth century, not only were all of the architects of the new mechanics deeply religious men; for them, theology grounds their cosmic imaginary (Charles Taylor) and what is more motivates the speculative metaphysical concerns that find realization in their physics itself (Amos Funkenstein). Two further major events in intellectual history set the stage for late modernity: first, Kant’s discrediting of metaphysics and displacement of the evidential ground for divinity to the sphere of practical reason; and second, Schleiermacher’s downplaying of objective dogma and replacement of it with the subjective feeling of utter dependence. Buckley:

This revolution in theological foundations elicited and fashioned its own correlative atheism….Whereas the theological appeals to nature had generated an atheism founded upon the adequacy of nature, similar calls upon human nature for theological assertions now generated the demands of Feuerbach, that human nature be recognized as infinite, of Marx, that it be freed from the social alienation wrought by religion, and of Freud, that it be free to live without these theological illusions. The atheism evolved in the eighteenth century was thus not to be denied by the strategies elaborated in the revolutions of Kant and Schleiermacher: it was only to be transported into a different key. Argue god as the presupposition or corollary of nature; eventually natural philosophy would dispose of god. Argue god as the presupposition or as the corollary of human nature; eventually the denial of god would become an absolute necessity for human existence. With Diderot and d’Holbach, a pattern had been completed….The nineteenth century would renew the question and reformulate the basis for argument as human nature, but it would repeat the pattern. [pp. 332-333]

This pattern prompts Buckley to a Hegelian retrieval of history:

The central meaning of any atheism is to be found, not in atheism, but in the theism of which it is the denial. The name, the definition and the referent for atheism are set by the going theism. The meaning of atheism, then, is always dialectical, that is, it emerges from its contradiction. But in this dialectical generation of meaning, more is involved. Each decision about the significance of god also settles new meanings on such systematically plastic terms as matter, world and human being. These loose and inherently ambiguous terms whirl kaleidoscopically around the central term and then settle into a new and coherent pattern. The term god collects and defines a host of words around itself. A determination about god and about atheism invariably involved the conferral of meaning on everything else, either as presupposition or as consequent. [p. 338]

Buckley responds to this circumstance under the rubric of the ‘self-alienation of religion’:

A critical self-contradiction developed within theology out of a decision about form….Lessius was neither the first nor the last Thomist to take for granted that (a) the denial of atheism was the same problem as that of the existence of God, and that (b) this latter was essentially a philosophic question, however much of a departure this might be from the organic structure and meaning of the Summa theologiae….By implication, this is to assert that religious experience or Christianity as such possesses nothing with which to engage this issue of the existence of god, that there are no specifically religious resources upon which theology might reflect and with which it might respond to the atheistic question. [pp. 341-342]

For Buckley, this must lead to a bracketing of Christology:

Discordant as the methods and systems of Descartes and Newton might be on so many issues, it is crucial to notice that they both continued to demonstrate a god known only by inference. One neither experienced anything of god nor discerned within oneself a pervasive orientation that could tell as theological evidence. One was informed of god from the outside – as one might be informed about the existence of the New World or deduce the corpuscular theory of matter. The conceptual, the objectifying, the reflexive deductions that lead to the assertion of god to account for any particular effect – all of these were not taken as secondary and reflexive objectivifications of a prior and personal involvement either in orientation or in experience. They were taken as the primordial and responsible religious awareness itself. [pp. 347-348]

There was an unrecognized progressive movement in this ongoing dialectic of content. In their search for proof of the divine existence, the theologians had shifted from the god defined by and disclosed in Christ and religious experience to the god disclosed in impersonal nature. [p. 350]

Malebranche failed to reverse the trend, in consequence of which resolution took the following form:

From Descartes was accepted the autonomy of mechanics from all alien principles, from any causes which were not mechanical. Newton was denied his theology, but his mechanics were admitted as universal; Descartes was denied his first philosophy, but the mechanical character of his principles eliminated the contradiction inherent in Newton. The synthesis of these movements left the hegemony to a natural philosophy become mechanics. The contradictions inherent in both were resolved in this new unity, a mechanics with only mechanical principles. The alienation in the previous conjunction of religious content with philosophic form was reduced by the disclosure that what had been thought religious was actually dynamic matter….In failing to assert its own competence, in commissioning philosophy with its defense, religion shaped its own eventual negation. [pp. 356-357]

Atheism is not the secret of religion, as Feuerbach would have it, but it is the secret contradiction within a religion that denies its own abilities to deal cognitively with what is central to its nature. Atheism is the secret of that religious reflection which justifies the sacred and its access to the sacred primarily through its own transmogrification into another form of human knowledge or practice, as though the only alternative to fideism were such an alienation, as though religion had to become philosophy to remain religion. The unique character of religious knowledge does not survive this reduction. Another discipline cannot be made more fundamental and religion its corollary or its epiphenomenon. Religion, with all of its intersubjectivities, cannot but be destroyed if dissolved into some other human experience in order to justify its more critical cognitive claims. Eventually, such a dissolution will out as atheism. This self-alienation of religion or of its theological reflection lies at the heart of the atheistic transition in the modern world. [pp. 359-360]

Is Buckley right, however? The historian must always be on guard against a would-be monocausal explanation of any great shift in history, but this does not exclude there being a predominant factor, or at least, necessary conditions for the change to occur at the pace that it does. What about late-medieval nominalism, which goes so far in evacuating the serene high medieval synthesis of faith and reason of its convincing power and in sowing the seeds of its ultimate destruction by turning God into an implacable and capricious cosmic tyrant? There is also the scholastic tendency to use theology as a pretext for doing physics (see Edward Grant’s history of natural philosophy), which, however beneficial to the rise of modern empirical science it may have been does downplay the personal element in spiritual life and in mystical theology. These observations are intended not to reject Buckley’s contentions, but merely to point to the co-presence of several other contributing factors he has not space to treat even in a tome as compendious as this one.

Anyway, the departure undertaken by religious apologists in the sixteenth century Buckley so deplores is understandable, after all, as reflecting an innate desire for objective grounds of proof: what was in the air, so to speak – the rationalistic tendency, leading to the great systems of the seventeenth century. We today have less confidence in the supreme office of reason to lay bare the inner workings of the world, having been humbled by a recognition of its persistent mysteriousness. Thus, the early modern rationalists represent the adolescence of mankind. But then one can discern a faint ray of hope in our coming to maturity, if handled in the right way: it need not mean that we simply resign ourselves and give up on the endeavor to comprehend reality, just that we ought to be modest, less assertorial and more reflective in going about our researches. About which more in a moment.

The great obstacle to such a turning would be the forgetfulness of being that accompanies the drive to technology. Consider the reductive interpretation of Anselm’s ontological proof that results from stripping it from its monastic context. Once it devolves into merely a game with words it loses almost all its persuasive force (vide how Bertrand Russell, in his youth, toys with and glibly dismisses the ontological argument, all the while having nary the faintest suspicion of what is at stake in the ascetical monastic way of life in terms of which alone it could make sense).

Is this fate inevitable and permanent? For one thing, merely to rehearse tired arguments accomplishes nothing. Yet, on the other hand, original thought entails returning to the sources and reappropriating them from a fruitful point of view, which becomes possible only when one respects them enough to be able to come to appreciate what their authors saw that we might since have lost sight of – otherwise, one winds up a Nietzschean last man! The key to learning to see again would be to retrieve the medieval symbolist mentality; cf. the closing Chorus mysticus in Goethe’s Faust:

Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist’s getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
[ll. 12105-12111]

Why does Goethe so allege? Attentiveness to the enigmatic clues disclosed through a disposition to view the surrounding world in symbolical terms attunes one to the deepest layers of what is happening in the world. A parable: as with ecology, one had to learn to appreciate the very existence of ecosystems (Alexander Humboldt) before they could become an object of study on their own right. To cut off one’s perception of the experienced world at any given finite level would be arbitrary, precisely what the atheist does when he clips his own wings by acquiescing in the great refusal to seek anymore a transcendental signifier.

The way out of this trap must involve a revival of aesthetics, as still potentially testifying in the innermost conscience of every man, however given he may be to concur in the dismal anti-gospel of cosmic meaninglessness. For indeed, beauty has suffered the fate of becoming the forgotten transcendental of being (Hans Urs von Balthasar). Who can remember it? One has to be pretty far gone and delivered up to a dissipated life of empty entertainment and pleasure-seeking to have lost altogether the purity of heart that listens to the quiet, though incessant promptings of truth and beauty. What we have in mind – to employ academic jargon – would be a formalist position inspired by the sixth-century Neoplatonist known as Pseudo-Dionysius that aims at a reinstatement of Plato’s exemplary cause.

Besides this, one could contemplate the crazy idea of turning upside-down the materialism of the Baron d’Holbach by making motion the key to a reformulation of the Thomist metaphysics of being (as, incidentally, is to be found already in Maximus Confessor, who figures as the last and perhaps the greatest of the Greek church fathers yet who is unjustly neglected these days both in the West and in the East). The time is ripe for a fundamental reassessment. At a deep level, the culture of modern man is defined by its uncritical acceptance of the mechanistic paradigm, some of the central elements of which have been called into question by the revolutions of quantum mechanics and chaos theory. But do we take mechanism itself seriously enough to push it to its limits or else satisfy ourselves with a plausible-sounding if mendacious reductionism? What many-body theory teaches – seconding what will be obvious in everyday experience, at any rate – rather is that there seem to be organizing principles that inform matter and endow it with a surprising capacity to take on a higher collective structure, as in the many exotic quantum phases of condensed matter that arise at low temperatures. For the physicists’ idea of an ‘effective theory’ raises anew the question, traditional ever since Aristotle, of what constitutes the unity of a being. The entities that enter into our physical models are, we know, in fact collections of many microscopic degrees of freedom. The relation between the dynamics at the different levels calls for profound investigation, which has not seriously been attempted thus far either mathematically or philosophically. The upshot would be what we may call, for want of a better term, a renewed ‘theology of creation’ in which justice is done to the form-giving role of transcendental beauty.

[Brendan Bernstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atheism transitioned from derogatory term to badge of honor to something in modern times many takes as a given? How...

- Atheism in a constant dialectical debate with theism, parasitic on the definition of God and what is theistic
- Cordoned off debate to natural philosophy instead of theology
- God had to be found in nature instead of something transcendent
- Descartes metaphysics --> God as "superstition"
- Newton universal mechanics --> God was "designer", the infinite ground, the space / extension
- Newton ultimately led to modern deism, the worship of natural forces as God. But deism is already a stone's throw away from atheism. If God is just forces, are there other ways to explain nature? Yes...
- Rise of materialism and "generative matter" displaced God as designer with matter
- Religion was already on shaky ground. Bloodshed in Europe + irreconcilable contradictions of Christianity left it vulnerable. The "man in the sky" projection offended Enlightenment sensibilities
- According to Buckley, without the concept of Jesus as divine -- God manifested in form -- his rejection is inevitable. Why? Because you're left with a God that's infinitely far away, but still just as demanding in his moral strictures. Almost like a totalitarian police state that you could never question or get in contact with. Of course this was rejected.
- Result: secular humanism. Humans are material, mechanical machines. Moral good reduced to pleasure. Complete atomization and flattening of all hierarchies.
- Rejection of God led to a complete inversion in society. Elevating the mayic, material plane to the highest Good and devaluing transcendence to the lowest.
- But what if they were looking for God in all the wrong places? In the cosmos and "matter" instead of at the heart of consciousness and each human being?
- Modern world you no longer even need to have "atheism" because there is no longer any theism.

[Samuel Cheung · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a word of warning, a cautionary tale for theologians. Beware that you do not become what you set out to destroy. If Christianity is a message of peace then it can only operate by persuasion, not by rational coercion.