While it may be hard to understand now, the most frightening aspect of a godless world was not godlessness itself; it was what remained after God was gone: soulless humans who seemed little more than machines living in a world that was potentially determinist, where all future events were preordained, not by an omniscient deity, but by a set of mechanistic rules.52 Such was the dark side of the joyous impiety that Diderot preached. Part of this threat may explain why Philosophical Thoughts is not a work of straightforward atheism.
