At the Origins of Modem Atheism
Morris, Thomas V.
BOOKS A door that proved most narrow In one novel by Peter De Vries, a small-town pastor and the village atheist debate the existence of God on a public stage, and each of them is converted to the...
...This is the lesson which can be gleaned from the story of modern atheism that Buckley details...
...Cosmological or teleological arguments based on facts about the physical universe do not provide a broad enough or deep enough case for the God of the Christian faith...
...The problem, as Buckley sees it, was this: Newton and Clarke, as well as many others like them, developed a natural philosophy, a physics, essentially secular in nature, and then presented inferential arguments to the existence of an eternal, necessary, self-existent, intelligent First Cause of nature as the proper grounding of religious belief...
...Buckley begins this learned essay in the history of ideas by pointing out that what atheism amounts to is determined directly by the precise form of theism that is being denied...
...The dangers of apologetics, however, are well known, and well documented...
...Then denied religion in order to be true to its mechanical nature...
...Anthony Collins, the friend of John Locke, once even went so far as to say that had it not been for the Boyle Lecturers' annual demonstrations of the existence of God, few people would ever have doubted it...
...In his book on modern atheism, Michael J. Buckley draws our attention to what he considers to be an extremely important and instructive example of mis...
...DENISE LARDNER CARMODY is professor and chair of the Faculty of Religion at the University of Tulsa...
...One of her most recent books is How to Live Well: Ethics in the World Religions (Wadsworth...
...The intriguing philosophical work now beginning to appear on such topics as the Incarnation, the Trinity, sin, and atonement shows that it is not philosophy that is inimical to Christian faith, but only an overly narrow approach to philosophy...
...Proper risk management in this vital area requires not the avoidance of philosophy, but rather only the avoidance of incautious and narrowly delimited philosophical claims...
...The seeds of this denial Buckley interestingly, and controversially, sees as having been sown by a number of Christian thinkers who had endeavored to provide rational arguments in favor of a theistic vision of the world...
...By making theism an inferential gift of an otherwise secular natural philosophy, Christian thinkers of that time inadvertently misrepresented the true grounds of their faith and played into the hands of those who preferred to decline this particular gift...
...It has been true that Christian philosophers too often have talked and written as if they were merely theists and not first and foremost Christians...
...Religion protested that it could not speak for itself...
...A good example of this, according to Buckley, is provided by the work of Isaac Newton, and following him, Samuel Clarke...
...That only philosophy could argue for it...
...Newton went so far as to say "I am compelled to ascribe ye frame of this System to an intelligent agent...
...The humor in this is, of course, obvious and manifold...
...The Enlightenment atheist denied Christ and the God of Christian theism...
...The danger is that in specifying a precise argument or range of arguments, the Christian apologist always abstracts from the deep richness of his or her own religious experience and vision, and from the ongoing spiritual realities to be met with in the church, and thereby risks presenting a misleading picture of the true grounds of belief...
...For such Enlightenment figures as Denis Diderot and Paul D'Hol-bach, matter itself came to be seen as the eternal, necessary, self-existent origination of the current world system...
...But in the last few years, this has begun to change dramatically...
...Philosophy spoke, and its final word was no...
...And, following Newton's lead, Buckley shows how Clarke went on to develop arguments of his own in support of theism, a form of argumentation which he presented in the first of the famous series of Boyle Lectures in natural theology...
...According to Buckley, a form of argument rose to prominence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the defense and recommendation of belief in God which actually came to have the unanticipated opposite result of leading to the rise of modern atheism...
...Then became the only grounds for religion...
...Only certain philosophers, and theologians, are capable of that...
...And this was the beginning of all the trouble...
...The commensurate evidence with which the divine existence is asserted or denied must include both the external presence of the saints, of religious culture, or of Jesus, and the internal orientation of human beings toward the ultimate, the sacred, or the absolute...
...Yale, $27.50, 445 pp...
...The difference between theism and atheism was then made to seem as if it were no more than an issue over whether, a certain inference to the existence of an intelligent cause of the world is compelling, or whether, on the contrary, matter-in-motion can itself serve all our explanatory needs...
...Thomas V. Morris throughout Europe...
...Lessius was of the persuasion that the issue of the existence of God is a philosophical issue rather than a theological or religious one, Buckley explains...
...As the question is primarily religious, so the religious experience of human beings provides evidence that cannot be supplanted by something else...
...The very appeal of religion had generated its own denial...
...It is Buckley's contention that at the origins of modern atheism, religion turned to philosophy for its defense, and philosophy betrayed it...
...Debate is rarely so dangerous...
...And the popular apologist C. S. Lewis at one time admitted that no doctrine of the faith ever seemed to him so spectral or unreal as one he had just successfully defended in a public debate...
...Rational argumentation is seldom so existentially efficacious...
...In his basic emphases, I think Buckley conveys some insight, although I am not happy with everything he says...
...He views modern atheism as largely having sprung into existence in the eighteenth century, and as having molded its own identity not on the simple pattern of ancient pagan thought, but in contradistinction to the specifically Christian theism which had dominated Western culture for centuries, and which had provided the theological fuel for so many religious wars and persecutions AT THE ORIGINS OF MODERN ATHEISM Michael J. Buckley, S.J...
...But arguments can have effects, and sometimes powerful effects mat are not anticipated...
...Buckley begins tracing out these connections with the work of Leonard Les-sius in the seventeenth century, who launched an apologetic strategy that would come to dominate in the modern world...
...Buckley says: Religion had entrusted itself to philosophy...
...And there is no sense in which philosophy, as an intellectual enterprise, could itself betray religion...
...But in the process of doing so, they provided thoroughly secular categories of thought which could be extended in purely naturalistic ways to avoid any postulation of God at all...
...Thomas Aquinas to draw only on such knowledge as believers and unbelievers share in common...
...The past half century of philosophy of religion witnesses to this...
...In an effort to correct this direction of apologetic argument and to offer an alternative, Buckley states that: REVIEWERS THOMAS v. MORRIS is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and author of several books including The Logic of God Incarnate (Cornell...
...After detailing many of the concerns, problems, and results of Newtonian mechanics, Buckley displays how methods internal to Newton's procedure led him to postulate the existence of One "very well skilled in Mechanics and Geometry" who is creatively responsible for the world system as we find it...
...The greatest Christian intellectuals of the time began to present purely philosophical arguments for the existence of God which made no reference to anything distinctively Christian, but which purported in the manner of St...
...Philosophy first subsumed this task...
...Theists such as Newton in England and Descartes in France had made available natural categories of thought which could be used to construct the atheist's alternative world-view...
...The arguments deployed in defense of religion were of such a nature as to stimulate the development of the atheistic alternative...
...BOOKS A door that proved most narrow In one novel by Peter De Vries, a small-town pastor and the village atheist debate the existence of God on a public stage, and each of them is converted to the other's position...
Vol. 115 • January 1988 • No. 2
