Atheism during the Age of Enlightenment
Atheism, as defined by the entry in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, is "the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world.
Michael J. Buckley describes the rise of toleration, and of atheism itself, as a response to religious violence in the preceding years: the expulsion of the Huguenots from France, the Spanish inquisition, the witch trials, the civil wars of England, Scotland and the Netherlands.
Buckley argues that "religious warfare had irrevocably discredited confessional primacy in the growing secularized sensitivity of much of European culture.
Marisa Linton, however, points out that it was a common conception that religious diversity would lead to unrest and possibly civil war.
[9] Republican radicals like Henry Stubbe, Charles Blount and John Toland understood religion as a social and cultural institution, rather than as transcendent principles.
Because France was an absolutist monarchy in which the king was seen as ruling by divine right, it was generally thought that French people had to share his religious views.
The "acceptable face" of toleration was essentially the mainstream view, the freedom of worship and peaceful coexistence of different churches.
This movement was shaped by the lesser-known figures of d'Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet, and, in particular, Spinoza, who provided the heart and soul of this faction.
[citation needed] The Dutch Jew Spinoza argued for individual freedom to express personal beliefs, while discouraging large congregations unless they belonged to a somewhat deistic idealized state religion.
Jonathan Israel summarized his position, that anti-toleration laws were engineered "for personal advantage but also at great cost to the state and the public", and that they exacerbated religious conflict rather than diminishing it.
Martin Fitzpatrick credits him with making a "powerful contribution to the way philosophes would wage war on intolerance and superstition".
[19] Although he wanted to diminish the influence of Spinoza, Bayle was treated in a similar fashion by the Huguenots of the United Provinces, who saw him as a dangerous thinker and a potential atheist.
He vehemently denied the atheists' right to toleration since they did not believe in a god, practiced no recognizable form of worship, and were not seeking to save their souls.
[21] The vast majority of eighteenth-century writers, like Locke, had no interest in granting religious tolerance to ideas that deviated from the core of revealed religion.
Opponents tended to conflate the views of those who wrote in favour of toleration under the heading of dangerous anti-orthodoxy and atheism, despite their radically differing viewpoints and confessions.
"[27] Louis Dupré describes deism as "the result of a filtering process that had strained off all historical and dogmatic data from Christian theology and retained only that minimum which, by eighteenth-century standards, reason demands.
[29] Although Masonic literature referred sporadically and vaguely to a "Grand Architect of the Universe", their secretive practices made the religious affiliation of each Freemason a matter of speculation.
Jacob argues that "there is a streak of freethinking or deism that turns up at moments in the history of Continental Freemasonry right into, and especially during, the 1790s.
However, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spinoza's name was often associated with atheism, freethinking, materialism, deism, and any other heterodox religious belief.
It is, he wrote, "a very likely possibility that some men without religion are more motivated to lead a decent, moral life by their constitution, in conjunction with the love of praise and the fear of disgrace, than are some others by the instincts of conscience.
According to Dupré, Diderot concluded that if one abandons "the unproved principle that the cosmos must have a beginning"[39] then the need to establish the "efficient cause" of creation is no longer a problem.
[42] Despite claims that the salon was a hotbed of atheism, there seem to only have been three convinced atheists in regular attendance: D'Holbach, Denis Diderot and Jacques-André Naigeon.
Kors summarized some of the basic themes of these three texts as the idea that rigorous materialism was the only coherent viewpoint, and that "the only humane and beneficial morality was one deduced from the imperatives for the happiness and survival of mankind.
[44] The article "Athées" is primarily concerned with refuting Bayle's assertions, insisting that atheists "cannot have an exact and complete understanding of the morality of human actions".
