Near the Line

This series follows people who did not believe in a God who knows and cares about human beings. Some of the most famous critics of religion in history stopped short of that line. They attacked churches, scriptures and clergy, they were called infidels and atheists, and some of them went to prison for what they wrote, but in their own words they kept a God who hears, judges or rewards. This chapter tells their stories briefly. They belong to the history of unbelief even though they did not share it, and the people in the rest of this book read them, argued with them, and in several cases went further than they did. A last section turns to a different kind of nearness. It is about scientists and writers of our own time who, in a sentence or two, set themselves outside belief, or very close to its edge, but who have said too little about it, over too short a record, for a chapter of their own.

Voltaire: "I die adoring God"

Voltaire spent fifty years attacking the authority of the Church, and he was often called an atheist. He was neither an atheist nor, in the end, a doubter about God. As a young man of twenty-seven he wrote, in a poem meant only for a friend, that he could not worship the cruel God of the creeds.1 What replaced that God was a creator known by reason. "My reason tells me that God exists," he wrote to the young Frederick of Prussia in 1737, "but it also tells me that I cannot know what He is."2

His war was against what he called "l'infâme", the persecuting Church. In 1762 he signed a letter to d'Alembert with the order to crush it, and in the same paragraph said that he respected and loved the Christian religion; it was superstition he meant to destroy.3 The next year, after the Protestant merchant Jean Calas had been tortured and executed at Toulouse, he wrote the Treatise on Toleration: the right of intolerance, he said, was "the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs."4

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shook his faith that all was for the best, but not his God. His poem on the disaster ends: "The wise deceive me: God alone is right."5 When his friend Baron d'Holbach published The System of Nature in 1770, an openly atheist book, Voltaire objected to "the audacity with which it decides that there is no God."6 The line most often quoted from him, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him", comes from a poem of 1769 addressed to the author of an atheist book, and Voltaire meant it as an argument for God.7 On 28 February 1778, three months before his death, he wrote: "I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition."8

Thomas Paine: "I believe in one God, and no more"

Paine's Age of Reason attacked the Bible as a human book, in plain English, and it cost him his reputation in America. It opens with a creed: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."9 He wrote the first part in Paris in 1793, with the Terror around him, and he later gave his reasons. One was that his friends "were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off"; the other was that "the people of france were running headlong into Atheism", and he had the book translated "to stop them in that carreer."10 Christianity itself, he wrote, was "as near to atheism as twilight is to darkness."11

In 1797 Paine and five families founded a society in Paris whose members believed in God and in the immortality of the soul, and his opening address named the two enemies of religion as "Fanaticism and Infidelity, or that which is called atheism".12 Religion, as he defined it in the second part of the book, was "the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character", and he rested on it, he said, "all my hopes of happiness hereafter."13 Answering Samuel Adams's charge of infidelity in 1803, he asked: "do you call believing in God infidelity?"14 His will of 1809 begins by "reposing confidence in my Creator, God, and in no other being."15

His readers went further than he did. Richard Carlile went to prison in 1819 for publishing the Age of Reason, and Paine's biographer Moncure Conway judged that Carlile went in a deist and came out to find England's freethinkers generally atheists.16 Charles Bradlaugh called the book "the culminating blow which the dying eighteenth century aimed at the Hebrew and Christian records", and Robert Ingersoll said it "did more to undermine the power of the Protestant Church than all other books then known."17 Carlile, Bradlaugh and Ingersoll each have a chapter in this book.

Robert Taylor: "In my heart and soul a Deist"

Robert Taylor was a surgeon who became an evangelical Anglican priest and, by his own count, "did most entirely believe the gospel" for six or seven years.18 The bitterness he saw among the religious parties drove him out; he gave up his living at Midhurst "as soon as I had learned my A, B, C, of Deism."19 He told a Unitarian who tried to win him that if he could only believe that a dead man came to life again, Christianity would hold no other difficulty for him.20

In 1824 he became chaplain of a society founded for "the public worship of Almighty God", and by 1828 he was arguing that Jesus had never existed.21 In 1826 a member of Parliament, hearing his petition to swear his oaths on "the Works of Nature", called his case "nothing short of Atheism."22 Taylor denied it. Tried for blasphemy in 1827, he told the jury: "I am not an Atheist; I am not a Christian; neither am I a hypocrite. I am in my heart and soul a Deist," and "I sincerely believe in God—in the common God and Father of us all."23 His defence was an argument for free discussion: "that which no man had had liberty to deny, no man could have reason to believe."24

He spent a year in Oakham gaol, where he wrote The Diegesis, and after his sermons at the Rotunda in 1831, two more years in Horsemonger Lane.25 Eighteen years later the sixteen-year-old Charles Bradlaugh sent the Diegesis to his vicar, and lost his home over it.26 Taylor himself later practised as a surgeon at Tours, and died in 1844; a hostile obituary said he had returned to the Church, and accounts of his end differ.27

Abu al-Ala al-Maarri: "Not misdoubting the Creator"

The blind poet of Maarrat al-Numan in Syria wrote some of the sharpest lines against religion in any language. "They all err," he wrote, "Moslems, Christians, Jews, and Magians; / Two make Humanity's universal sect: / One man intelligent without religion, / And one religious without intellect."28 He called the rites of religion "a cheat contrived by men of old", and told his reader to consult his own understanding, "for every understanding is a prophet."29 In 2013, during the Syrian war, his statue in his home town was beheaded.30

Yet the same poems confess "belief in One God and the avoidance of evil actions."31 He said he had no knowledge of what comes after death, but in another poem he told his readers that he would pass away "not misdoubting the Creator", and asked them to "pray and give alms as long as ye live."32 His translator R. A. Nicholson judged him "a firm monotheist ... not indeed an atheist, but wholly incredulous of any Divine revelation".33 Whether the pious lines were his conviction or a shield has been argued since his own lifetime; he once wrote that he lifted his voice "to utter lies absurd," while the truth was spoken softly.34 On the evidence of his own words, read as they stand, he kept a God who was owed prayer, and so he stands just outside this book's line.

Six more who came close

Elizabeth Cady Stanton rejected the authority of the Bible over women and, in old age, published The Woman's Bible (1895–98). She did not believe, she wrote, "that any man ever saw or talked with God."35 But she read the first chapter of Genesis as a creation in the image of "the Heavenly Mother and Father", and defended her book as showing "a more worshipful reverence for the great Spirit of All Good than does the Church."36

Matilda Joslyn Gage, Stanton's ally, wrote in Woman, Church and State (1893) that the Church was the great obstacle to women's freedom. But her quarrel was with the Church for having lost "the incorporeal and spiritual", not with God; her book ends by looking for "something deeper, holier in religion".37

Omar Khayyam, the Persian astronomer, is known in the West as the poet of doubt. His own prose, though, prays in a believer's words: "It is God whom we implore in every state; he is our refuge."38 The quatrains that doubt the afterlife were first quoted against him more than ninety years after his death, and the collections that bear his name grew larger with every century; his translator E. H. Whinfield doubted that many of them were his.39

Giulio Cesare Vanini, a former friar, was burned at Toulouse in 1619 as an atheist. His own books defend God and Providence. In one he set out the argument that religions were made by the stars and the priests, then had his own speaker say he had "silently detested" such arguments all along.40 At his trial he picked up a straw from the floor and argued from it that nature proves God; the historian Gramond thought he did so from fear, not conscience, and called him an atheist.41 Whether Vanini believed what he wrote cannot now be known; what he wrote affirms God.

Abu Bakr al-Razi, the Persian physician who ran hospitals in Rayy and Baghdad, is remembered, through the book his Ismaili opponent wrote against him, for arguing that reason was enough and prophets unnecessary. In his own account of his life, though, he described philosophy as becoming like God so far as a human can, and affirmed a merciful Creator and reward and punishment after death.42

Abdullah al-Qasemi, born in Najd in 1907, wrote fierce defences of Wahhabi orthodoxy in Cairo in the 1930s, then broke with it in These Are the Shackles (1946), a book in which he still described himself as trying to be a believer in God, His messengers, His books and the Last Day.43 His later books, written in exile in Cairo and Beirut, put God himself on trial. But in the preface to one of them, in 1963, he explained that by "god" he did not mean the creator of the universe, the giver of life and reason, but the tyrants, idols and unjust orders that men ascribe to God; his own faith, he wrote, had no limits, and he did not doubt God.44

What they handed on

None of these people believed what the rest of this book's subjects came to believe. But almost every unbeliever in the following two centuries learned from them. Paine taught Carlile, Bradlaugh and Ingersoll that the Bible could be read as a human book and answered in plain English. Voltaire taught the next generation that a church could be laughed at and fought in public; Vissarion Belinsky preferred his blasphemies to the authority of religion.45 Taylor's prison book set Bradlaugh on his way. What they would not do was take the step their readers took, which was to say that the God behind the order of nature, if there is one, does not know or care that we are here.

Four who said little

Peter Higgs (1929–2024), who predicted the particle that bears his name, called himself an atheist when he was asked about it, and not otherwise. At first, he said in 2007, he disliked the nickname "God particle" because it might needlessly offend religious people;46 by 2013 his objection was the opposite one, that it fed confused thinking in people who already took the creation story literally.47 In 2012 he said that science and religion could live together for anyone who was not dogmatic, that science had weakened some of the old reasons for belief, and that Richard Dawkins, in attacking fundamentalists, had become something of a fundamentalist himself. His own unbelief, he suggested, owed more to his family than to physics.48 That is almost all he said.

Brian Cox (b. 1968), the physicist and broadcaster, answered "No" in 2010 when asked whether he had ever believed in God; he remembered a few weeks of Sunday school that he gave up because he disliked getting up early.49 In 2016, speaking to Catholic clergy in Leeds, he said that he had no personal faith but would not call himself an atheist, because he disliked labels that sort people into camps, and that he rarely thought about religion unless asked.50

Brian Greene (b. 1963), another physicist, has never called himself an atheist or an agnostic. In 2011 he said that he felt no need for religious explanation himself, but that a Spinoza-like reverence for the order of nature was beyond science's reach, and that his own manner was less confrontational than the New Atheists'.51 In 2020 he said that the universe holds no ultimate purpose waiting to be found, that whatever follows death is probably nothing, and that religion should be valued for community, ritual and comfort rather than judged as a source of facts.52 He stands as close to the line as anyone in this chapter, on either side of it.

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), raised in a Philadelphia household steeped in Hebrew learning but, as he put it, Jewish in culture rather than religious,53 has refused to say whether he is an atheist or an agnostic, on the ground that nobody can tell him what he is supposed to believe or deny.54 He called himself a child of the Enlightenment who tries to avoid irrational belief, and said in 2020 that he knew of no reason to believe in an afterlife or in divine justice.55 He criticised the New Atheists for ridiculing beliefs that matter deeply to people: it was not his business, he said, to lecture a mother who hoped to see her dying child in heaven.56

Footnotes

  1. Voltaire, Epistle to Uranie ("Le Pour et le Contre"), 1722, a letter not intended for circulation, as described by Joseph McCabe in his introduction to Voltaire, Toleration and Other Essays (New York: Putnam, 1912). ↩

  2. Voltaire to Frederick, Prince Royal, Cirey, October 1737, in Voltaire in His Letters, tr. S. G. Tallentyre (London: John Murray, 1919), p. 48. ↩

  3. Voltaire to d'Alembert, 28 November 1762, Correspondance, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), t. 42, p. 293: "écrasez l'infâme" and "pour la religion chrétienne, je la respecte et l'aime comme vous." ↩

  4. Voltaire, Treatise on Toleration (1763), "Whether Intolerance is of Natural and Human Law," in Toleration and Other Essays, tr. McCabe (1912). ↩

  5. Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756), in Toleration and Other Essays, tr. McCabe (1912), in McCabe's blank-verse version. ↩

  6. Voltaire to Prince Frederick William, Ferney, 28 November 1770, in Voltaire in His Letters, tr. Tallentyre (1919), p. 233. ↩

  7. Voltaire, "Épître CIV, À l'auteur du livre des Trois Imposteurs," Œuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1877), t. 10, p. 403: "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer." Dated 1769 by Beuchot. ↩

  8. S. G. Tallentyre, The Life of Voltaire (London: Smith, Elder, 1903), ch. XLIII, p. 530. ↩

  9. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I, ch. I, in The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway, vol. IV (New York: Putnam, 1896), p. 21. ↩

  10. Paine to Samuel Adams, 1 January 1803, in Writings, ed. Conway, vol. IV, p. 205. ↩

  11. Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I, ch. XI, in Writings, ed. Conway, vol. IV, p. 49. ↩

  12. Paine, discourse to the Society of Theophilanthropists, 1797, in Writings, ed. Conway, vol. IV, p. 236; Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. II (New York: Putnam, 1892), pp. 254–55. ↩

  13. Paine, The Age of Reason, Part II, in Writings, ed. Conway, vol. IV, p. 167. ↩

  14. Paine to Samuel Adams, 1 January 1803, in Writings, ed. Conway, vol. IV. ↩

  15. Paine, will of 18 January 1809, in Writings, ed. Conway, vol. IV, p. 508. ↩

  16. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. II, p. 424. This is Conway's judgement, not Carlile's words. ↩

  17. Charles Bradlaugh, "Heresy: Its Utility and Morality," Theological Essays (London, 1895), p. 59; Robert G. Ingersoll, "Thomas Paine" (1870), The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (Dresden edition), vol. I, p. 152. ↩

  18. Robert Taylor, letter from Oakham gaol, 1 February 1829, in Richard Carlile, ed., The Lion, vol. III (London, 1829), p. 180. ↩

  19. Taylor, same letter, The Lion, vol. III, pp. 180–81. ↩

  20. Taylor, in The Lion, vol. II (London, 1828), p. 593. ↩

  21. Trial of the Reverend Robert Taylor ... upon a charge of blasphemy (London: J. Carlile, 1827), p. 13; Taylor, note signed Oakham Jail, May 1828, in Syntagma (Boston reprint), p. 3. ↩

  22. Sir E. Carrington, House of Commons, 29 November 1826, Hansard, vol. 16, col. 174; Taylor's petition at col. 177. ↩

  23. Trial of the Reverend Robert Taylor (1827), p. 12. ↩

  24. Trial of the Reverend Robert Taylor (1827), p. 16. ↩

  25. Taylor, The Diegesis (London: Richard Carlile, 1829), dedication and ch. XVI; for 1831, A. G. [Alexander Gordon], "Taylor, Robert," Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LV (London, 1898), pp. 462–63. ↩

  26. Charles Bradlaugh, The Autobiography of C. Bradlaugh (London: R. Forder, 1891), pp. 7–8. ↩

  27. "Mr. Robert Taylor," obituary, The Gentleman's Magazine, new series vol. XXII (1844), pp. 550–51, which its own errors make unreliable; Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LV, p. 463. ↩

  28. Al-Maarri, Luzumiyyat, tr. R. A. Nicholson, "The Meditations of Ma'arri," in Studies in Islamic Poetry (Cambridge: University Press, 1921), p. 167. ↩

  29. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, pp. 173, 172. ↩

  30. France 24, 14 February 2013. ↩

  31. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, p. 165. ↩

  32. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, pp. 178, 170. ↩

  33. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, pp. 164–65. ↩

  34. R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge: University Press, 1907), p. 319. ↩

  35. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Revising Committee, The Woman's Bible, Part I (New York: European Publishing Company, 1895), pp. 11–12. ↩

  36. The Woman's Bible, Part I, pp. 20–21; Part II (1898), pp. 7–9. ↩

  37. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State (1893), pp. 11, 526, 543. ↩

  38. Omar Khayyam, preface to the Algebra, in F. Woepcke, ed. and tr., L'Algèbre d'Omar Alkhayyâmî (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1851), pp. 4–5: "C'est Dieu que nous implorons en tout état, c'est lui qui est notre refuge." The English is ours. ↩

  39. E. H. Whinfield, tr., The Quatrains of Omar Khayyám (London: Trübner, 1883), pp. xv–xvii. ↩

  40. Giulio Cesare Vanini, De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis (Paris, 1616), p. 390. ↩

  41. Gabriel Barthélemy de Gramond, Historiarum Galliae ab excessu Henrici IV libri XVIII (Toulouse, 1643), Book III, pp. 208–10. ↩

  42. Al-Razi, al-Sira al-falsafiyya (The Philosophical Life), Arabic text on Wikisource (edition not named); the argument against prophecy is known only from his opponent Abu Hatim al-Razi's A'lam al-nubuwwa, as modern scholars report it. ↩

  43. Abdullah al-Qasemi, Hadhihi hiya al-aghlal (Cairo, 1946), in the Cologne reprint (Al-Kamel Verlag, 2000), p. 353; Jürgen Wasella, Vom Fundamentalisten zum Atheisten (1997), Arabic translation (Beirut, 2011). Both in copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  44. Al-Qasemi, al-'Alam laysa 'aqlan (Beirut, 1963), preface, pp. 6–8. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  45. Vissarion Belinsky, letter of September 1841; see the chapter on Belinsky. ↩

  46. Ian Sample, "The god of small things", The Guardian, 17 November 2007. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  47. Decca Aitkenhead, interview with Peter Higgs, The Guardian, 6 December 2013. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  48. Pablo Jáuregui, interview with Peter Higgs, El Mundo, December 2012; reported in English in The Guardian, 26 December 2012. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  49. Interview with Brian Cox, The Observer, 7 March 2010. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  50. Mark Woods, report of Brian Cox's address to the Leeds diocesan clergy conference, Christian Today, 9 September 2016. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  51. Interview with Brian Greene, Oxonian Review 15.6, 4 April 2011. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  52. Interview with Brian Greene, The Guardian, 6 February 2020. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  53. Hassan Mirza, "In conversation with Noam Chomsky", part 3, The Express Tribune, 17 January 2020. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  54. Noam Chomsky, with Lawrence Krauss and Sean Carroll, "Science in the Dock", Science & Theology News, 1 March 2006. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  55. David Barsamian, Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with Noam Chomsky (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1992); Mirza 2020. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

  56. Mirza 2020. In copyright; paraphrased. ↩

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