HoP 499 Beyond Belief: Bayle, Toleration, and Atheism

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

This episode explores the emergence of explicit atheism in European philosophy through the works of Jean Meslier and Pierre Bayle. It examines

Key takeaways

• Meslier's 'Testament' presents a fierce anti-religious and anti-authoritarian manifesto, arguing that religion is a tool of oppression invented by rulers to control the masses.
• Bayle defends toleration not because he believes all beliefs are equally valid, but because religious disagreement shows no clear path to truth, making persecution unjustifiable.

Main topics

• The rise of atheism in early modern Europe
• Jean Meslier and his posthumous 'Testament'

Notable quotes

"I am hardly more than nothing, and soon I will be nothing." – Jean Meslier

"The fact that Christians disagree and fight amongst themselves is another strike against them." – Jean Meslier

Conclusion

This episode marks the beginning of a series on atheistic philosophy, highlighting how early thinkers like Meslier and Bayle

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:11) Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Beyond Belief, Bale, Toleration, and Atheism. Speaker 1 (0:31) Thanks to reactions I've received from listeners over the years, I know that quite a few of you out there think that all philosophy worthy of the name has to be independent of religion, or even anti-religious. Obviously, I don't agree. To my mind, religion has in fact provided the main historical and intellectual context for the development of philosophy in most times and places. Studying the history of philosophy without mentioning religion would be like studying swimming without mentioning water. But if it were true that serious philosophy can only be done by atheists, it would certainly have saved us a lot of time. We're on the cusp of reaching 500 episodes, and not a single one of them has featured an avowed atheist. Yes, there have been thinkers who had little or nothing to say about religion or the divine, but this was just because they had different interests or were cautiously steering clear of the topic. They didn't come out and explicitly deny the existence of God. Sometimes philosophers were accused of being atheists, but on closer inspection this usually meant that they had unorthodox conceptions of divinity, with the ancient Epicureans being a leading example. From antiquity, only a few stray counterexamples have reached us, with the most convincing case being a sophist named Diagoras of Melos, whose writings are lost but who was said in late antiquity to have been an out-and-out atheist. Apart from that, where would a history of explicitly atheistic philosophy in Europe begin? Probably right here, around the turn of the 18th century. We have a very ample work from the pen of Jean Messlier, a so-called testament, in which he excoriated Christian religion and denied the very existence of God. Ironically enough, he was a priest, a rather obscure one who, to all accounts, led a quiet and morally upright life. but the testament shows that behind this facade was an inner turmoil, even rage. He explains that he took holy orders to please his parents, but always hated carrying out his priestly tasks, particularly all the idolatrous and superstitious celebrations of masses and the vain and ridiculous administrations of sacraments that I had to do. This remark comes early in the text, and Messlier is just getting started. He provides an avalanche of arguments to undermine belief in Christianity. There's no reason to prefer it to other religions. For instance, other creeds, including the pagan ones, claim to be based on miracles like those performed by Christ. In fact, Christians are required to believe absurdities not found in other religions, like the dogma of the Eucharist, which amounts to idol worship, except that in this case, the idol is made of flour and water, rather than the stone and metal of pagan idols. If anything, then, Christianity is even less worthy of belief than other religions. The fact that Christians disagree and fight amongst themselves is another strike against them, and is typical of the way that blind faith leads to violence. As for the Bible, the Old Testament endorses the horrors of animal sacrifice and preposterously claims that God chose the Jewish people over others. which would be flagrantly unjust, while the Gospels are full of internal contradictions. This shows that the authors were not inspired by God and that they did not have enough reason or natural talent to know how to edit a story well. We might expect that Messlier would follow this with a more philosophical, rationalist account of God, like the deism that would be embraced by some in coming generations. And Messlier is certainly a rationalist. He says that his arguments are the fruit of long reflection using only the natural light of reason. But this light has revealed to him that God doesn't exist at all. Unsurprisingly, he invokes the problem of evil as the main argument that tells against God's existence. sarcastically remarking that Christians call God a father, but if so, then this is a father who has abandoned his children to all manner of suffering and evil. On the other side of the ledger, he's downright dismissive of arguments in favor of God's existence. His scorn is directed especially at the quietest thinker, Fenelon, and a work he wrote attempting to demonstrate God. Messlier wrote critical comments in his copy of Fenelon's treatise and takes aim at him here in the Testament as well. Against Fenelon's claim that the perfect design of the world shows that it has a perfectly wise creator, Messlier says that if perfect things need creators, then presumably this perfect creator would need a creator too, leading to an infinite regress. Instead, given that the physical universe clearly exists, why not stop with it? rather than positing imaginary invisible causes to explain what needs no explanation. Speaker 1 (5:10) This is all heady stuff, which is probably raising two questions in your mind. First, why have you never heard of this guy? And second, why wasn't he at least arrested if not put to death? Both questions have the same answer. Messlier was a bold and fearless thinker, but not so bold and fearless to publish these extravagantly heretical ideas in his own lifetime. Instead, near the end of his life, he wrote out three copies of his testament and left them for posterity. He professed to be unconcerned with his post-mortem reputation, ending the work with the bleak sentiment, I am hardly more than nothing, and soon I will be nothing. Thus his message was delivered only posthumously, but he clearly did want it to be received. The Testament often makes appeals to potential readers, calling upon them to abandon superstition and also rise up against the tyrannical political rule that he saw as inextricably linked to religion. The very idea of God was first invented by human