How to be a Puritan Atheist

um in the last lecture in this series we were looking at what most people in the pre-modern world thought when they thought about unbelief that is the angry rejection of religious orthodoxy whether that anger was because as the preachers tended to imagine unbelievers was such a depraved people that they longed for any excuse to sink themselves into debauchery or whether as seems to have been as common in reality because these were people who were fired with righteous anger at a religion which seemed to them to fall short of true morality and that was mostly a story of angry young men and in the way that angry young men tend to that's the story that grabs most of our attention it's also perhaps not as serious a threat to christened him as it was taken at the time I'd it was certainly unnerving if some people withdrew from the great religious struggles of the day and started sniping from the sidelines but the outcome of a battle is rarely determined by the deserters the story that I want to tell you today is a different one it was happening at the same time it attracted much less attention it's emotional register was different it wasn't driven by anger but by anxiety and as I'll try to show in this lecture and in the next one it was much more consequential let's begin with John Earl the English satirist future Bishop who in 1628 published a character sketch series of character sketches but this particular one was of a character whom he called a skeptic in religion now his audience would have known what to expect when they saw that headline a blasphemous scoffer an incestuous libertine boasting above hit of his contempt for God but actually driven by his own sinful lusts but no Earl's skeptic turns out to be an agonized vasa later someone he says who would be holy a Christian but that he's something of an atheist or holy an atheist but that he's partly a Christian his whole life is a question this is somebody who changes his mind each time he reads something new he dips his toe into an opinion Earl says like a cat dipping its paw into the water pulling it out again he compares this peacemaker to this person to a hapless peacemaker trying to intervene in a duel who ends up being shot by both sides but however tentative he might be this sceptic bridles of any talk of obedience or submission he's so paralyzed by the possibility of being wrong that he'll never settle on anything as right and he says he finds doubts and scruples better than he resolves them he always has some argument to non-plus himself the least reason is enough to perplex him the best won't satisfy him and his central critique of this man's indecisiveness is that he is wondrous loathe to hazard his credulity while he fears to believe a miss he believes nothing now I think this fictional portrait is onto something I'm not very much interested in the reasons and arguments that this skeptic spent his time wrestling with that's a layer of froth his turmoil is emotional before its intellectual never mind the theological knots look at the mood of agonized indecision but in one important sense I think Earl's character is misleading because like the blasphemers and Libertines we met last time he's an adult male of apparently independent means the real figures behind this caricature came from all social classes from across the age range and they include a striking number of women on her deathbed in 1601 an English gentlewoman was asked whether she did believe the promises of God or no and in her answer she quoted one of the favorite one of the most quoted biblical verses of the age mark 9 verse 24 lord I believe help my unbelief that prayer could be a banal or a momentous sentiment the Bible's witnessed that belief and unbelief aren't opposites but could coexist will impart the greatest Protestant theologian of Elizabethan England warned that these two thoughts there is a God and there is no God maybe and are both in one and the same heart and if any of his readers were tempted to reassure themselves that they had never had in themselves any such thought as this that there is no God Perkins warned them that if they weren't crying out to God to overcome their unbelief then perhaps that showed that their unbelief had already overcome them this wasn't a new problem but it wasn't newly a cute one the Reformation had begun as an argument about the meaning of the word faith Protestants loaded more weight than than ever onto that word the problem was sharpest for Protestants who didn't belong to tightly organized and disciplined churches the ones that exercised systematic discipline over their their church members so forcing believers to be responsible for policing their own faith and that was a situation which applied above all in one country the kingdom of England which by the seventeenth century had become home to a strain of obsessively introspective religion distinguished by contortionist feats of self-examination and its chiefly the English story that I'm going to be following in this and the next lecture not because England was unique it wasn't but because its peculiarities let us see this case particularly clearly because at the centre of this intense religion is a problem of unbelief let me explain it starts with a particular form of doubt this is doubting whether or not you as an individual have been predestined by God to be saved to go to heaven so the question is not is there a God but has God saved me asking that question was regularly described as a form of atheism John Donne distinguished between what he called the presumptuous atheist that believes no God and the melancholic atheist that believes no jesus applied to him so somebody who believes in Christ simply denies that they themselves are among the saved in John Bunyan's the holy war the city of man's soul is assaulted by captain incredulity and an army of doubters and in this army the resurrection doubters and the glory doubters who deny the immortality of the soul in the existence of heaven what we might call doubt fight alongside the election doubters and the vocation doubters who deny that you yourself have been chosen or called to salvation now this might seem perverse but the rationale was that to deny that you have been saved is to disbelieve God's promise and we find real cases of this a penitent whom we know only by her initials I G described how after some months of fearful despair she tried to take comfort in the Bible's promises of God's mercy but she found that words on a page even on a sacred page weren't enough to still her in her struggles she wrote I was tempted to think that it wasn't the Word of God but my own word and it's not clear whether that's because she ultimately believed more in her own worthlessness than she did in Calvinist doctrine or because she simply didn't dare to let herself hope but her sufferings are positively transient compared to Hannah Allen's Hannah Allen was a teenager in the 1650s who went through a period of despair in which she was convinced that she was going to be damned after her husband died in 1664 her Agony's returned worse than before she considered suicide she repeatedly seriously self in the end the fog gradually lifted from her she ascribed that to God's mercy into the passage of time but what I want you to notice is that during her struggles her family repeatedly tried to persuade her to believe and trust in God's mercy and she refuses to do it once she heard a thunderclap and she told her aunt that that was a message from God saying that she was damned the ant said surely not the Bible gives no precedence for God working in miracle in order to convince somebody of their damnation but Allen wasn't going to be reasoned with my answer to her was to say my condition is unparalleled then yeah this has never happened before there was never such a one as me since God made any creature either angels were men nor never will be to the end of the age and at first she worried that she'd committed the so-called sin against the Holy Spirit of the mysterious unforgivable sin mentioned in the Gospels but pretty soon she concluded that sin is for amateurs my sins she says are so great that if all the devils and damned in hell and all the reprobates in earth were comprehended in one man minor greater there's no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my condition as that I am the monster of the creation and she tells us that she delighted in thinking this way because she was tempted to give up all for lost and to close with the devil and forsake my god what really seems to have tormented her during this time or her fleeting glimpses of hope better to find cold comfort in certainty and to fall back on the devil who at least never turns away customers she wouldn't let herself entertain the unbearable thought that God's mercy might be real and so in this case doubting her own salvation has indeed metastasized into a thorough denial of basic Christian doctrines it's a vicious circle you fear that your dad and so your faith wavers and because your faith wavers you become even more convinced than you must be damned in the 1640s a formerly pious London teenager named Sarah white suffered four years of spiritual Agony's and as she recalled I could see nothing but hell and Roth I was as desperate as ever was any I felt myself soul and body in fire and brimstone already and now from that agonized conviction it was only a short step to wonder if there was no other hell but that which I felt at least that held out the hope that death might bring an end to her sufferings and on that basis she attempted suicide several times thinking that if I made myself away then there was an end of my misery and that there was no god no heaven and no Hell but then the fact that she has such thoughts convinces her that she must be damned already for an unbeliever another woman who again we only know by her initials MK wrestled with her fears of damnation and she felt as if the devil was saying this to her why does that trouble thyself take that pleasure do what thou likest I shall never be called to account for anything for as the wise man dieth so dieth the fool and both rest in the grave together there is no God to save thee or punish thee all things were made by nature and when their diets there is an end of all thy good and bad deeds if you're desperate then unbelief offers a get out of hell free card but in this case as in many of them she only makes it half way she became convinced that there was no heaven no God no Jesus no good angels only a hell there was and devils to carry me do the ordinary religious practice can't survive these kinds of Agony's Hannah Allen said she couldn't even bear at the sight of a book because books meant Bibles she once knocked a book out of her own child's hands in distress in 1640 at the sixteen forties a mrs. Drake another godly gentlewoman convinced that she's damned told the minister who came to reason with her that she would neither pray nor read the Bible nor ever go to church again since her damnation was certain she said she was resolved to spend the remainder of her time in jollity and merriment denying of herself no worldly comforts so in fact she's found a religious reason to be irreligious or again Luke hound apprentice shoemaker in the 1650s suffered lengthy spiritual Agony's eventually he thought to make merry over it and to take my fill of the world with all that I could enjoy there oft it tries to forget God and to pursue worldly prosperity Richard Baxter the Worcestershire minister who's one of the most popular humane pastoral theologians of the age sorrowfully recalled a school friend who had been intense in his piety and devotions but had then taken to the bottle and had despaired at his own sinfulness and eventually Baxter remembered his conscience could have no relief or ease but in disowning the teachers and doctrines which had once restrained him and he fell away from his faith even if that wasn't your experience then months on end staring at an implacable decree of divine condemnation might stir up the thought that God's justice isn't all that it's cracked up to be Hannah Allen who we met before reported dreadful temptations to have hard thoughts of my dearest Lord respectable gentle women aren't supposed to be angry with God but when such acute sufferings are mixed with relentless sermons about God's power and God's justice well how can they not be now these florid outbreaks of suicidal despair are not the norm in this period but I think they are Canaries in the mine some people suffered but peculiarly acutely from these sorts of anxieties but even the most most robust Souls couldn't keep clear of it altogether John Bunyan remembered how as a young man he had noticed some unexpected thoughts that came stealing upon me it began slowly but after a hotel few only a few weeks he remembered whole floods of blasphemies both against God Christ and the scriptures poured upon my spirit to my great confusion and astonishment these blasphemous thought blasphemous thoughts were such as stirred up questions in me against to the very being of God and of His only Son as whether there were in truth a god or Christ whether the Holy Spirit Holy Scriptures were not rather a fable and cunning story than the holy and pure Word of God again what I want you to notice isn't so much the substance of his worries but the mood these suggestions as he calls them did make such a seizure upon my spirit and did so over weigh my heart that I felt as if there were nothing else he compared the way he struggled against them to the way a baby might struggle with a kidnapper that is he spirited noisy and completely unable to resist it recalled he remembered like it felt he remembered like a relentless assault and it lasted for about a year and he's in good company 17th century diaries and autobiographies and correspondences are full of references to risings of atheistic thoughts temptations that there was not a god this horrid temptation to question the being of God one Northamptonshire gentlewoman wrote it came questioning into my mind of the truth of god seeing many would show a reason in nature for almost everything this temptation came many times unto me Richard Baxter the Worcestershire pastor we met a minute ago recalled that as a young man the tempter strongly assaulted my faith especially to question the certain truth of the sacred scriptures and also the life to come and immortality of the soul those who suffered these kinds of shameful assaults instinctively concealed them I was troubled one woman wrote about her adolescent temptations to unbelief but I couldn't acquaint any with my condition for I didn't think that it was so with any other as it was with me another teenage girl who was beset by what she called tempt that there was no God feared that nobody else had ever had such appalling thoughts I thought my estate to be singular she wrote and that I should hear books and balance cried of me about the streets but in fact when she finally poured out how distressed to her aunt the older woman was able to reassure her from her own experience in the like case doubts like these weren't discussed openly especially not in front of children but they weren't rare either ministers discreetly advised their flocks about how to deal with them the minister's advice and the sufferers testimony agreed on one crucial point that these were doubts that had been thrust unwillingly into people's minds by the work of the devil now modern readers tend to just dismiss that kind of claim I'm not asking you to believe it but I do think it's a really revealing testimony for a couple of reasons first of all it tells us that these narratives these stories we've been hearing are a literary genre they're a bit like the modern genre of narratives of recovery from mental illness and like that genre they suffer from survivorship bias in this period if you lose your temptation your battle with temptation was doubt you don't tell your story what makes temptation so indispensable for narrating these crises is that it's a distancing technique if these terrible thoughts are temptations then you aren't to blame for them they're the devil's work their enemy propaganda that shouldn't be listened to there are bombardment the only response that's required is endurance and resistance but this language of temptation also seems to reflected these people's experiences doubts crapped upon them unawares seeping to the surface or erupting without warning at the least this ever-present language of temptation tells us that although this phenomenon is pretty widespread it's not a movement or a party of any kind if these doubters learned their doubts from other people they're not conscious of having done so I found no accounts of people being tempted into unbelief by others or blaming other people for it the recurrent fear that nobody else had ever had such terrible thoughts no doubt reflects a sort of felt absence a sense of God's absence but it also suggests that most of these doubters reached their doubts without outside assistance in which case what did trigger them well two specific issues recur constantly in these narratives the immortality of the soul and the inspiration of the Bible people who thought that they were serene in their faith might be struck suddenly by unexpected doubts when death struck somebody near them after all whatever doctrines you believe there's no denying that death looks very final and the Bible is a specifically Protestant problem all the Protestantism doctrine of authority is compressed between the covers of that one book and that's a difficult job of containment at the best of times in the 17th century it was made harder by the accumulation of minor textual puzzles and problems as the biblical scholars are beginning to turn up it was starting to look as if the exact text of the Bible might be unknowable that maybe only a move from a hundred percent confidence to ninety-nine percent confidence but as anybody who works with critical systems knows 99 percent confidence is sometimes an intolerable level of risk these apparently minor concerns were like chisel taps on a case of dynamite they threatened to blow the whole thing open one Puritan scholar recorded spending one Sunday in 1653 being sadly assaulted with doubting whether ever word of the scripture were infallible because of worries about variant versions of the text ordinary readers could be forgiven for concluding that since the scholars disagree certain knowledge of God's Word beyond their reach maybe beyond anybody's reach so whenever you sat down to read your Bible you couldn't be quite sure that that's what it really is that it really is the word when I'd read the Word of God Our Lady MW that the same initials as the gent above a different person she said when I'd read the Word of God the devil tempted me with doubts and questions touching some things were in whether it was truth or not this thought is a wood worm eating away at the crossbeams of your faith what makes these thoughts so insidious is that they frame the problem in a way that makes it insoluble no faith can be ventured until all traces of uncertainty has been banished trying to argue the problem away only makes it appear more complicated and therefore worse and this leads into a series of other equally corrosive thoughts maybe the Bible is a trick maybe it's a fraud being played on us by the powerful there are so many different Christian sects to choose from how do you know which one is true if any what about the other religions in the world now these questions could be answered preachers are very confident that they can answer them but however neat your answers are you can't silence the questions but amid all these anxieties which seem to have drawn these people into unbelief it's worth noticing one supposedly perennial problem which didn't the classic problem of suffering it had been a truism since ancient times still is today that worldly suffering can break Christians faith by making them question how a good God can permit such terrible things all I can say is I have found virtually no evidence of real people actually being troubled by this train of thought or being led into unbelief by it in 17th century Christians were sometimes angry with God because of their sufferings but that's not unbelief in an age which was far more intimately acquainted with every day suffering than ours is an age when barely half of children lived to adulthood and when the best form of pain relief available was brandy we simply don't find evidence that suffering was producing loss of faith at least not worldly suffering but if we widen a lent the lens of it the picture changes all major Christian denominations in this period taught that much of humanity probably the vast majority would eventually endure an eternity of torment in hell sufferings to which no pain in this world could possibly compare preachers enthusiastically used this to scare sinners into repentance but if your conscience is already tender then you might well find that this threat would paralyze or even unhinge you with dread John Bunyan remembered that as a child he was so overcome with despair of life and heaven that I should often wish that there had been no hell if you've given up on the hope of heaven then the idea of mortal ISM that the soul dies with the body is much more appealing than traditional Christianity for example look at the case of Ludovic and Moulton who eventually went on to found a rather eccentric sect known of course as the Mogul Toni ins which I like to imagine that was a name lurking somewhere in the back of JK Rowling's subconscious when she started writing um before his sectarian days in the religious turbulence of London in the 1640s muggle s'en moved fretfully from church to church increasingly convinced that I must needs go to hell he tried hard to persuade himself that there is no God but he couldn't do it his intuition revolted at the notion but a different hope crept up on him even if there is a God maybe there's no immortal soul I was in Good Hope at that time he said that there was nothing after death he persuaded himself of this for three years he had a great deal of peace of mind in this condition he said I thought if I could but lie still in the earth forever it would be as well with me as if I were in a turn happiness I cared not for heaven so I might not go to hell but then one day in 1651 his long suppressed belief in eternity came flooding back his arguments against immortality suddenly felt flimsy to him he cast around desperately he even thought that since there have been so many millions of people since the creation he might be lucky enough to escape the final judgement due to a sort of kind of administrative oversight God may forget me and not raise me again then I shall lie still and be quiet but he couldn't cling to this straw and he unwillingly desperately acknowledged the truth of eternity as it happened that crisis didn't last long because that same night he began to receive revelations and began his career as a prophet and naturally his sect abandoned the traditional concept of hell it's a rather individual solution but the problem is all too common there's one plain example that I know of of an English Protestant who was tempted to abandon his faith because of worldly suffering who said he was this comes from an even more unusual individual Thomas drone was a meditative riddling poet priest who quietly discovered deep wells of peace within himself in the mid 17th century but as you'll expect by now he was also tempted to unbelief and on one occasion he tells us he reasoned with himself along these lines if there be a god certainly he must be in finishing goodness so how comes it to pass therefore that I am so poor of so scanty and narrow a fortune in doing enjoying few and obscure comforts I thought I couldn't believe him a god to me unless all his power were employed to glorify me in other words the classic problem of suffering but the key detail is that this supposed incident happened when Trahan was 4 years old and if he's alone in having doubts sparked by suffering he's certainly not alone into falling into doubt as a child a lot of the accounts that I've already mentioned come from teenagers a pioneer of navigation and surveying name bridge Norwood recalled that he was aged about seven when he fell - reasoning about whether there were a god as so often it began with questioning his own salvation adults gave him offhand assurances that God loved him it felt flimsy he began to read the Bible in earnest eagerly shared his scriptural discoveries with his parents but when he did so they made me little answer but seemed rather to smile at my childishness upon which and like occasions I doubted whether things were really so as I conceived them or whether elder people didn't know them to be otherwise only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play and thus today theism show shrewd man as they grow up all children learn that they've been mistaken or lied to about a great many things when they're told about their invisible God the thought is this true must sooner or later have crossed the minds of many most all children our adult wrestlers with doubt may have been surprised by the strength of the southern temptations they met but they will most likely have discovered and overcome unbelief of this kind in themselves before now obviously these anxious doubters aren't bold pioneers of free thinking if they're atheists they are reluctant even horrified ones they were drawn despite themselves into entertaining thoughts that they wished would go away and this is because they saw these temptations as irrational one serving made confessed that I am darkened in understanding and I am tempted to believe that there is no God the darkening and the temptation are part of the same story these insistent thoughts might pretend to be reasonable but the plain fact was they contradicted everything that all the wisdom of the new to be true these people were tempted to atheism in the same way that we might be frightened of flying with our rational minds we know that a plane is not going to fall out of the sky but that's not much help when you sit pale knuckled through a nasty bout of turbulence when they're able to gather their thoughts these people know that there is a God that the Bible is His Word that human souls are immortal maybe these truths were counterintuitive but plenty of truths are mathematical theorems for example these people knew what was true but like most of us they struggled to hold on to what they knew and you can see this pattern in the way they fight back against these temptations the first resort naturally enough was to argument to remind themselves why these superficially plausible doubts in fact made no sense from their perspective I'm not going to go into the barrage of arguments that they mobilized I just want to notice the overall shape of that battle the attack on atheism in this period wasn't a drilled precise philosophical assault it is a chaotic indiscriminate charge by enthusiastic disorganized volunteers who are blindly confident of victory the former bishop Martin father B's 1622 book a Theo mastix took over two hundred thousand words to lay out his case but it's only a beginning according to the structure he lays out in the introduction the published text only covered the first sixteenth of the total argument that he plans to make mercifully death intervened before he could write any more spotting such a colossal white elephant on the battlefield should alert us to the fact that these arguments are not seriously intended to persuade people or to clinch a victory these aren't opinions which have changed anybody's mind they tend to be throw away debating points or auxiliary rationalizations used to bolster convictions that people have already reached by other means and indeed it seems that arguments against doubt weren't all that effective the abstract thought that there were arguments for faith was comforting the arguments themselves not so much Bunyan's testimony of his struggle with doubt is typical he says sometimes I've endeavoured to argue against these suggestions but alas I quickly felt when I've us did such arguing's would return again upon me anyone can argue the toss with temptation if you're a few of us can reason it into silence wiser heads knew that those who were tempted to unbelief grew sicker by seeing the medicine indeed there is a fair amount of testimony that reading arguments against atheism could actually disturb people's faith rather than settle it veterans of this battle with temptation agreed that since unbelief was irrational remember there's little use in bombarding it with rational arguments anyway to argue as somebody who's with somebody who's as quick-witted as the devil is as a fool's game better to change the subject persist in the faith and wait for God to bring the storm to an end the biblical exemplar here is doubting Thomas who doubted but continued faithfully to keep company with the other apostles until his doubts were brought to an end one radical preacher put it this way says the way to be warm isn't to ask for a pheasant only to ask for a fire or whether there be a fire or no or to wish for a greater but to stand close to that fire that there is and to gather heat the idea was to treat broken faith like a broken limb to set it in a rigid cast of conventional pious practice and hope that it would eventually heal well sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't for example receiving Holy Communion could powerfully strengthen people's faith we've got plenty of testimony of that didn't always work in the early 1640s a young man named Richard Farnsworth took his first communion after weeks of preparation trembling with terrorists unworthiness hoping to receive assurance of grace but after I after I'd received he said I sat and waited in expectation to end myself to receive some divine operation and spiritual change to receive assurance of the pardon of sin but none came in and he dwelt on this alarming emptiness it was then that I saw that it was not the body and blood of Christ but a carnal invention trying to jumpstart your faith by going through the motions could end up just draining away whatever life that was left in it the most powerful weapons against this temptation - unbelief weren't trite rationalizations or these techniques of self manipulation but arguments that combined logical force with emotional punch the two key arguments of this kind are summed up by John Milton God he said has imprinted so many clear signs of himself in the human mind point one and so many traces of himself throughout all nature point two that no sane person can be unaware of God's existence beneath all the throwaway debating points these are the convictions that appear to have worked that storm-tossed believers could use to bring themselves back to an even keel let's start with the second of his two points they appeal to nature in the created order obviously this is a classic rational argument for the existence of God but it's more than just that it's important to realize that in this period it's intellectually compelling it's almost unanswerable at this point but what makes it so powerful is that it doesn't just seem logically true it's also intuitively true as one anti a theist asked in 1634 what man is there that beholding the frame of this world may not perceive that there's a God it seems obvious to everybody another anonymous woman who reported a period of wrenching temptation and doubt we've heard these accounts before describes how she rose early one morning and went up into the highest room that was in the house she sorely tempted to leap to her death and she looked forth of the window to if I could see God of course she didn't but instead I beheld the trees to grow the birds to fly the heavens how they were hanged and all things that were before me and then I thought they could not make themselves for this woman this was a turning point of course the existence of trees and birds and stars was not neuter wasn't it with this this is news what was new was the emotional impact that their intricate Majesty had at that moment of raw ulnar ability another girl who was tempted to atheism tells us that the Lord was pleased to obviate that temptation by my meditating on the creation especially on the flowers in her father's garden in which she beheld God's curious workmanship the mood of that is karma but that sense of or in this case intertwined with her love for her father is the same so what begins as logic can end his worship to go back to Thomas Trahan in his meditations he described how from his infancy the wonder of creation had enraptured him and had filled him with curiosity as a small boy he remembered my soul would be carried away to the ends of the earth and my thoughts deeply engaged with inquiries now the ends of the earth isn't a figure of speech the problem vexed him what's at the edge of the world is is there a wall surrounding it or or or a cliff did heaven he thought come down to touch the earth so near that a man with difficulty could creep under and what's beneath the world's other pillars dark waters and if so what's me then he knew that none of these guesses were adequate but he couldn't puzzle it out at last somebody told him the answer and its simplicity and beauty surpassed any of his speculations little did I think that the earth was round that moment of astonished discovery has been shared by generations of children but if were to believe him young Trahan was a little more unusual in drawing a theological lesson from it when he understood the truth when this light on for him I knew by the perfection of the work there was a God and was satisfied and rejoiced people underneath and fields and flowers with another Sun and another day pleased me mightily but more when I knew it was the same Sun that served them by night that served us by day in the modern age the majesty and strangeness of the cosmos still has a powerful emotional tug but that tug in our own times has usually been towards atheism rather than towards theism of course neither of those two emotional reactions is correct Terron simply reminds us how different the same facts can appear to different eyes one of the most thoughtful meditations on the natural worlds role in this dance between belief and unbelief is found in a 1625 treatise by a minister named Thomas Jackson Jackson agreed that the natural world refuted atheism less by persuading the mind than by refreshing the soul with what he called the pleasant spectacle of woods and shady fountains he even suggested that unbelief might be seasonal he says our apprehensions of the true God as creator have a kind of spring when he renews the face of the earth more likely to believe in God in the springtime I don't know how we could test that claim but it doesn't seem to me to be a ridiculous one his point is that unbelief isn't a form of rational skepticism it's what he called a spiritual madness a kind of melancholy he believed the doubts would be settled not by philosophical dispute ation but by turning unbelievers attentions to their own hearts so that as he put it they might behold the image of God in graven in them in other words Milton's appeal to the witness of nature in the end brings us back to his first his most fundamental point that the human mind itself testifies to God at the root of everything is this appeal to inward experience every discussion of this subject comes back to this it's it really we find again and again claims like it's engraving in all hearts that there's a deity God is to be felt in every man's conscience the being an attribute of God were so clear to me that he was not to my intellect what the Sun is to my eye if you dig into every argument that anxious believers used to persuade themselves back to faith sooner or later this is what you find that they know there is a God because they just know like all fundamental truths this one is self-evident and you either see it or you don't maybe you can laborious ly construct a proof to demonstrate the fact but the project is as ridiculous as one writer said as trying to enlighten the Sun with a candle if God's being is utterly self-evident then the subject just can't be debated I mean where do you begin it's no accident that the analogy of the Sun in the sky is so often used what can you do with somebody who denies that it's there other than to pity their blindness and from this perspective it was logical to treat unbelief as an anomaly a monstrosity some anti atheists suggested that maybe our sins blind us to God on the principle that moral and intellectual corruption are linked for a convenient approach a more extreme version of the same argument wondered whether atheists are really human that's not just abuse it's a logical solution to the puzzle of how somebody could maintain something that's so obviously false trouble is if you can't see it if all that you can make out above you were dark skies then none of this is any comfort the heart of the question is why during the 17th century did people who knew all the arguments that there is a God stopped finding God's reality intuitively obvious why did people who knew on one level that the wind wouldn't disappear from under their wings begin to be gripped with an unexpected fear of falling I find one fretful Puritan wrote that the clearest arguments that can be can't persuade my heart of belief in the being of God if God don't let the beams of his glory shine in why is it that those beams of glory become to be obscured I trace this back to the anxiety and intensity of Protestant piety the way it makes doubt a part of everyday religion the despair with which a great many of these people wrestled could easily shade into doubts of various kinds whether because God's mercy seemed too good to be true or because his justice seemed too terrible to be contemplated and the the tendency that Providence have to start intellectual arguments that they have no means of bringing to an end doesn't help by its nature debate is open-ended and although it pursues certainty that certainty vanishes like a mirage but this emerging crisis of faith in this period is not in the end an intellectual one the problem of suffering which is the you know the most evergreen rational argument against Christianity doesn't seem to have had much purchase the rational doubts that were cited you know whether the Bible's to be trusted whether there's an immortal soul these were nothing new they've been around for centuries the Protestant Reformation hasn't made Christians ask these questions for the first time instead it's taken doubts that had been suffuse through the culture and it's distilled them it's mobilized doubt as a weapon and encouraged ordinary believers to do the same for fighting between the different communities in the hope that they'll make their way through to a reflective and an experienced faith rather than a simple and trusting one but that journey was a dangerous one individual believers were compelled to confront their doubts to ask on exactly which foundation their long professed beliefs actually stood it brought unbelief out into the open and did so quite deliberately on the principle that you should keep the devil where you can see him and so the implicit doubts that had long pervaded Christendom become explicit of course the aim of this wasn't to turn believers into unbelievers it was to turn naive believers into sophisticated self-aware believers who'd confronted temptation and overcome it and very often it worked but becoming a sophisticated believer was neither as simple nor a controllable transformation the process had costs and it had casualties and it had consequences these doubters often paralyzed by despair and anxiety may not sound like they were likely to affect very much a virtual change but in fact some of those who faced up to these doubts and managed to rebuild their lives afterwards became the leading challengers of the religions of their day as a result they didn't see themselves as atheists quite the opposite but in fact it was these earnest wrestlers with doubt more than anyone else who despite themselves laid the foundations for modern unbelief and that's the story that will pick up in the next lecture thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 46,180

Rating: 4.8901958 out of 5

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, alec ryrie, religion, divinity, atheism, christianity, protestant, catholic, history, religious history, puritan, 17th century history, GOD, John Earle, William Perkins, John Milton, Bible

Id: SsNu6VbtdyE

Length: 47min 51sec (2871 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019