Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (49 page)

And what a shocker it was! Religion, said the anonymous author, was born of ignorance and is full of “vain and ridiculous opinions.” Ideas of God are “silly,” and the clergy use those ideas to keep the common people in “deplorable blindness.” Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad were “impostors” who intentionally duped their followers with the equivalent of magic tricks. Even the existence of God was seriously doubtful.

The smoldering embers of debate created by the earlier clandestina burst into a bonfire when this mythical manuscript suddenly came to life.

But who wrote it?

My money (and the money of most of the historians who’ve weighed in) is on John Toland, an Irish philosopher and satirist. Toland was in his 20s and expressing suspiciously rational opinions at the time the “ancient manuscript” suddenly appeared. He was among the first to claim that he’d found a copy — I’m betting he was the very first — which he quickly disseminated to philosopher friends. And within a decade, Toland was writing one treatise after another attacking Christianity and questioning every religious assumption he could get his hands on.

If John Toland didn’t write
Three Impostors,
I’m the Pope.

Within a few years of its sudden appearance,
The Treatise of the Three Impostors
was the most widely read of the anonymous atheist documents coursing around Europe, setting the stage for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Expelling the Atheist: Shelley’s Necessity of Atheism

Even as late as the 19th century, blasphemy was still an actual, arrestable crime in England. Simply standing up in public and expressing the opinion that God didn’t exist could, and often did, get a person locked up.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was never one to hold back an opinion — and despite the laws against blasphemy, this included his opinion that God was pretend. While an Oxford student in 1811, Shelley wrote a strongly worded and well-reasoned pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism,” printed up a few hundred copies, and quietly scattered them around the Oxford grounds.

Just expressing an atheist opinion out loud was enough to set the wheels of British justice in motion at this time. But Shelley went beyond that, arguing (pretty convincingly, if you ask me) that atheism was a
necessary
position — the only one that could be reasonably held.

Shelley examined three types of evidence — human senses, human reason, and the testimony of others — dismantling each in turn as a valid foundation for belief. Having done so in under a thousand words, he concluded that atheism wasn’t just sound and reasonable, but the only real choice left standing.

In his one act of caution (possibly ever), Shelley left his name off the pamphlet, signing only “An Atheist.” No one who knew Shelley was fooled by this act; between the mastery of language and the sheer cheeky nerve of it all, every finger pointed right at the 19-year-old poet. Within the week, he was hauled in front of the wall of frowns that was the Oxford Council of Deans.

When one of the deans asked him point blank if he wrote the pamphlet, Shelley didn’t admit to it, but he didn’t deny it either. As a result, he was suspended from Oxford and sent home, furious.

Percy and his father (a Member of Parliament without the slightest sense of humor) couldn’t stand each other, and this latest development made things much worse. Without Percy’s permission, the elder Shelley worked out a deal with Oxford to let his son back in. Just one condition — Percy had to publicly renounce his atheism.
Oh, fat chance,
said Shelley, or probably something more poetic — at which point he was permanently expelled from Oxford.

This expulsion had such a devastating effect on his career that he was forced to settle for becoming one of the finest poets in the history of the English language.

Disguising Darwin’s Autobiography

In 1876, just a few years before his death, Charles Darwin jotted down a few recollections of his life. He mostly skipped over his biggest achievements, which were already well enough known. Instead, he focused on the development of his opinions and character, which made it much more fun to read. He barely touched on the writing of entire books but spent almost two pages describing his ingenious method for stealing fruit from trees as a child. (It
was
pretty clever.) So in these jottings, which eventually became his autobiography, you get a good look inside the private head of a man whose public work fundamentally changed what it means to be human.

Darwin finished the book, stuck it in a drawer, watched his grandkids play for another six years, and then died — at which point his son Francis began to think about what to do with the document.

The choice may seem obvious at first: He’s Darwin after all, and this was his autobiography, so you publish it, right? But Francis had to deal with two knotty questions, and the answers to these questions weren’t obvious:

Did Dad want it published?
In the first pages of the manuscript, Darwin said he was writing because he thought it may interest his children and their children to read it. He’d have loved to have such a thing from his own grandfather, he wrote, even if it was “short and dull.” So he decided to give his children and grandchildren a record of his own thoughts. But would he have wanted the rest of the world to see it?

If so, would he have wanted it
all
published?
Darwin included not just his scientific opinions, but also his religious ones — or should I say his
irreligious
ones — which were guaranteed to raise hackles if those opinions got out and started wandering the streets of Victorian England.

Most people familiar with the current cultural debate over evolution may think Darwin would have relished raising a hackle or three. But they don’t know Darwin. The man whose theory overturned the most cherished assumptions of the human race was actually a conflict-avoider of the first rank. After publishing
On the Origin of Species,
he retreated to his home to study orchids, leaving the pitched debate to friends like Thomas Huxley. Was this a man who’d want his religious opinions trotted out after his death?

If I were Francis, I’m not sure what I’d have thought.

When it came to religion, the path Darwin took was a really interesting one. He was so religious as a young man that he planned to be a minister. But a five-year voyage around the world as a naturalist on the
Beagle
brought a very different Darwin back to England. He put aside his plans for the ministry and gradually did the same with his supernatural beliefs.

The
Autobiography
gives a full, personal account of his changing opinions. He decided in the end that the Old Testament was “manifestly false” and to be trusted no more than “the beliefs of any barbarian.” He said that “fixed laws” and not divine will governed the world, and that all morality can be derived without reference to God. Disbelief crept over him slowly but was at last complete, he said, and he “never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct.”

Reading the manuscript after Charles’s death, his wife Emma — a deeply religious Christian — was worried about what would happen to his reputation if his views were known. Though there was no end to her penciled concerns, one passage especially troubled her. Charles wrote

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true, for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

Emma bracketed that passage and wrote in the margin

I should dislike the passage in brackets to be published. It seems to me raw. Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief — but very few now wd. call that ‘Christianity,’ (tho’ the words are there).

In all, Emma marked up nearly 20 pages of the document for deletion, telling Francis that his father’s true religious views must not be made public. In some cases, her edits precisely reversed what Charles meant to say. If you read this

I liked the thought of being a country clergyman . . . I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted.

. . . you’re likely to think Darwin remained a Christian. But the original passage told a different story:

I liked the thought of being a country clergyman . . . I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted.
It never struck me how illogical it was to say that I believed in what I could not understand and what is in fact unintelligible.

At first Francis disagreed strongly with his mother’s wishes, and for five years after Charles’s death,
the Darwin family nearly came to blows over it. They were on the verge of actually suing each other when Francis finally relented. He published his father’s
Autobiography
with his mother’s requested edits, leaving very little hint of Charles’s agnosticism.

So if it didn’t end up in the published
Autobiography
, how do modern readers know his real views? For that, another member of the Darwin family deserves the thanks — Nora Barlow, niece of Francis and granddaughter of Charles, who got her hands on the original in 1958, restored all the omitted passages and published Charles’s unabridged
Autobiography
for the first time with religious critiques and agnosticism intact.