Feuerbach and Theology

Abstract

The first form of atheism is an inheritance from the skepticism of Hume, though one rather suspects that it is the common distillate of the thought of both rationalists and empiricists who were skeptical in matters religious. But undoubtedly Hume gave it classical expression, perhaps nowhere more succinctly than in the eleventh essay of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where he suggests the foolishness of trying to establish theistic religion on principles of reason. Specifically, the grounding of particular events in particular providence and let us remember that no doctrine was held in higher esteem by the common heritage of traditional theism, to which men as diverse as Calvin and Leibniz had given expression in the early modern period is a purely speculative notion that really explains nothing. As Hume says, We can never be allow'd to mount up from the universe, the Effect, to Jupiter, the Cause; and then descend downwards, to infer any new Effect from that Cause.... The knowledge of the Cause being deriv'd solely from the Effect, they must be exactly adjusted to each other, and the one can never point towards any thing farther, or be the Foundation of any new Inference and Conclusion.2 The thrust of this comment is much the same as Laplace's famous remark to Napoleon that he had no need of the theistic hypothesis. In a universe made up solely of specific items and movements, the hypothesis of a divine cause for particular events explains nothing. Indeed, the hypothesis is meaningless, and were we to use the metaphor God is in connection with this point of view, we would have to say that he is dead only in the sense that he never lived in the first place.