l am loving Matthew Stewart's brilliantly written book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.
It demolishes the absurd oft-heard claims that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Yet it is difficult to summarize Stewart's arguments why this is untrue.
"Nature's God," which I'm about 2/3 through, is a complex blend of history and philosophy. It isn't enough to simply say that this country was founded by deists, not theists.
Yes, this is true.
But to understand the book's subtitle, "The Heretical Origins of the American Republic," not surprisingly requires Stewart to journey through a whole lot of philosophy, beginning with Epicurus in ancient Greece. He is an excellent writer and an amazingly skilled philosopher.
Still, my mind is regularly boggled, in a decidedly pleasant and stimulating fashion, as I make my way through the chapters.
So I figured that rather than trying to explain the book in my own words, I'd use the authors'. Here's a collection of quotations up through page 274, culled from my highlighting scheme.
The quotes do a pretty good job of summarizing Stewart's central arguments. But naturally many (or most) of them will leave the reader with as many questions as answers. Which is one of Stewart's main points: truth comes from active reasoned understanding, not passive revelatory faith.
Enjoy...
Although America's revolutionary deists lavished many sincere expressions of adoration upon their deity, deism is in fact functionally indistinguishable from what we would now call "pantheism"; and pantheism is really just a pretty word for atheism.
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In the universe as Lucretius found it, there is no heaven but the one we project on the stars overhead. There is no hell but what our imagination can conjure out of our fears of this world. And there is nothing at all outside of experience that can bring us any more happiness, misery, good, or evil than we can find within the limits of the world we inhabit.
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The bare outlines of the Epicurean philosophy are first discernible among America's revolutionary deists at this level, where the pursuit of happiness and true piety merge with the scientific spirit.
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The body, in short, is not an artifact of design but the outcome of a fortuitous natural process. Like everything else in the Epicurean universe, it is a kind of beautiful accident, the output of an algorithm that generates astounding complexity from the operation of a few simple rules.
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If "true piety" is just the contemplation of the universe, then there is no difference between the study of nature and the worship of God.
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Indeed, "Nature's God" was the presiding deity of the American Revolution.
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God, according to this conception, is the eternal this-ness of all things. It is the being-ness of beings, or the eternal being of all beings.
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While Spinoza and his successors ultimately ascribe our ignorance to the very lawfulness of nature itself, the common religious consciousness attributes it to the inscrutability of God's purposes and intentions, which is to say, the arbitrary or unlawful aspect of God's agency.
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Which is to say, in a manner of speaking, that nature is God's revelation, and science is the true theology.
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Radical philosophy attempts to show that nature itself contains a principle of infinite activity; that it is the real source of the enigmas we falsely gather under the name of God; and that it is the font of everything that we may value.
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To cut a long story short: "Nature's God," the God of Thomas Young and the presiding deity of the American Revolution, is another word for "Nature."
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In the infinite universe of Nature's God, "creation" and "Creator" refer to the same thing.
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Modernity exists because the soul does not.
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Our explanations of ourselves, all our cherished experiences of this or that time of day, our memories of last night's dinner, and our theories about the future of the universe and our place within it, all consist of ideas that explain one piece of the universe through another, while what we grandly call our conscious mind is just the string we tie around the bundle of ideas that makes each of us what we distinctly are.
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Belief is a matter of evidence, not choice.
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To perceive something is already to perceive a cause for our experience in the world, which is to have an idea. (When we see a desk, for example, we don't see a collection of sense data but an explanation for such a collection.)
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It follows that revelation -- a series of representations that we have no reason to hold true apart from our desire to believe in their truth -- is not a form of knowledge or consciousness or belief at all. It is simply the sign of a desire that must always be explicable through some other ideas. It belongs by its very nature to a mind that does not know itself and cannot be acting freely.
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But this is to suppose precisely what the radicals deny: that truth may take the form of a revelation, and that the freedom of the mind consists in its ability to choose what it will believe without reason or cause.
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The picture-theory takes for granted that the mind, by virtue of being "inside" of the "gallery," has a perfect grasp of itself before it knows anything about anything else. According to Spinoza, on the other hand, the mind is not "inside" anything. It is just another idea, out there in the world, that happens to explain or represent the activity of a particular body.
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Less technically, we could say that the mind of any individual is simply the theory that explains the behavior of that individual's body.
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On the whole, this radical view of the self gives flesh to the intuition -- obvious from experience yet previously withheld from science on the basis of common religious prejudice -- that mind and body are deeply interconnected and that the consciousness and self-consciousness that come with them are always matters of degree.
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According to radical philosophy, on the other hand, the body is an act of substance no less than the mind. Its activity is nothing other than the activity of nature itself, understood and expressed in a certain way.
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Eternal life means nothing other than this life, lived and understood in its most complete form.
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The traditional conception of immortality also takes for granted that the purpose of the afterlife is to resolve ethical problems across time zones: actions in this life receive their just consequences in the next. In the philosophical conception, however, eternal life stands only for the incompleteness of moral equations in this life, not as a term within those equations.
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From the analysis that Locke and Spinoza share to this point, it follows that freedom of the mind, properly understood, does not consist in the ability to affirm propositions without reason or cause, as the common view supposes. Rather, freedom is just the power of the understanding itself.
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Radical philosophy supposes that the long and arduous path to freedom passes through the continuous improvement in our knowledge of ourselves and of the entire universe around us.
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The obstacles this liberalism seeks to overcome are not whatever prevents us from clinging to what we wish to believe, but those that would constrain the questioning, the criticism, the search for evidence, and the conversation with others that might compel us to change our minds.
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A genuinely liberal political system likewise aims not to satisfy the existing impulses of the majority but to hold the actions of an entire collective accountable to reason.
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Genuine liberalism is at bottom a system designed to ensure that self-government among naturally passionate individuals takes place, as it must, through acts of understanding. It is both a republic of learning and a learning republic. In its ideal form -- never perfectly realized in any specific set of institutions -- it is a truth machine, and the purpose of its truths is freedom.
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Behind such historical judgments it isn't hard to detect the same, transcendental conception of morality writ large. Only righteous belief produces righteous leaders, the reasoning goes, and only righteous leaders can create a righteous system of government: ergo, the founders of this great nation must have been great believers. And if we have fallen on hard times, this can be only because we have lost our belief in the goodness of being good, our "religion." Yet the fact of the matter is that the history of ideas moved in exactly the opposite direction.
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The transcendental conception of morality is deeply flawed, even self-contradictory, a kind of hallucination conjured out of common misconceptions about the nature of self, mind, and freedom.
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The radical philosophy from which America's founders drew their ideas of virtue therefore set about to demolish and replace the common idea of morality. Radical philosophy says, in a nutshell, that virtue is happiness; that acts of understanding, not acts of faith, are the foundation of morality; and that the public good is nothing but the private good perspicuously understood.
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Belief in God, the soul, and otherworldly authorities offers only a simulacrum of morality, often quite at odds with the thing itself. Otherworldly religion is not the cure for nihilism but a symptom of it. It has nothing to do with good government: virtuous people are the consequence, not the cause, of virtuous government.
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Call this radical ethical philosophy the "immanent" conception of morality. It wasn't popular at the time of the Revolution and is far from universally accepted today. Yet it had influence enough at the time to make possible the creation of the American Republic, and it remains the best way to make sense of moral life.
Hi Brian,
I'm currently reading "Dances with Wolves", by Michael Blake, E-book edition in honour of the 20th anniversary of the academy award winning film.
Next I want to read David E Stannard's book - The Conquest of the New World, "American Holocaust".
"The European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world."
"What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians."
My heart connects to the indigenous people of this earth who were spiritually connected to the natural world and now so much has been destroyed.
Posted by: Jen | August 15, 2015 at 05:44 PM