J.P.SOMMERVILLE

Beliefs and culture	Lord Herbert of Cherbury
Pierre Bayle	351-20

Philosophical Skepticism

	Descartes wanted to refute skeptics who said that true knowledge was impossible. He insisted that we could be sure of our own existence, and indeed deduce much more.
	But some thought that Descartes' attack on Pyrrhonism had resulted in only a Pyrrhic victory: on reading the Meditations it can seem that Descartes' doubts are more persuasive than his certainties.
	In England, William Chillingworth (1602-44) and Joseph Glanvill (1636-80) accepted many of the skeptics' tenets but argued that people could reach a reasonable certainty quite adequate for normal life.   Marin Mersenne Pierre Gassendi
	In France, Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) and Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), although themselves sympathetic to the skeptical tradition, argued that  precise scientific observation supplied useful, largely reliable information about the physical world.
	Philosophical skepticism reached its seventeenth century peak in Pierre Bayle (1647-1706). Bayle challenged the pretensions of human reason, as well as doubting the reliability of sensory data. He adopted the pose of being an ultra-orthodox fideist with such dry wit, that some people still believe he was a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church.

Religious skepticism

	Bayle combined philosophical skepticism with arguments designed to undermine orthodox Christianity.
	During the later seventeenth century the clergy began to lose its control of education and the political influence of the churches declined. In England, the efforts of Archbishop Laud to impose Anglican orthodoxy failed comprehensively in the 1630s, and during the 1640s and 1650s his Puritan opponents failed to create a godly commonwealth of saints. On the European Continent, the Dutch and Swiss Calvinist theocracies declined and even the Roman Catholic Church was forced to compromise in its struggle with Louis XIV over lay control.
	Old notions of Biblical authority steadily retreated before scientific advances. Luther had scoffed at Copernicus's moving earth because it contradicted Joshua, but the scientist has supplanted the Prophets in Sir Isaac Newton's epitaph: "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said Let Newton be! and all was light."   In the 1650s, Archbishop Ussher of Armagh confidently calculated the precise date of Creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BC. By 1681, Thomas Burnet in his Telluris Theoria Sacra, or The Sacred Theory of the Earth was tying himself in knots trying to reconcile Noah's Flood with Newtonian science and the embarrassing absence of evidence for a deluge within the last 6,000 years. In 1692, Burnet argued for viewing the story of a six-day creation "metaphorically," and promptly lost his job as clerk of the closet to William III.
	In 1655 in two Latin works (Systema Theologicum and Prae Adamitae) Isaac de la Peyrère called into question the story of Adam and Eve because of the difficulty or reconciling biblical chronology with the far more ancient records of Middle Eastern history.
	In France,the Catholic priest Richard Simon (1638-1712) published his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Critical History of the old Testament) in 1678. He used history and linguistic analysis to show that the text of the Old Testament was defective, and that Moses could not have been the author of its first five books (the Pentateuch). The French authorities seized as many copies of Simon's book as they could and destroyed them. Richard Simon's  book was republished in the Netherlands in 1685.
	Simon had tried to portray himself as a loyal Catholic -  arguing that pointing out flaws in the text of Scripture undermined Protestants' insistence that the Bible alone, independently of tradition or authority, was a perfect guide to faith. Jean Leclerc (1654-1736), a Swiss Calvinist, could not use the same reasoning, yet he conceded many of Simon's points.

Deism

	Thomas Hobbes and Benedict Spinoza also denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and painted a radically different picture of God from traditional Scriptural exegesis.
	Spinoza's God was indistinguishable from Nature; Hobbes' God was little more than a postulated "First Cause." Both Hobbes and Spinoza argued that where the Bible seemed to clash with reason, it must be reinterpreted in a reasonable way.
	During the seventeenth century, deism, the idea that religion could be deduced by the use of natural reason (rather than revelation) became more prevalent. One of its first advocates was Lord Herbert of Cherbury (ob. 1648). Cherbury argued that the essence of true religion lies in worshipping God in a morally upright way, in the hope of eternal rewards. He dismissed many of the ritual and supernatural aspects of religion as the machinations of greedy priests.
	Many of Herbert's ideas were repeated by John Toland (1670-1722) in his Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which aimed at showing that "true religion must necessarily be reasonable and intelligible." Toland inclined to pantheism, and like Spinoza, Toland denied that God ever infringed the laws of nature, "for miracles are produced according to the laws of nature, though above its ordinary operations."
	The deists' belief that God had created the world, but now played no direct part in its daily operations, leaving these to the Laws of Nature, fitted very conveniently with mechanical philosophy and scientific progress and became increasingly popular with Europe's educated elite.
	Deism dispensed with faith, revelation, and providence, and radically undermined the status of the clergy. It also banished angels and miracles from the world, along with demons, and with the Devil's other agents - witches.