The German Genius

that many traditions were actually nowhere to be found in the scriptures. The Bible also came under more systematic criticism when it was shown that the original Old Testament had been written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, meaning the scriptures could not have been dictated to Moses by God: the Old Testament was not “inspired.”
    As more and more people began to lose faith in the Bible, the calculations of the earth’s age based on the scriptures lost support also. The new science of geology suggested that the earth must be a great deal older than the 6,000 or so years it said in the Old Testament, and Robert Hooke, at the Royal Society in London, observed that fossils, now recognized for what they were, showed animals that no longer existed. This too suggested that the earth was much older than the Bible said: these species had come and gone before the scriptures were written. This had implications for the significance of the Creation.
    The effect of all this was to produce a world where the very nature of doubt (or the reasons for it) was itself always changing. In fact, the growth of doubt went through four distinct stages: rationalistic supernaturalism, deism, skepticism, and, finally, full-blown atheism.
    Deistic thought was the most important stage. It came into existence first in England, from where it spread to both the Continent and America. The actual word “deist” was coined by the Genevois Pierre Viret (1511–71) to describe someone who believed in God but not in Jesus Christ. The anthropological discoveries in America, Africa, and elsewhere only underlined that all men had a religious sense but that on the other continents there was no awareness of Jesus. The deists were also influenced by new discoveries in the physical sciences, which suggested that God was not an arbitrary figure, as in ancient Judaism for example, but the maker of the laws that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and the others had uncovered. The deists in fact achieved a major transformation in the concept of God, arguably the greatest change in understanding since the development of ethical monotheism in the sixth century B.C . God lost his “divine arbitrariness” and was now regarded as a lawmaking and law-abiding deity.
    The atheists were predominantly French and were known as mechanists (as the intellectual heirs of Newton they were inspired by the idea of a mechanical universe). Voltaire was just one who thought that science had shown that the universe was governed by “natural laws,” which applied to all men and that countries—kingdoms, states—should be governed in the same way. Voltaire convinced himself that, through work, religious ideas would eventually be replaced by scientific ones. Man, he insisted, need no longer lead his life on the basis of atoning for his original sin; instead he should work to improve his existence here on earth, reforming the institutions of government, church, and education. “Work and projects were to take the place of ascetic resignation.”
    These new attitudes, grounded in the recent advances of science, together with the fact that more and more people could read of these discoveries, meant that the optimistic idea of progress was suddenly on everyone’s mind, and this too was both a cause and symptom of changes in religious belief. Until the likes of Michel de Montaigne and Voltaire, the Christian life had been a sort of intellectual limbo: people on earth tried to be good in the manner laid down by the church but, in effect, they accepted the notion of perfection at Creation, followed by the Fall and decline ever since. The faithful expected fulfillment only in “a future state.”
    Pietism was of course a response to this, a religious response. It stressed the (moral) rewards available in this life. A quite different response, however, which matured as the century wore on, was the idea that if the rest of the universe was governed by (relatively) simple laws—accessible to figures like René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Antoine Lavoisier, and Carl Linnaeus—then surely human nature itself should be governed by equally simple and accessible general laws.
    With this went a further profound change—the reconceptualization of the soul as the mind, the mind increasingly understood by reference to consciousness, language, and its relationship with this world, in contrast to the soul, with its immortality and preeminent role in the next world. This was, in other