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The City of
No God
Graeme Hunter on the Most Challenging Thought Experiment of All Time
Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, daring provocateurs invented the most challenging thought experiment of all time: Try to conceive of a world in which there is no God. Mainstream thinkers quickly became aware that this project had "gone viral," as we would say nowadays. In 1623, long before there was a single documentable atheist in the known world, the philosopher and scientist Marin Mersenne guessed that there were over 50,000 of them in Paris alone.
That sounds less strange once you realize that atheism meant something vaguer back then than it does today. Then it meant having false opinions about God, not denying his existence altogether. There were plenty of people with false opinions, but none yet so extreme and deluded as to say there was no God.
Even in its weaker sense, however, 50,000 atheists was still a gross exaggeration. The figure, rather than the accusation, is what makes Mersenne's claim so interesting. He was a keen reader of trends, and the great thought-experiment of the age had come to his attention. He feared that something unheard-of and sinister was afoot, something related to what he knew as atheism. And in that he was correct.
Nothing Wrong but the Notion of Wrong
By the end of the eighteenth century almost everyone could see it. The new thought experiment was the pastime of the modern age. New pieces were always falling into place. A new physics had been born in which everything happened through natural causes. Providence, mind, and miracle were banished from science and forgotten. Nothing there was beautiful or had a purpose.
Hierarchies had also skulked away. There was no Great Chain of Being in science; higher social classes were an abomination; there was no objective standard by which to evaluate art or behavior. Each thing must be the thing itself: a poor, bare, forked creature. All matter was prime matter in one or another of its ever-shifting shapes, none better than the one next to it or the one before or after.
On a long, hot, midsummer evening, a friend and I were looking at the Ottawa skyline from a rooftop patio. "Out there in concrete is the 'death of God,'" my friend sighed. "We've rejected the City of God: we're fast building the city of no-God."
Looking with new eyes, I saw a city without a cross or steeple. There were only towers that ended where they began: the upper parts higher off the ground but in no way more important, signifying nothing beyond themselves, reflecting nothing but their peers. It is a city that scoffs at confession and penitence, because nothing is wrong, except the notion of wrong itself.
And except, of course, for wrong people who think things are wrong. They are the holdouts who cling to "male privilege" or "white privilege" or some other exclusionary principle of discrimination, from which arise good and evil and their hydra-headed brood. Such people are wrong, and theirs is a wrong too great to be tolerated. They must be made to confess; they must be penitent; they must be punished. Justice will have to be meted out to them—done and seen to be done—so that equality may be all in all.
Tradition Migrates to the Moneyed
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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