Chapter 8: Science and Magic

In which two bedfellows end up not so strange

This is the eighth chapter of a book that currently has the working title Cataspectral. You can find the introduction and table of contents here.

The Third Wave and the Wars of Religion

Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned academic, published The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium online in 2014. Surveying various episodes of popular insanity after the turn of the third millennium such as the Arab Spring, the Tea Party movement and the Occupy protests, he argues that the decentralization of information beginning with cable television and exponentially expanded by the Internet has caused society’s elites to be universally hated by the public, but has made the public incapable of agreeing on why they’re mad or what the elites can do to fix it. Gurri recruits the legendary journalist Walter Lippman for his definition of “the public,” which is simply “the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.”¹ This concept is emphatically distinct from the idea of the “masses” or the “people” or any other word for the political whole. The public with respect to any given issue is just the relatively small group of people heavily invested in that issue.

But the rise of cable and the Internet were not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Gurri lays out a structure of five waves in the development of the information landscape: the first was the invention of writing sometime at the beginning of the agricultural revolution; the second was the development of the alphabet as distinct from pictographic writing, which made information transmission radically more efficient; the third was the invention of the printing press; the fourth was the propagation of mass communication, which had the effect of increasing elite control over the information available to the public (as Gurri notes, radio and television are “I-talk-you-listen” formats with high barriers to entry). Gurri’s book concerns itself with the fifth wave, which is the increased democratization of information by way of cable TV, expanding the options available to consumers of information, and then the proliferation of the Internet across the world, which put elites on the back foot in controlling the information available to any given person for the first time since the late 19^th century, and in a ridiculously intensified way. Most notable for our purposes in this chapter is the third wave: the moment when the printing press revolutionized the availability of information to the public, breaking the capacity of the elites to manage what the public was able to read, and thus to an extent what they were able to believe.

Gurri describes² this moment of upheaval in his introduction: “A third wave, the arrival of the printing press and moveable type, was probably the most disruptive of all. The Reformation, modern science, and the American and French Revolutions would scarcely have been possible without printed books and pamphlets.” Gutenberg unknowingly unleashed a world-altering revolution through his invention (although, yes, the Chinese did get there first). Great minds like Luther and Galileo first took up the technology to publicize heretical notions against the wishes of the Debunkers in the Catholic Church. That, we’ve covered. Now, we move on to the aftermath of that initial spark, which was the absorption of those ideas into educated populations across Europe, rapidly transforming localized seekers into a mob-like transcontinental public, alert to the issues and willing to raise hell about them.

The formation of a European religious public, in Gurri’s sense, was a predictable result of this exposure to heterodox ideas on an unprecedented scale in a relatively short span of time. Economic factors pushed the dissemination of ideas toward ever newer groups of readers and ensured that the information diverged ever more from the Catholic party line, generating ever more Bunkers. Beginning with the Defenestration of Prague, it wasn’t long before the continent was mired in an orgy of violence. The war ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which solidified the earlier Peace of Augsburg’s holding that all princes would be able to determine the religion of their political territories, but now included the proposition that religious minorities in all territories must be respected and allowed to practice their own faiths. This put the official stamp on the replacement of the single orthodoxy promulgated by the Catholic Church with a collection of various orthodoxies of comparable strength. Catholicism was the largest single one in the menagerie, but it was in the interest of the separate Protestant denominations to come together in defense if any of them were threatened by Catholic suppression.

This was an important point in the development of the modern secular state. In medieval Christendom, the Catholic Church was the undisputed final authority in what counted as the truth. The secular authorities – the various kingdoms of Europe – were in charge of the daily affairs of state but ultimately explained their legitimacy in Catholic terms (i.e. the divine right of kings). Now that the Catholic status quo was shattered, each kingdom had the power to determine for itself what counted as the truth. This power implied the ability not to choose at all, evacuating the public square of politically sanctioned truth claims altogether, at least within certain areas of discourse. Though not yet a practical reality in the seventeenth century, the time was approaching when secular states would become increasingly common, and then dominant.

Science was the system of thought that would come to fill the epistemological void in the secular states of the future. But it didn’t spring into being fully formed, despite the great insights of people like Galileo. Anything that could be said to be true in this era had to be explicable in terms of Christian doctrine, meaning that phenomena not explicable in such terms were by definition nonexistent and any method of obtaining information outside of such terms was by definition heretical. Science as we now know it could not have started out, then, as anything other than a collection of practices and bodies of knowledge within the broader swirl of the cultic milieu, flying near or beyond the periphery of respectable discourse.

Science and Magic: Unstrange Bedfellows

This chapter will include a lot of talk of something called “magic.” Keith Thomas describes magic in his 1971 classic Religion and the Decline of Magic as essentially an attempt to gain control over nature by ineffective means, although it could also be used as a convenient way to scapegoat an unpopular individual as a witch. The “witch” aspect here is important, and we will return to it in a bit, but for now the most important thing is what makes magic different from technology. I’ll give a two-pronged definition of technology: (i) putting knowledge into practice (ii) in order to do stuff. Magic can be different in two ways: (i) not being knowledge put into practice or (ii) not being intended for doing stuff. For Thomas, magic is different from technology in that it is ineffective and used to allay anxiety in the absence of methods that actually work, while technology is effective; his argument is that magic declined as technology replaced it, since the two were targeting the same basic problems. Why carry around an amulet when a vaccine is far better at warding off disease? He argues that magic is different from technology in that it doesn’t do stuff (or, if it does, it only works as an anxiety-relief method rather than doing what it purports to do). This implies a slightly different version of my definition of technology (though he never provided a formal definition, so this is not an argument against him as much as it is a method of clarifying my own position). Thomas moves the “(ii)” so that the definition is “(i) putting knowledge into practice in order to (ii) do stuff.” This puts the onus on whether stuff is actually done rather than the intention to do stuff. To tease out some awkward implications, one could call experimental medical treatments that end up not being effective in their stated goals “magic” under Thomas’s implied definition. This is why my definition of technology only requires that the practitioner intend to have effects on the world.

In his The Decline of Magic, Michael Hunter takes another look at Thomas’s subject of study. He defines magic as “supposed intercourse with forces and powers above the course of nature, which it was thought possible for adepts to manipulate and control.”³ Hunter’s definition takes into account the different priors at play in the world in which magic was in common use, making supernatural influences the factor differentiating technology from magic. If you think every phenomenon is by definition within nature, then controlling those phenomena in a systematized and predictable fashion would be the purview of technology by Hunter’s definition. If you think there are some phenomena outside of nature, then controlling those phenomena in a systematized and predictable way would be the purview of magic by Hunter’s definition. This avoids the problem that arises with making efficacy the main arbiter of whether something is magic, but it is of course open to its own issues – mainly because it relies on a neat division between the natural and the supernatural. I would quibble that, if a phenomenon is not well understood but seems to be controllable by certain actions (e.g. incantations, wand waving, etc.), then that phenomenon is just as natural as turning a key to start a car engine. Either way, you’re (i) putting knowledge into practice (ii) in order to do stuff. Why should we call one ‘technology’ and another ‘magic’? Really, we’re talking about enacting the same basic human impulse to control events to our own ends.

The upshot is that what we call ‘magic’ ends up being properly understood as a special case of technology. Some practice is an instance of magic when it is (i) putting permanently limited knowledge into practice (ii) in order to do stuff. What I mean by ‘permanent limitation’ is that there’s a point at which the way the magical technology functions cannot be explained, even in principle. If one defines ‘supernatural’ as whatever facts exist permanently beyond human comprehension, then this makes my definition of magic congruent with Hunter’s. For an ordinary technology, I could always in principle understand every aspect of its function. For example, I won’t ever actually be able to understand how a lightbulb works beyond a very rudimentary sense, but if I won the lottery, quit my job, got a ton of Adderall and had the desire to devote my time to understanding all of the science behind it, I could theoretically come to a point at which I could properly explain anything I wished to know concerning how a lightbulb works. If an alien spacecraft were to land on my apartment roof tomorrow, I of course wouldn’t be able to explain how it worked, nor would the greatest scientists alive. But as scientific knowledge progressed, perhaps with the help of my new alien neighbor, we would be able to explain more of its operational principles. This is not the case for something like astrology, in which no amount of money, time, Adderall, desire or extraterrestrial assistance could get me past the “well, that’s just how it works” aspect of it. You can get a few explanations to begin with, such as how the planets’ “energies” align, but eventually there will come a wall beyond which no explanation can be given other than “it’s mysterious,” and no future discoveries will change the existence or location of this wall. The same is true for energy crystals, Tarot cards, transubstantiation, Voodoo dolls, snake handling, Ouija boards, faith healing, palmistry and anything else properly given the name ‘magic.’ With magic, questions always run up against an arbitrary wall beyond which no explanations are possible, and this wall will never move or go away. Arthur C. Clarke famously said that a technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. I think he was incorrect. If we could eventually be capable of understanding the principles governing the technology in question, then it fails the permanent limitation requirement for being the special case of technology we call ‘magic.’ Magic in the sense I mean here is a subset of technology that will never, even in principle, be capable of being explained beyond a certain arbitrary point. Of course, we may think from our limited point of view that some phenomenon is properly classified as magic but be incorrect; if we eventually found some explanation for remote viewing, it would then need to be reclassified as non-magical technology.

Today, we would rightly place magic and religion together on the Bunker side of the ledger, both opposed in equal measure to physicalism, the realm of the Debunkers. Reasoning backward from this point, it might make sense to expect the magic and science of the early seventeenth century to be aligned together against religion. But this is a little too simple. The two main poles of discourse during science’s infancy were Catholicism and Protestantism, with the Catholics holding onto more magical elements than Protestants, who reclassified most or all magic as black magic – that is, the effects of demonic influence – fully accepting its reality but rejecting its practice. Since post-Westphalian religion was a shatter-zone of competing epistemologies, magic was the province of Bunkers and Debunkers alike. Science can be understood as a sect (recalling Campbell’s use of that term) growing out of the cultic milieu as Bunkers used the power of the printing press to network with one another. The sect of science in its ideal form takes the egalitarianism, commitment to “doing one’s own research” and ideological tolerance of the cultic milieu and tempers it with uniform standards of reasoning and a commitment to the truth over one’s own pet theories or personal preferences. In this way, you could say science is a kind of domesticated version of the cultic milieu. As the sect of science grew, it sampled the facts on offer from Catholics and Protestants alike, as well as those associated with the cultic milieu and rejected by all Christian epistemologies.

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (a.k.a. the Royal Society), founded in 1660, is one of the most important institutions in the early development of science. It was there that many of the greatest minds of the age worked to build the foundations of what was to become modern science. But before this, the foundations had to be laid for the foundations. Finding a contractor, I guess. Thinkers like Galileo, Kepler and Brahe (none of whom were English) made a particular splash with the English intelligentsia of their period, roughly the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. This isn’t that surprising, since England was Protestant and thus more inclined toward the belief that the age of miracles was over, that relics and the holy communion were merely symbolic, that all magic was necessarily demonic or pure trickery, and the like – not to mention the fact that the Catholic Church had proven its distaste for empirically minded people like Galileo in the past.

Francis Bacon, among the most learned and influential men in Renaissance England, was perhaps the first modern philosopher of science. Among his most important contributions was his unique distillation of the concept of induction. Induction is the act of deriving general theories from specific observations. Though this wasn’t precisely how science would end up proceeding, it was the best explanation of the core procedure of the scientific method that existed at the time. Basically, his goal in formulating a method of science was to put simply in writing just how it was that Galileo, Kepler and Brahe got their results. Deduction, the explicit statement of implications, was not up to the task of creating new theories, and other sources of theoretical knowledge like revelation and authority were anathema to the incipient physicalist sect.

Bacon’s second big contribution was to set out the path toward science as an institution. In his New Atlantis, Bacon sketched an outline of how he thought science would end up changing the world for the better. It looks a lot like something a modern video game designer would come up with.⁴ There’s an island called Bensalem, ruled by a technocratic institution called Salomon’s House (after King Solomon, renowned for his wisdom). The visitors, Europeans on an expedition lost at sea, find themselves taken in by a highly organized, Christian and scientific culture. The European visitors understandably ask how it was that the island’s inhabitants became Christian, to which the governor of the House of Strangers (where newcomers are housed) replies that the apostle Bartholomew put a cedar trunk containing the Bible and a letter from the apostle himself out to sea, which later appeared below a miraculous pillar of light in the harbor of a city on the island. The visitors then ask how the island has knowledge of foreign languages and the governor explains that, thousands of years ago, many civilizations explored the world by sea, including the Americans, who were then known as Atlanteans (so Graham Hancock has quite the patrician intellectual ancestry). The main thing, though, is that the House of Salomon looks strikingly like the modern research university. The inhabitants of Bensalem have significant technology at their disposal, including medical faculties, purified water, skyscrapers, artificial soil fertilization, refrigeration, cinema, microscopy and power generators. Bacon, like other proto-scientific magicians of the time, used the term ‘magic’ in the same way we would use ‘technology,’ but including both natural and supernatural facts; he regarded ‘science’ as knowledge of forms and principles, while ‘magic’ was putting those to work. The work of the House of Salomon represented “the ultimate legitimate power over nature” and a reclamation of the powers of Man before the Fall.⁵

It was this vision that would lead in part to the Royal Society, which can be described as the public legitimation of the informal correspondence between academics regarding scientific topics, dating from the rise of printing. Of course, intellectuals have corresponded amongst themselves for as long as there have been intellectuals. But the printing press created unique conditions for the public institutionalization of this correspondence, much like it created the conditions for the Reformation. While manuscripts and letters were circulated before the age of printing, such limited transmission was incapable of building up enough independent force to counter the authority of the reigning orthodoxy. With the wave of information unleashed by printing, independent readers everywhere could, with relatively little effort, test predictions and engage in arguments at scale. Previously, dissemination of data was laborious; for the most part, if you wanted to test a hypothesis, you’d have to generate the data yourself or spend significant time and money tracking down a manuscript with the right data. Even when you did find a manuscript, it was often the authorities’ preferred source, since those would be the most-copied texts, and as time passed, even the best sources of information degraded until significant error was introduced. Now, data could be consistently renewed and thus protected from degradation, and it could be disseminated much more widely than in the past. By the eighteenth century, the transcontinental (and eventually worldwide) exchange of information was known as the Republic of Letters; in the middle of the seventeenth century, the eminent English scientist Robert Boyle referred to it as the Invisible College. The creation of the Royal Society by the English Crown represented the formalization of this preexisting intellectual community, and it was the first tentative movement of a state toward the adoption of physicalism as an epistemic status quo.

Two problems faced by the new science were how to go about dealing with the magical inclinations of some of its practitioners, as well as science’s association with atheism. There were at least two important reasons for solving these problems: (i) saving society from corruption at the hands of supposedly antisocial ideas and practices such as witchcraft and (ii) showing that the new science was compatible with Christianity, which if left undone could jeopardize its reputation among religious authorities.⁶

The term ‘witchcraft’ is generally pejorative (though it has since been reclaimed by Wicca and other new religious movements). This fact should be surprising, given that what is now known as ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ remains in many parts of the world an indispensable method for practicing medicine, conducting religious ceremonies, predicting the weather, harming or defending against enemies and performing many other activities of everyday life. The West, like all other societies, had a tradition of magic for the majority of its history. According to the relevant Wikipedia entry, the term ‘magic’ derives from the Latin ‘magus’ via the Greek ‘μάγος’ via (in turn) the Old Persian ‘maguš,’ via (in turn in turn) the Proto-Indo-European ‘magh,’ which means ‘be able.’ This fits nicely with my definition of magic as a subset of technology, since technology is defined as using knowledge to do stuff, which magic clearly is meant to do. Starting from the Scientific Revolution, Westerners began to seriously devalue magic as it became clear that at least the vast majority of it didn’t work at all or at least not as well as non-magical technology (and the magic that did work was often eventually understood in scientific terms and thus recategorized as non-magical technology). This explains why many people living in large metro areas today consider magic to be silly. But why the lingering suspicion that it might also be evil?

The concept of witchcraft as distinct from other uses of magic has a long history, dating back in the West at least to the fifth century B.C.⁷ The ancients saw witchcraft as the usurpation of divine powers, that is, to compel or enslave the gods to do humans’ will, rather than beseeching them through the proper, deferential religious customs.⁸ By the first century A.D., Roman authorities had explicitly outlawed the practice of veneficium, a term that could alternately mean ‘magic’ or ‘poison’, though there would have been little practical difference between the two for ancient people.⁹ The term maleficium, perhaps familiar to modern readers from the sixteenth-century witch-finding manual, the Malleus Malificarum, came into use in the second century and meant the intentional use of magic for harm.¹⁰ All veneficium and maleficium, including “the making of love potions, the enactment of rites to enchant, bind or restrain, the possession of books containing magical recipes, and the ‘arts of magic’ in general”, was by the third century punishable by death, and by burning alive if it was done in exchange for money.¹¹ Divination, as well as the use of potions and all sorts of other magical practices were, of course, perfectly legal if performed by the proper authorities, like the Oracle of Delphi or recognized medical professionals. The problem was illegitimate magic, not magic per se, by our definition.

The magical tradition of the Roman world, following the pattern of its religious tradition, was syncretic, drawing from Egyptian, Jewish, Persian and Greek sources and combined into collections of texts, two of the most important coming down to us as the Corpus Hermeticum and the Chaldean Oracles. While there was a clear line between proper religion and magic, the two certainly occupied related spheres of discourse. But this was soon to change. In A.D. 313, Emperor Constantine promoted Christianity from illegal sect to a protected religion immune from persecution through the Edict of Milan. Sixty-seven years later, Emperor Theodosius I followed up with the Edict of Thessalonica, establishing Christianity as the sole official religion of the empire. From that point onward – excepting the brief and ill-fated attempt to reinstate the old religion by Emperor Julian “the Apostate” - all other contenders became ‘pagan’ (etymologically, the religion of the rustics or commoners), enemies of the one true faith. Across the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500, over which the Church presided from beginning to end, unorthodox traditions, including official pagan rites and folk magical practices, came under sanction with varying levels of intensity, from reluctant toleration to systematic extermination. For the clergy, like the Graeco-Roman authorities before them, all magic that was not practiced or permitted by themselves was witchcraft, though this now also included rituals in honor of the very deities their forebears were so anxious to respect.

Unlike the pagans, the Christians could no longer have recourse to the “coercion of the gods” criterion of illegitimacy, as God cannot be coerced. St. Augustine defined the generally accepted medieval doctrine, which was that witchcraft was performed by the aid of demons, while Christian miracles were performed by God at His own choice to answer the prayers of the faithful.¹² But this was somewhat unpragmatic, as valued professions like medicine and astrology relied on techniques that, by this definition, might be considered witchcraft. Thomas Aquinas provided some nuance regarding astrology, arguing that the prediction of events due to the understanding of causation was licit, but any prediction of accidental events or anything involving free will was inherently impossible for man alone and thus, if successfully performed, must have involved demonic assistance.¹³ In 1586, Pope Sixtus V promulgated the Bull Coeli et terrae creator, which set Aquinas’s division between natural and divinatory astrology (where free will was concerned, this was called ‘judicial’ astrology) into law, and also banned “each and every book, work, and treatise of this sort of judicial astrology, geomancy, hydromancy, pyromancy, onomancy, chiromancy, necromancy, magical art, or those in which sortilegia, veneficia, auguria, auspicial, execrable incantations, and superstitions are contained…”¹⁴ Under this policy, court astrologers like Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler or Galileo, who provided counsel to royal courts based on the movements of the heavens but who did not engage in judicial astrology or other forms of divination or ceremonial magic, were safe. But anyone suspected of performing rituals with the goal of obtaining forbidden knowledge or power from demonic forces would be in jeopardy.

For natural magicians, who simply sought to understand the underlying logic of physical events, this outcome was, in theory, favorable. Paracelsus, a pioneering physician who was among the earliest to recognize the potential applications of chemistry in medicine – but who also, for example, believed the stars had spiritual influences on the course of disease and that incantations were sometimes necessary parts of medical treatment – viewed magic as Bacon did: the use of humanity’s God-given rationality to investigate the properties of nature and to employ them in the improvement of society.¹⁵ Historian of science Charles Webster credits the mathematician and Kabbalist Pico della Mirandola with a similar outlook: “by the employment of acute observation rather than demons, the forces of the celestial world might be brought to bear on the terrestrial world in order to perform natural works rather than to seek miracles.”¹⁶

Unfortunately, favorability in theory does not always translate into practice. Cornelius Agrippa, another famed magician, complained that, because natural magic could be used to perform surprising feats, the uninformed often leapt to the conclusion that demonic activity was at work. Indeed, proto-scientific magicians including Paracelsus, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Giordano Bruno and John Dee were all at different times suspected of being in league with the devil.¹⁷ Some of these accusations, like those against Dee, were perhaps more legitimate than others. Especially towards the later part of his career, Dee claimed to be in frequent contact with non-human intelligences that he believed to be angels, facilitated by the use of scrying mirrors and wax tablets and recorded in what was supposedly disclosed to Dee as the original language of Adam, known as the Enochian language. To anyone who believed in the existence of demons, such summoning of occult entities claiming to be angels could obviously be quite suspect.

Avoiding accusations of demon summoning was best done through public conduct of one’s research. Even Thomas Hobbes, while no believer in literal demonic powers, used the metaphor of a Biblical “Kingdom of Darkness” to describe the Royal Society.¹⁸ His chief complaint was that the Royal Society’s experimentation was not as public as advertised and was a cover for what amounted to “just another conspiratorial group whose interests were in obtaining power over citizens, and whose devious confederacy sought an illegitimate autonomy from the state.”¹⁹ For those who believed in the very real power of demons, this logic couldn’t have been any less compelling. It was in the interest of early scientists, then, to be aggressively open in their practices.

But this openness had to be carefully managed. As a fledgling institution, the Royal Society had no place for toleration of anything that might have smacked of witchcraft, but neither did it wish to put its public imprimatur on anything arguing that witchcraft was altogether nonexistent, as that could lead to charges of atheism.²⁰ Thus, the policy of the Royal Society was to remain indifferent and to allow its Fellows to pursue their more magical activities in their individual capacities.²¹ Two of the most famous of these scientist-magicians were Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Despite the disdain of many in the Royal Society and educated circles more broadly, these two (among many others) remained convinced that magic could lead to gaining power over and knowledge of nature. Robert Boyle closely followed investigations of alleged incidents of witchcraft and other potentially demonic activity, including the famous poltergeists known as the Devil of Mascon and the Drummer of Tedworth. Isaac Newton consulted the Bible and astrological charts in order to make predictions about the coming apocalypse and penned many manuscripts detailing his alchemical studies, including attempts to discover the philosopher’s stone and the secrets of the transmutation of lead to gold. Even by this comparatively late date, natural magic had still not yet been banished from the realm of scientific discourse entirely, though the refusal of the Royal Society to engage publicly with such questions could be said to be the inception of that boundary. The reason magic is best considered the realm of Debunkers during this period is not that others believed all magic was witchcraft (though some people did); rather, it is that the very belief in the efficacy of magic resisted in certain respects the foundations of a more important problem: atheism, which was obviously not favored by even the more mainstream Protestant authorities.

So urgent was the issue of atheism that Robert Boyle established the Boyle Lectures in his will, which have continued their mission of demonstrating Christianity’s compatibility with science to this day. Boyle also published works of apologetics throughout his career, alongside those of other leading intellectuals such as naturalist John Ray, philosopher Henry More and clergyman Joseph Glanvill. Hunter describes the “atheism” they opposed as having no single agreed-upon definition, instead comprising numerous overlapping senses. Broadly, these can be classified as a mixture of heterodox intellectual beliefs and what were then seen as antisocial attitudes by the intellectual mainstream. It’s important to note that, although many of the thinkers who held such views back then are now seen as philosophical giants, their ideas were far from common in the seventeenth century and were very much at odds with the orthodoxy as disseminated by both Protestant and Catholic authorities (as, indeed, they still are).

In terms of theoretical content, this atheism came down to a belief in what was then known as the “mechanical philosophy.” This was the view articulated by Descartes and others that all phenomena in nature could in principle be explained in terms of mechanistic causation, without the involvement of supernatural forces. Of course, Descartes famously couched this proposition in dualist terms, avoiding the obvious implications of this sort of reasoning applied to God and the spiritual world in general, though this didn’t prevent contemporaries like Thomas Barlow from discussing whether “it will follow from his avowed principles, that there is noe God.”²² John Locke went a step further, speculating that thinking matter (without any spiritual component) might be possible, though he didn’t make a definite claim one way or the other. Thomas Hobbes prefigured David Hume one century later, leaving questions of religion entirely out of his understanding of philosophy: “Thus philosophy excludes from itself theology, as I call the doctrine about the nature and attributes of the eternal, ungenerable, and incomprehensible God, and in whom no composition and no division can be established and no generation can be understood.”

It would be one thing if this sentiment were limited to the likes of Hobbes alone, but the reality was far more unsettling for scientists in the open Bunker camp who wished for some form of joint Christian-scientific orthodoxy. By the Restoration, the smart set had become enamored with the writings of ancient naturalists such as Epicurus and Lucretius and a general culture of “wit” had taken root throughout the coffeehouses of London. This “wit” referred to the premium on fashionable literary knowledge that had become popular among the coffeehouse crowd as well as the tendency among such types to scoff at religion. In Glanvill’s Blow at Modern Sadducism, the author describes a “wit” as one who “quickly jests at Scripture, and makes a mock of sin, playes with eternal flames, and scoffs at those that fear them” (italics Glanvill’s).²³ This worldly, scoffing attitude among certain elites was connected with the sense after the English Civil War that highly passionate partisanship was dangerous; generally, this kind of distasteful intensity was known as “enthusiasm.” Coupled with the mechanical philosophy, the social proclivities connected with atheism - including the rejection of enthusiasm and the attitude of scoffing - would lead in the next century to deism. Deism - the idea that God existed but really only “got the ball rolling” on the universe - would remain popular among the educated until it was overtaken by atheism in the modern sense, which began to emerge at scale in the nineteenth century. It is this event that we will investigate in the next chapter.

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1. Gurri, Martin. The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis in the New Millennium. Stripe, 2018. p. 12

2. This idea is not original to Gurri. It was most famously articulated by Elizabeth Eisenstein in her 1979 treatise, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

3. Hunter, Michael. The Decline of Magic. Yale, 2020. p. 13.

4. In Bethesda’s Starfield, the capital city of the United Colonies is called New Atlantis, presumably in honor of Bacon.

5. Webster, Charles. From Paracelsus to Newton. Cambridge, 1982. p. 64.

6. Wootton, David. The Invention of Science. Penguin Random House, 2015. p. 582.

7. Hutton, Ronald. The Witch. Yale, 2017. p. 54.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid. 61.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid. 148.

13. Summa Theologica. Q95, A1 and A5

14. Rutkin, H. Darrel. “Is Astrology a Type of Divination? Thomas Aquinas, the Index of Prohibited Books, and the Construction of a Legitimate Astrology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.” International Journal of Divination and Prognostication. 2019. p. 32-33.

15. Webster 57.

16. Ibid. 58-59.

17. Ibid.

18. Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air Pump. Princeton, 2017. p. 319.

19. Ibid.

20. Hunter 101.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid. 32.

23. Ibid. 34.