25. Jim Herrick, Against the Faith, London: Glover Blair, 1985, page 29.
26. Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History, Op. cit., page 712.
27. Though terrible for many people, it was at the same time liberating because, as Harry Elmer Barnes says, it freed man from ‘the medieval hell-neurosis’.
28. Barnes, Op. cit., page 714.
29. John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion, 1660–1750, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976, page 150.
30. Febvre, Op. cit., page 340.
31. Ibid., page 349.
32. Barnes, Op. cit., page 715. As Febvre showed, a vernacular language such as French lacked both the vocabulary and the syntax for scepticism. Such words as ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, ‘occult’ or ‘sensitive’, or ‘intuition’, were not yet in use. These were all words coined in the eighteenth century. As Lucien Febvre puts it, ‘the sixteenth century was a century that wanted to believe’. Febvre, Op. cit., page 355.
33. Redwood, Op. cit., page 30.
34. Febvre, Op. cit., page 332.
35. Kuhn quotes from a long cosmological poem, published in 1578 and very popular, which depicted Copernicans as
Those clerks who think (think how absurd a jest)
That neither heav’ns nor stars do turn at all,
Nor dance about this great round earthly ball;
But th’earth itself, this massy globe of ours,
Turns round-about once every twice-twelve hours:
And we resemble land-bred novices
New brought aboard to venture on the seas;
Who, at first launching from the shore, suppose
The ship stands still, and that the ground it goes . . .
36. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 190. Despite its views, even this book by Bodin was placed on the Index.
37. Ibid., page 191. Luther’s principal lieutenant, Philip Melanchthon, went further, quoting biblical passages that Copernican theory disagreed with, notably Ecclesiastes 1:4–5, which states that ‘the earth abideth forever’ and that ‘The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.’
38. Ibid., page 191; see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, Op. cit., pages 27ff, for a different detailed discussion of heliocentrism and its reception. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
39. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 193.
40. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London: Penguin, 1971, page 4.
41. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 197.
42. Ibid., page 244.
43. Tycho Brahe did work out an alternative explanation to Copernicus, which kept the earth at the centre of the universe, and the moon and sun in their old Ptolemaic orbits. But even this, the so-called ‘Tychonic’ system, necessitated the sun’s orbit intersecting with that of Venus and Mars. This meant that the traditional idea of the planets and stars orbiting around giant crystal balls could no longer be sustained.
44. Thomas, Op. cit., page 416.
45. Next, the spots on the sun, also revealed by the telescope, conflicted with both the idea of the perfection of the upper realm, while the way the spots appeared and disappeared betrayed yet more the mutability in the heavens. Worse still, the movement of the sun-spots suggested that the sun rotated on its axis in just the same way that Copernicus claimed the earth did. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 222.
46. People tried, of course. Some of Galileo’s opponents refused even to look through a telescope, arguing that if God had meant man to see the heavens in that way he would have endowed him with telescopic eyes.
47. And in the universities, Ptolemaic, Copernican and Tychonic systems of astronomy (see note 43 above) were taught side-by-side, the Ptolemaic and the Tychonic not being dropped until the eighteenth century.
48. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 198.
49. Popkin, Op. cit. Barnes, Op. cit., page 784. People did not, at first, see any conflict between religion and reason. Redwood, Op. cit., pages 214–215.
50. See: Israel, Op. cit., chapter 12, ‘Miracles denied’, pages 218–229, for a fuller discussion of this subject; and Thomas, Op. cit., pages 59–60.
51. Barnes, Op. cit., page 785.
52. Herrick, Op. cit., page 38.
53. The more you think about it, the harder it is to make this distinction.
54. Redwood, Op. cit., page 140. The very concept of revelation took a knock at the end of the seventeenth century as the world of witches, apparitions, magical cures and charms suffered a near-fatal setback in the wake of the discoveries of science, which appeared to suggest an atomistic, determinist universe.
55. Barnes, Op. cit., page 788.
56. Redwood, Op. cit., page 179.
57. Israel, Op. cit., page 519. Israel has a whole section on Collins, pages 614–619.
58. Barnes, Op. cit., page 791.
59. Herrick, Op. cit., page 58.
60. A. C. Giffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant, New York: Scribners, 1915, pages 208ff.
61. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 282.
62. Israel, Op. cit., page 266.
63. Not that the deists were wholly negative in their views. A variant form of deism accepted the true Christianity of Jesus, but rejected the Christianity as it had grown up in the church.
64. Barnes, Op. cit., page 794.
65. Preserved Smith, History of Modern Culture, Op. cit., volume 2, page 522.
66. See in particular the sections on scepticism in Stephen Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 2001, for example, pages 111–118, 167–168, 270–280.
67. Ibid., pages 289–294.
68. Herrick, Op. cit., page 105.
69. Barnes, Op. cit., page 805.
70. Herrick, Op. cit., page 33. There are those who doubt that Bayle was a true sceptic, but see him instead as a ‘fideist’, a believer who thought it his Christian duty to air his doubts, as a way to encourage others to be stronger in their faith. Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, London: Palgrave, 2001, page 15. There were also many French sceptics grouped around Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and his Encyclopédie. Figures such as d’Alembert and Helvétius argued, as Hume did, that what people learn as infants tends to stay with them all their lives, for good or ill.
71. Herrick, Op. cit., page 29; Barnes, Op. cit., page 813; and Redwood, Op. cit., page 32.
72. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 350.
73. Redwood, Op. cit., page 35.
74. Israel, Op. cit., pages 41 and 60.
75. Redwood, Op. cit., page 35.
76. Ibid., page 181.
77. Ibid., page 187.
78. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979, pages 215–216. See also the same author’s The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (revised and expanded edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Redwood, Op. cit., page 34.