Atheism in the Age of the Enlightenment

Atheism, as defined by the entry in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie is "the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world. The simple ignorance of God doesn't constitute atheism. To be charged with the odious title of atheism one must have the notion of God and reject it." In the period of the Enlightenment, avowed and open atheism was made possible by the advance of religious toleration, but was also far from encouraged.

Accusations of atheism were common, but most of the people suspected by their peers of atheism were not actually atheist. D'Holbach and Denis Diderot seem to be two of the very small number of publicly identified atheists in Europe during this period. Thomas Hobbes was widely viewed as an atheist for his materialist interpretation of scripture—Henry Hammond, a former friend, described him in a letter as a "Christian Atheist." David Hume was accused of atheism for his writings on the "natural history of religion"; Pierre Bayle was accused of atheism for defending the possibility of an ethical atheist society in his Critical Dictionary; and Baruch Spinoza was frequently regarded as an atheist for his "pantheism." However, all three of these figures defended themselves against such accusations.

In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras, Europe was a "persecuting society," which did not tolerate religious minorities or atheism. Even in France, where the Edict of Nantes had been issued in 1598, then revoked in 1685, there was very little support for religious toleration at the beginning of the eighteenth century. States were concerned with maintaining religious uniformity for two reasons: first, they believed that their chosen confession was the way to God and other religions were heretical, and second, religious unity was necessary for social and political stability. The advancement of toleration was the result of pragmatic political motives as well as the principles espoused by Enlightenment philosophes. Religion was a central topic of conversation during much of the eighteenth century. It was the subject of debate in the coffeehouses and debate societies of Enlightenment Europe, and a bone of contention among the philosophes. Michael J. Buckley describes the rise of toleration, and of atheism itself, as a response to religious violence in the preceding years: the expulsion of the Huguenots from France, the Spanish inquisition, the witch trials, the civil wars of England, Scotland and the Netherlands. Buckley argues that "religious warfare had irrevocably discredited confessional primacy in the growing secularized sensitivity of much of European culture." This is a view echoed by Ole Peter Brell and Ray Porter. Marisa Linton, however, points out that it was a common conception that religious diversity would lead to unrest and possibly civil war.

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