A Brief History of Creation (9 page)

THE LABORATORY OF THE ATHEISTS

It's better to go along with the stories about gods than give in to what the natural philosophers call Fate. If there are gods there is some hope of appeasing them with a little worship; if not, we are ruled by something that no one can appease
.

—EPICURUS,
c. 300
BC

 

O
N JULY 1, 1766
, in the small French town of Abbeville, a young man named Jean-François de la Barre, was taken from a prison cell and brought to a room where his legs were placed in a torture device known as a “Spanish boot.” For the next hour, his jailors methodically crushed de la Barre's legs and feet before, according to some accounts, removing his tongue. When they were finished, they lifted him up and placed his body in the cart that would carry him to his place of execution. Around his neck, they hung a sign on which they had written “impious, sacrilegious and hateful blasphemer.”

As a member of the nobility—a descendant, in fact, of Joseph-Antoine de la Barre, a former governor of New France, France's colonies in North America—Jean-François de la Barre was beheaded rather than hung. When they were finished, his executioners burned his body in a fire along with a copy of a banned book they had found in his room, the
Dictionnaire philosophique
, which had challenged the existence of miracles and mocked the literal truth of biblical stories. The ashes of both were then tossed into the nearby River Somme.

At the time of the execution, the author of the
Dictionnaire
was keeping
a low profile at his estate near Geneva. He was a man of many paradoxes. He was, on the one hand, vain, narcissistic, and, where his own personal safety was concerned, cowardly. He had already been thrown into the Bastille once and had endured two exiles, once for merely writing a poem that suggested Adam and Eve had never taken a bath. He had no wish to repeat either experience. Yet he was, at the same time, a brazen and impassioned champion of reform, a self-styled enemy of injustice and ignorance. He had tried in vain to use his influence to stop de la Barre's execution. And that influence was considerable, for he was a writer whose skill, in his time, was matched by few. His sharp intellect had made him one of the most famous men in the world. He was certainly the most famous writer. His name was François-Marie Arouet. Most knew him only by his pen name, Voltaire.

Voltaire's
Dictionnaire
was really more of what would later be called an encyclopedia, a collection of essays on various wide-ranging subjects. The form had become extremely popular by that time. The book that established the genre was the
Dictionnaire historique et critique
, which had been written in Holland in 1697 by the man Voltaire had called “the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote,” the French intellectual Pierre Bayle. Bayle's
Dictionnaire
, like Voltaire's, was extremely controversial. Bayle was a Huguenot, as the French Calvinists were known. He had fled the religious strife of France in the seventeenth century for the freedom of the Netherlands, where he was able to pursue his radical notions of religious tolerance and skepticism. Though Bayle always professed to have retained his Calvinist faith, his book implied that no reasonable person could believe the stories contained in the Bible. His critics called him godless. Some of his admirers said it too. Back in France, his writings led to the arrest of his father (a Calvinist minister) and of his brother. His brother would die in prison.

Bayle's
Dictionnaire
became the most widely read book of philosophy of the eighteenth century. Voltaire himself wrote a preface to a later edition. The book was also immensely influential in intellectual circles, helping to shape some of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson insisted that it be included among the first hundred books that would
form the American Library of Congress. Publishers were soon flooded by similar books, each seemingly more radical than those that came before. Many of these works challenged religious conventions. Some had even begun to brazenly question the very existence of God, even though to do so was risky. It could even be deadly. In 1757, amid the reactionary climate that followed a crazed assassin's attempt on the life of King Louis XV, the French Parliament had passed a slew of repressive measures, including the death penalty for anyone who “composed and printed writings tending to attack religion.”

Nobody understood the risks better than Voltaire. “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong,” he once wrote. There was a time in his life when he seemed to thrill in testing such dangers. He would even court them. But by the time of de la Barre's execution, Voltaire was seventy-one. He was still physically able and mentally sharp, which he liked to say was because he fasted periodically, drank thirty cups of coffee a day, and ignored the advice of doctors. Age, however, had made him cautious.

Voltaire had published his
Dictionnaire
anonymously in Geneva in 1764, using a publisher that specialized in dealing with forbidden books. There were many such publishers in that city, each with their own smuggling rings that specialized in slipping their wares into foreign countries. These same publishers also dealt in saucy books that passed for erotica at the time. The two genres sold extremely well, and their printers put both in the category of “philosophic books.”

No one was fooled about the authorship of the
Dictionnaire philosophique
. Voltaire was renowned for not being able to keep a secret, especially when it involved a project in which he had invested so much of himself. The book had taken him twelve years to write. He considered it his life's work, a compendium of all the wisdom he had gained and a summation of his philosophy. Yet when it was eventually banned and copies were burned in town squares all over France, Voltaire simply shrugged his shoulders and pretended not to care. Worse things could happen to a writer.

Voltaire had taken care to couch many of the book's more controversial
lines, especially those regarding Christianity, using a style of writing called “reportage,” as if he were simply reporting the opinions of others. In truth, his private views on religion were often even harsher. In a letter to his lifelong confidant, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Voltaire had once called Christianity “the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.” It was not that Voltaire did not believe in God; he simply did not believe in an
active
God. “Is it not the most absurd of all extravagances,” he wrote in the
Dictionnaire
, “to imagine that the Infinite Supreme should, in favor of three or four hundred ants on this little heap of earth, derange the operation of the vast machinery that moves the universe?”

A
FTER THE PUBLIC FURY
surrounding the de la Barre affair had faded away, Voltaire began composing a series of pamphlets based on his essay on miracles. These came to the attention of a traveling schoolmaster who happened to be visiting Geneva that year, who took it upon himself to publish a response. In an earnest style that contrasted strongly with Voltaire's rhetorical flourish and bombastic sarcasm, the schoolmaster wrote that the world was indeed governed by laws that God had set down, but from time to time, God needed to intervene. “Miracles,” he said, “are very intelligible and believable for the loyal Christian.”

Nothing could drive Voltaire into a rage more easily than a critic, and he never let any criticism go unanswered. To Voltaire, it was as if the man had thrown down a gauntlet. “To hold a pen is to be at war,” he would often say. Now he really did see himself at war. It was as if he had channeled the whole de la Barre affair into this one argument. His penmanship grew more precise, as it always did when he was angry. His letters grew more legible. A heated exchange of epistolary pamphlets began.

Such debates were common in the eighteenth century. It was customary for such exchanges to remain anonymous, but by the fourth exchange of letters, Voltaire had learned his antagonist's identity. He was an Englishman named John Turberville Needham, a Catholic priest. Needham
seemed the embodiment of everything Voltaire detested: the church, sanctimony, superstition. Voltaire thought him an utter simpleton.

Needham could often be naïve. He tended to trust in the good nature of others, sometimes to a fault. But he was by no means simple. Needham was an accomplished natural philosopher, microscopist, and one of the finest experimentalists of his time. His scientific explorations into the generation of life had made him famous. His work featured prominently in all of the most important scientific journals of the time, and he had become the first Catholic priest ever admitted to the ranks of Britain's Royal Society. Above all else, he was known as one of the world's foremost authorities on the theory of spontaneous generation.

Gradually, Needham and Voltaire's argument meandered into the fields of natural philosophy. Until his death fourteen years later, Voltaire would turn his pen to the natural sciences more than he had at any point in his life. His argument with Needham over miracles became a debate about the nature of life itself, and how life comes to be. It was often colored by the deep religious tensions of the time. It became one of the first glimmerings of an argument between religion and science, and reason and faith, that would continue, in one form or another, for the next two and a half centuries.

Their argument also contained some surprises. Each man found himself playing a role to which he was not accustomed. Voltaire, who had once said that every thinking man should “hold the Christian sect in horror,” ended up as the champion of faith and the belief in a supreme being. Needham, a Catholic priest who believed in miracles, unwittingly provided a scientific legacy that would underpin a new understanding of the world being propagated by atheists. Voltaire, one of history's greatest ironists, would die never quite understanding the twist. Needham would live to see what he had done, and it would haunt him.

J
OHN NEEDHAM
was an English Catholic who came of age at a time when it was dangerous to be a Catholic in England. In 1688, the country's last Catholic king, James II, was deposed by the country's parliament and
replaced by the protestant William of Orange, the grandson of William the Silent from Delft, and one of the many heads of state who had at one time or another visited Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to see his microscopes. William of Orange's installment set in motion a series of Catholic uprisings, known as the Jacobite rebellions, each of which was violently put down.

Needham was a minor British aristocrat from an old family that had been split in two by religion. Needham's father, the head of the family's Catholic branch, worried about the direction the country was taking and decided to send his young son abroad to Douai, France, a few miles south of Lille, where a school had been established for English Catholics fleeing the violence in their home country. While officially a seminary, the school could compete with the better universities of the continent. Needham quickly became its brightest star, winning a reputation as a brilliant experimentalist and natural philosopher. Many of his professors even considered him their superior. He was eventually ordained, but Needham decided to devote his life to scientific inquiry. He chose the life of a secular priest, one who has forsaken the right to perform clerical services for a regular career. A series of teaching posts followed, including a professorship at the English university in Lisbon, although he abandoned the position after little more than a year. Needham was a frail man, deathly pale, with delicate, effeminate features. He told friends the hot Portuguese weather didn't agree with him.

Soon after his return to London, he turned his attentions to the field of microscopy, the branch of science he found most compelling. Within a year, he had made an important discovery that would shape the course of the rest of his life. Needham had been studying a batch of blighted wheat under his microscope when something in one of his samples caught his attention. There were fine, off-white fibers he had never seen before. He thought they might tell him something about the nature of the blight and decided to see what would happen if he placed them in water. To his surprise, the fibers soon teemed with microscopic creatures.

A year later, he returned to the same batch of wheat and repeated the experiment. Once again, the creatures—like van Leeuwenhoek, Needham called them “eels”—came to life yet again, the water having seemingly
reanimated them from the dead. In 1745, Needham published his work in the
Philosophical Transactions
, but he took care not to draw any broad conclusions, simply reporting the facts as he had observed them. A year later, more of his observations of little “eels” that had seemingly emerged out of a simple paste of flour and water were published in the journal.

Needham's papers were translated and subsequently published in Paris, where they caught the eye of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the director of King Louis XIV's botanical gardens, the Jardin du Roi. Buffon was a polymath who excelled in the wide array of fields he set his mind to. He was one of the most intuitively gifted mathematicians of his time. He came up with a solution to one of the earliest-known problems in the mathematical field of geometric probability by determining the mathematical odds that a needle dropped from a certain height would land within a demarcated set of lines. The problem became known as “Buffon's needle.” Yet it was in the natural sciences that he would leave his greatest mark.

As a young man, Buffon showed little evidence of the genius that would one day be so apparent. At university, he was an average student at best. Soon after taking a degree in law, his murky involvement in a duel forced him into exile abroad for several years. But he returned to Paris at a fortuitous time. The country was about to undertake a massive overhaul of its navy, and somebody was needed to study the strength of different timbers used to construct ships. Buffon had made some important friends by then, and the task was entrusted to him. By the time he finished, he had so impressed the minister in charge that he was handed the prestigious position at the Jardin du Roi.