Peter Adamson
speaker
1,322 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard today
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Under these rules, the theologians won't stand a chance.
It should be said that, unlike Meslier, the author does place his lengthy atheistic diatribe within a pious frame.
Brief remarks at the beginning and end say that the arguments are being put forward only so that learned theologians can rebut them.
But this seems to be mere lip service given that these few pages of religious piety at the start and end are sandwiched around some nine hundred pages of atheistic argumentation.
Since Messley and the Theophrastus were little known at the time, the title of the first known atheist in early modern Europe should probably go to Matthias Knutzen, who distributed anti religious pamphlets in Germany in sixteen seventy four.
Adding insult to insult, he even handed these out in churches and at the university in the city of Yena.
This earned Knudsen an entry in Bale's dictionary.
Without of course openly agreeing with Knudsen, Bale notes that Knudsen affirmed solid ethical principles along with his atheistic views, showing that unbelief need not lead to immorality.
Which brings us back to Bael and his own perspective on religious belief, or perhaps unbelief.
This is far more elusive than what we find in the outright atheists, but in part for that very reason, had a far wider dissemination and influence.
As a result, Bell wound up being at least as important in the history of atheism as Meslier, Knutsen, and the authors of anonymous works of irreverence, like the Theophrastus, despite the fact that Bell may well have been, his doubts notwithstanding, a believing Christian.
To appreciate Bale's role in this story, we need to look beyond the dictionary to his other works.
In an earlier treatise from sixteen eighty one called Diverse Thoughts on the Comet, he had criticized reactions to the appearance of a comet in the sky the previous year, which many took to be some sort of omen.
Such superstition, said Bell, is worse even than atheism.
Warming to his theme, Bale observes that a community made up entirely of atheists would probably be no less harmonious and virtuous than a religious one.
After all, he explained, the inclination to pity, to sobriety, to good natured conduct, and so forth, does not stem from the fact that one knows there to be a god, but from a certain disposition of the temperament, fortified by education, by personal interest, by the desire to be praised, by the instinctive reason, or by similar motives that are met with in an atheist, as well as in other men.
Notice that here, the Protestant Bao seems to be thinking along similar lines as Catholic moralists like La Roche Foucault, though he is drawing out a consequence of their theory that they apparently did not notice.
Since people often behave well for the sake of reputation and other such considerations, rather than out of religious conviction, an atheist should be able to behave just as well as a religious person.
Actually, Baile may be less cynical than the French moralists.
He does mention the instinct of reason here and not only self interest.
Showing 161–180 of 1,322 · page 9 of 67
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