So, Galileo felt how he was burned to death. Think about Bruno, such great scientists who were sentenced to death by the Inquisition. You know that in the context of the powerful religion at that time, no one dared to say "no" to religious beliefs, and all those who dared to challenge religion could only explore nature under the protection of religion.
So, until the 17th century, all exploration of nature was under the banner of theology, whether it was Newton or Montesquieu, almost none of them dared to say that my research was to prove the non existence of God; On the contrary, each of them is saying that my research aims to prove the existence of miracles, and naturally presents us with the traces left by God on earth.
This is their basic starting point, which is called thinking with shackles. So, in that era, whether it was atheism or theism, they were able to express their own views and insights, which was already part of the enlightenment we mentioned earlier, that is, religious enlightenment. Of course, they have provided such a statement regarding the errors of atheism.
Most atheists are bold and directionless scholars who are not good at reasoning, cannot understand the roots of creation, evil, and other difficulties, and turn to the hypothesis that all things are eternal and inevitable.
On the contrary, the eternal and inevitable nature of all things is the viewpoint of theists.
Let's take a look at Voltaire's proof of existence, a proof of the existence of matter. Can we understand whether this logical inference is valid?
Voltaire's proof of the existence of matter:
My only reason is to prove to me that there is a craftsman who arranged the material things in the world; However, my rationality does not have the ability to prove to me that this craftsman created this substance, or to prove to me that he was created from nothing.
In other words, reason can prove the existence of such a craftsman, but I do not have reason to prove that this person created matter.
So, what I can do without the help of advanced wisdom is to believe in the only God in this world - God, who is also eternal and self existent. God and matter exist due to the nature of things.
If we do not have the ability to prove how God created this existence or created matter, then the existence of matter itself and the existence of God itself are unverifiable.
If the existence of God is unverifiable, the fact that God is able to create matter is also unverifiable. Therefore, the statement that God's creation of matter is an instinctive existence rather than a derivative one is very obvious. For religious philosophers, if you acknowledge the existence of God, you can no longer acknowledge that God or the material creation is an equal existence with God; If you acknowledge the second existence, you are clearly blaspheming God, because you place the material existence, that is, the created, in the same position. Therefore, this is undoubtedly a blasphemy against God.
However, Voltaire precisely proved that there is a homologous relationship between the two, and explained that their homology is something that our rational ability cannot prove. This is its cleverness. I do not know how your God was born, nor can I confirm the existence of your God, nor can I confirm the existence of the material created by God.
So, in this sense, neither of them can be proven because human rational ability is limited and cannot be achieved by human reason. On this point, the two are common.
There is actually another problem here. As mentioned earlier, all claims about God belong to a belief. Therefore, we do not verify or confirm the theory of faith. Although medieval philosophers proposed various ways of arguing for the existence of God, including Anselm's four proof methods, they were basically forged after birth. It is not because of this confirmation that God exists, but because God already exists, I will find another basis for its existence.
Today, this type of person is referred to as an imperial scholar. You first propose a truth, and then go back to prove how this truth is right. Theologians actually have the purpose of proving the rationality of God's existence. Therefore, such existence is an acquired proof, not an innate proof. And what role can this acquired proof play? It can only play a protective role, not a debating role. For faith, we can understand it this way, just like the faith we are exposed to today about communism. When we accept communism as faith, it is non-negotiable. If you say that communism does not exist, it is equivalent to saying that communism exists. The same principle applies. When we accept it as faith, it doesn't matter whether it exists or not.
So, people need to have faith, and you can have all kinds of faith. The acceptance of your faith itself is not subject to your rational understanding of faith. You cannot say that I understand it and only then do I consider it as my faith, or that I see it as logically arguable and therefore accept it and believe in it.
So, why did medieval philosophers say such a sentence? The more absurd it is, the more I believe it. And believing in it is not because it is absurd, but because I believe, that is to say, simply because I believe in it, whether it is absurd or not, that is the function of faith. So, regarding the understanding of faith, when we talk about Kant, we will reveal a deeper basis behind it.
Among French thinkers, we cannot yet see a deeper understanding of faith, and we can only grasp it from the surface. From medieval theology to the Enlightenment in France, their attitudes towards faith are basically the same, without the need for argumentation, but only the way of acceptance.
However, when it comes to rationality, they are all different. The French Enlightenment had two main core words, one is reason and the other is religion. For French thinkers and philosophers, what exactly is reason?
This has always been an unresolved issue, whether we are from Montesquieu, to Voltaire, to Rousseau, to Diderot, or of course, there are several other French thinkers in between. If you flip through any book, you will read his views on reason, and then you will read another book about reason. The various views are vastly different from each other.
We have learned about a philosopher's concept of reason, Montesquieu. What does he understand reason as?
He understood reason as nature, an ability of humans to understand and grasp nature, which does not exist within themselves, but within natural things. If humans are also seen as a kind of external object, it can be said that humans have reason, just like any thing has natural relationships. It is a natural product, Voltaire's statement about reason that we see today.
So, he did not specify what rationality is here, but from the ideas he expressed, we can generally feel that the concept of rationality is not natural, but the result of human common sense observation of the empirical world, and the process of inference from the basic logic of our observation of natural things.
This is the concept of nature revealed to us by Voltaire. Therefore, 'observation and common sense' constitute the natural process they understand.
From this, we can conclude that throughout the intellectual movement of the French Enlightenment, although people emphasized the concept of reason so much, no one gave a universally accepted explanation of reason. It can even be said that the differences in the understanding of reason by different philosophers made it difficult for them to form a unified ideological line in the process of argumentation, and then provide a powerful theory of the existence of the world, even if it is materialistic.
So, why did later philosophers call French materialism naive materialism, to what extent?
Simple enough that anyone of us who doesn't study philosophy, doesn't understand philosophy, doesn't know philosophy, and hasn't been exposed to philosophy can understand what he means. Just plain to this extent. So you might have asked, is there anything wrong with this?
Philosophy originally comes from our experience and common sense. Without this common sense, how can tall buildings be built on flat ground. That must have a foundation, foundation is our common sense, so it is right. However, if the philosophical way of thinking remains experiential and observational, based on common sense, what use does a philosopher have?
Because all statements about common sense and experience will be replaced by science, and it can even be said that all our understanding of observation is based on the needs of science.
The purpose of observation is not for ordinary understanding, the purpose of observation is not to gain an understanding of the world, but to acquire scientific knowledge about the world. These two are different, so in this sense, when we grasp the French materialists, we suddenly feel that French materialism is so pale, so poor, and so superficial.
We have great respect and admiration for Voltaire's ideas, and we do not want to criticize his philosophical arguments too much. However, when we study philosophy, we have to bring up his ideas to speak up. Because we are learning from him, the purpose of talking about him is not to refute him, but to use his understanding of how the entire process of French intellectual development is presented in such a way.
