1574: Denis Diderot on God: Superstition, Nature, and Reason (1746–1770)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/26
How did Denis Diderot’s writings from 1746 to 1770 challenge Christian theism and advance a naturalistic, deist critique grounded in experience and reason?
1746: “The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.”
1746: “These are people of whom we ought not to say that they fear God, but that they are mortally afraid of him.”
1746: “Who condemns them to such torments? The God whom they have offended. Who then is this God? A God full of goodness. But would a God full of goodness take pleasure in bathing himself in tears? Are not these fears an insult to his kindness?”
1746: “Judging from the picture they paint of the Supreme Being… the most upright soul would be tempted to wish that such a being did not exist… The thought that a God did not exist has never terrified humanity, but the idea that a God such as is represented exists.”
1746: “God must be imagined as neither too kind nor too cruel. Justice is the mean between clemency and cruelty, just as finite penalties are the mean between impunity and eternal punishment.”
1746: “There are pietists who do not think it necessary to hate themselves in order to love God… according to their moods they see a jealous or a merciful God; it is a fever with its hot and cold fits.”
1746: “Yes, I maintain that superstition is more of an insult to God than atheism.”
1746: “Only the deist can oppose the atheist. The superstitious man is not so strong an opponent… His God is only a creature of the imagination.”
1746: “I tell you that there is no God; that Creation is a fiction; that the eternity of the universe is no more of a difficulty than the eternity of spirit.”
1746: “Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God — I mean, nature.”
1749: “If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.”
1749: “What did we do to God, you and I, so that one of us possesses this organ [of sight], and the other is deprived of it?”
1751: “Atheism is the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God, author of the world.”
1769: “Do you see this egg? With this you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth.”
1770: “Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, blow out your candle to find your way more clearly.’ This stranger is a theologian.”
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