Enlightenment’s Rejection of Purposeful Cause:
A critique of Gordon Wood’s Implicit Atheism
Andy Gustafson (grad paper)
Gordon Wood, in his article, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in
the Eighteenth Century”, attempts to provide us with an understanding of the notion of causality
as it developed in the eighteenth century. His goal, in short, is to try to understand how that
reasonable people might construe causation in terms of asking “who” was responsible, rather
than asking “how” the event happened. (Wood, 94, 97) Here I would like to demonstrate that The
change in perception of causation-- the focus of Wood’s article-- is modern according to a basic
fourfold criteria of modernity which we have used in class. I will conclude with a brief critique
of this modern “either/or” characterization of causation, emphasize that final causation was
discarded by the “Enlightened”, and point out the inherent atheism in such a position.
To begin, we must understand that by “paranoid style” Wood means, “. . . a mode of
causal attribution based on particular assumptions about the nature of social reality and the
necessity of moral responsibility in human affairs.” (Wood, 94) He says such a mode expects to
discover deliberation-- in other words, someone who has deliberated. Second, by “Conpiratorial
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interpretations” Wood means, “. . . attributing events to the concerned designs of willful
individuals-- . . .” (Wood, 96) In other words, this is an attempt to find out someone who chose
and designed the events to happen as they did. This is the sort of cause many looked for in the
eighteenth century, “For that different, distant world the question asked of an event was not ‘how
did it happen?’ but ‘who did it?’” (Wood, 97)
But all of this was before Enlightenment-- before people “ . . . had less fear of chaos and
contingency and greater confidence in their ability to understand events, . . .” (Wood, 97)
Enlightenment was, in Wood’s essay, a turning away from the error of claiming that particular
events were a result of God’s judgments or desires. (Wood, 97) While few had the backbone to
muster this rejection of God’s interaction in the world at first, eventually this became the norm,
and “to conceive of a human world without God’s judgements and providences was simply
breathtaking: it was in fact what centrally defined the Enlightenment.” (Wood, 98) Laws of
nature now replaced God. No longer in this “liberal and learned world” could there be any place
for miracles or chance. All became viewed as determined-- determined not by God, nor by the
intentions of humans, but by the collective non-intentional results of human actions collectively.
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“Earlier, men had sought to decipher the concealed or partially revealed will of God; now they
sought to understand the concealed or partially exposed wills of human beings. That, in a
nutshell, was what Enlightenment was about” (Wood, 101) Of course people would still speak of
providence sometimes, but now it came to mean the not-entirely known but still determined ways
that events were caused by the regularity of the world, and the collective actions of human
beings. This was the “invisible hand”-- a necessary result of human actions, but not necessarily
intended by anyone in particular. People realized that there was no design or motive behind
events, but were opened to the then-novel possibility that things were actually happening
according to no one group’s or being’s design. The most sensitive intellectuals, and the most
sensitive and reflective observers realized, according to Wood, that efficient causes could explain
most events adequately. (Wood, 103)
What Wood here describes, then, shows signs of all of what may be described as the
“four motifs of modernity”. First, the new ways of looking at political events like the French
revolution-- as being not an event ordained by God, but a somewhat accidental occurrence which
is the necessary outcome of a mass of individuals acting together, but not with full cooperative
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awareness of one another-- was the birth of a secular interpretation of political power and
authority. The individuals united could make new world events happen on their own. Neither
God nor secret societies were ordaining the governments, but individual people were, in a helter-
skelter and not pre-planned fashion, making history themselves without realizing it. This
revolutionary view-- that political and social events happened in a haphazard and not ordained
way-- provides a social/political critique quite indicative of modernity.
Second, the modern focus on individual autonomy is central to this newfound way of
viewing the world, since I as an individual help to become providence. I am, in this sense, what
God once was. I have come to realize that it is I, not God or an elite secret group, who hold my
own destiny.
Third, we see in this development of a newfound sensibility about the causes of events in
history the optimistic scientific attitude that we could master cause and effect in order to benefit
humanity. This is yet another modern motif, demonstrated in that a more sophisticated view of
cause and effect was realized-- an understanding that cause and effect are quite complex and
multifaceted, coming from unintentional causes, not direct from the hand of God, or the
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intentions of organized persons or groups.
Fourth, the belief that our concepts could adequately grasp, explain, and represent the
world is a fourth motif of modernity, demonstrated in the “breathtaking” confidence the
Enlightened thinkers felt as they were able to discover efficient causes, and explain world-
historical events through causes apparent to their own eyes, without reference to an intention of
God or other individuals.
Whether or not Wood accurately characterizes the thinking of Enlightenment as a delight
to throw off any belief in the providence of God and intentionality behind historical events, he
certainly seems to be a member of that tradition, identifying himself with the sophisticated and
sensitive thinkers, not the quaint, primitive, marginal, psychologically disturbed, mentally
aberrant individuals who believe that God destines particular events to happen. If Enlightenment
is indeed to be characterized primarily as an attempt to be rid of God as an explanation for
anything, then Wood certainly is a child of Enlightenment.
Critical Conclusion
Wood’s article can be clarified even more if we make the distinction between efficient
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and final causation. For Aristotle, the efficient cause of a house was the builder, while the final
cause was the purpose or goal of the house. But in Wood’s modern Enlightened world, one no
longer looks for a ‘who’ as the efficient cause, and final causation is dropped (without a who,
there is no longer a need for intentionality). The replacement for God is a “rule” or “principle” of
nature. As long as a rule can be derived or traced out, it is assumed that no further questions
need be raised. What is discarded then, is the belief that there is an intention, meaning, or
purpose given to the world. There is nature-- randomly given by a chance collision of atoms in
the universe converging in a fortunate evolutionary world of regularity and “laws”; but there is
no nature in the sense of a planned, pre-ordained lovingly chosen design for the world and its
ways. To the unenlightened, this can certainly have the appearance of arrogant pride. The belief
that political and natural events happen apart from the will of God, the belief that I create my
own destiny (albeit unintentionally) free from the will of God, and the optimistic belief that I can
through my own conceptual understanding comprehend and uncover all of the causes behind
events without need of God can all appear to be an atheistic turn-- a turning to a worldview
devoid of God.
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