Did Ralph Cudworth accidentally provide the best arguments for the atheism he fought?
In short: Ralph Cudworth spent his life defending the existence of God against the rising tide of secularism. Yet, his magnum opus was so thorough in detailing the objections of his opponents that critics like John Dryden suggested he had inadvertently made the case for atheism stronger than his own rebuttal.
Born in 1617, Ralph Cudworth became the leading systematic voice of the Cambridge Platonists. Reared in a strict Puritan environment, he eventually moved toward a more individualistic view of religious practice. His academic career was marked by rapid advancement, including his 1645 appointment as master of Clare Hall and his role as regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. By 1654, he had become the head of Christ’s College, a position he maintained until his death in 1688.
His primary intellectual battleground was his 1678 work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe. The book was an ambitious attempt to dismantle atheism by exhaustively cataloging its philosophical foundations. However, the work was so comprehensive that it drew significant theological fire. John Dryden famously noted that Cudworth had presented the arguments against God and Providence with such force that many readers felt he had failed to successfully answer them, despite that being his stated goal.
Cudworth’s ethical framework was equally contrarian. In his posthumously published A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, he rejected the Calvinist and Cartesian reliance on divine will as the source of morality, as well as the Hobbesian view that morality is merely a product of civil obedience. Instead, he argued that moral truths are inherent in nature, famously stating that things are what they are not by will, but by nature. This rational, disinterested approach to ethics was later championed by his daughter, Damaris, Lady Masham, who played a vital role in disseminating his ideas.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Ralph Cudworth | English Theologian, Exponent of Cambridge Platonism | Britannica
- Also: Ralph Cudworth
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