A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler

often even harsher. In a letter to his lifelong confidant, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Voltaire had once called Christianity “the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.” It was not that Voltaire did not believe in God; he simply did not believe in an active God. “Is it not the most absurd of all extravagances,” he wrote in the Dictionnaire , “to imagine that the Infinite Supreme should, in favor of three or four hundred ants on this little heap of earth, derange the operation of the vast machinery that moves the universe?”
    A FTER THE PUBLIC FURY surrounding the de la Barre affair had faded away, Voltaire began composing a series of pamphlets based on his essay on miracles. These came to the attention of a traveling schoolmaster who happened to be visiting Geneva that year, who took it upon himself to publish a response. In an earnest style that contrasted strongly with Voltaire’s rhetorical flourish and bombastic sarcasm, the schoolmaster wrote that the world was indeed governed by laws that God had set down, but from time to time, God needed to intervene. “Miracles,” he said, “are very intelligible and believable for the loyal Christian.”
    Nothing could drive Voltaire into a rage more easily than a critic, and he never let any criticism go unanswered. To Voltaire, it was as if the man had thrown down a gauntlet. “To hold a pen is to be at war,” he would often say. Now he really did see himself at war. It was as if he had channeled the whole de la Barre affair into this one argument. His penmanship grew more precise, as it always did when he was angry. His letters grew more legible. A heated exchange of epistolary pamphlets began.
    Such debates were common in the eighteenth century. It was customary for such exchanges to remain anonymous, but by the fourth exchange of letters, Voltaire had learned his antagonist’s identity. He was an Englishman named John Turberville Needham, a Catholic priest. Needhamseemed the embodiment of everything Voltaire detested: the church, sanctimony, superstition. Voltaire thought him an utter simpleton.
    Needham could often be naïve. He tended to trust in the good nature of others, sometimes to a fault. But he was by no means simple. Needham was an accomplished natural philosopher, microscopist, and one of the finest experimentalists of his time. His scientific explorations into the generation of life had made him famous. His work featured prominently in all of the most important scientific journals of the time, and he had become the first Catholic priest ever admitted to the ranks of Britain’s Royal Society. Above all else, he was known as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the theory of spontaneous generation.
    Gradually, Needham and Voltaire’s argument meandered into the fields of natural philosophy. Until his death fourteen years later, Voltaire would turn his pen to the natural sciences more than he had at any point in his life. His argument with Needham over miracles became a debate about the nature of life itself, and how life comes to be. It was often colored by the deep religious tensions of the time. It became one of the first glimmerings of an argument between religion and science, and reason and faith, that would continue, in one form or another, for the next two and a half centuries.
    Their argument also contained some surprises. Each man found himself playing a role to which he was not accustomed. Voltaire, who had once said that every thinking man should “hold the Christian sect in horror,” ended up as the champion of faith and the belief in a supreme being. Needham, a Catholic priest who believed in miracles, unwittingly provided a scientific legacy that would underpin a new understanding of the world being propagated by atheists. Voltaire, one of history’s greatest ironists, would die never quite understanding the