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Although embroiled in many intellectual controversies throughout his career, Jean Le Clerc's repeated disputes with Pierre Bayle were of greatest significance. Bayle had argued that Christianity strengthens Pyrrhonian skepticism in that a number of axioms of logic and metaphysics are contradicted by Christian dogmas. Therefore, even self-evidence (évidence) is not an infallible criterion of truth, since these axioms are self-evident, yet false. In the same vein, Bayle argued that one cannot conceive how an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God could allow human suffering either here or in the afterlife. Le Clerc replied that God's justice demands that those who freely choose to sin be punished, but conceded that the torments of hell might not be eternal.
Similarly, when Le Clerc championed the notion of plastic natures—insentient, immaterial substances causally responsible for the organization of animal bodies—Bayle argued that the hypothesis undermined the most compelling argument for God's existence by severing the conceptual connection between complex effects and conscious design.
Underlying their debates were two fundamentally different conceptions of the relation between faith and reason. For Le Clerc, Bayle's insistence on the irrationality of Christianity constituted a thinly veiled attack on religion itself, whereas Bayle saw Le Clerc's demand that scripture be interpreted according to rational principles as ultimately leading to deism or atheism.
Atheism; Bayle, Pierre; Deism; Faith; Pyrrho; Reason.
Golden, Samuel A. Jean LeClerc. New York: Twayne, 1972. Study of Le Clerc's career as editor of a number of highly successful learned journals.
Rosa, Susan E. "Ralph Cudworth in the République des Lettres: The Controversy about Plastick Nature and the Reputation of Pierre Bayle." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994): 147–160.