Lincoln's Christianity by Michael Burkhimer

[maharba]

I think deism was a lingering outflow of The Enlightenment. It allowed for a doddering old grandfather who had set the cosmos in motion...and then fell asleep or died. At many levels, it continued to function as a badly oiled machine. But then, that did not touch upon the supposed conundrums of 'natural evil' or man caused evil. The machine analogy was supposed to have been easily discredited, at the biological level. But, when Darwin reworded and published (Alfred Wallace and others work) on evolution, Darwin actually believed that the cell was an undifferentiated simple blob of protoplasm. It went hand in glove with the simplistic glosses of deism. When desired, it was also easy to ridicule Christianity and notions of a God actually taking an immediate hand in, and intervening in: nature, man, the cosmos, etc. None of that could happen. Jefferson ridiculed the notion of 'rocks falling from the sky'. Each day now, shows the unbelieveable complexity of the 'simple cell', each one an
unimaginably complex array of machinery. That machine analogy returning to vex atheism, and negating elaborate philosophical constructs of the Enlightenment. Lincoln's atheism played well enough as a stump speech mingled with amusing gestures, mimics and jokes. Later on, and with the shrewd counsel of folks like William Seward, Lincoln saw the value of weaving in Bible platitudes into his speeches, but not into his actual worldview.