Editor’s Desk
by Frank R. Zindler
Winter 2000, 2001

The role played by Atheists and Freethinkers in American history is a well-kept secret, thanks in part to the disinformation war waged relentlessly by the religious right in its effort to prove that America is - and always has been - a Christian nation. The fact that many of the most important of America’s Founding Fathers were Deists is smothered by the fictional melodrama of George Washington praying in the snow at Valley Forge. The Atheist or Agnostic Abraham Lincoln has been recreated as a Christian (even the Mormons have claimed him) and Christians take credit for the abolition of slavery - the Bible-based institution they created and fought so hard to preserve.

It is a delight, therefore, to be able to reprint in this issue of American Atheist two interviews on religion granted by Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931] several decades before his death. This great man, whose inventions so quintessentially made the twentieth century what it was, is not generally known to have been an Atheist. Religious revisionists have erased his name from the monuments marking the contributions of Freethinkers to America’s history and heritage.

Edison had no patience with the idea of a personal god. “I have never seen the slightest scientific proof,” he told the reporter Edward Marshall, “of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.”

“God? God?” he exclaimed later, “A Supreme Being, sitting on a throne and commending human individuals to eternal peace or condemning them to everlasting punishment for what they have achieved or failed to do upon this earth? The thought to me seems as abhorrent as fallacious.”

Edison based his argument against immortality squarely upon the new science of biology. “Remember,” he said, “that each man, each woman, is made up of myriads of cells. They, not the men and women, are the individuals. We know very little of them, but are slowly learning something. The man is not the individual - the cell is. We are no more individuals than cities are. Cities will not go to heaven or hell, will they? A man’s intelligence is the aggregate intelligence of the innumerable cells which form him - just as the intelligence of a community is the aggregate intelligence of the men and women who inhabit it.” It was just such biological considerations that prompted me too, over a decade ago, to write my satirical Dial-an-Atheist® message, “The Pope’s Most Fallible Brain” - which vanity has compelled me to reprint beside the words of the great inventor.

Readers will note, however, that Edison was not quite the straight-forward Atheist we think ourselves to be. Despite his rejection of the concept of a personal deity and all the usual claudications of thought that usually go along with that idea, he nevertheless assured his interviewer that “I never have denied Supreme Intelligence,” going on nevertheless to deny “the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.”

Exactly what Edison meant by “Supreme Intelligence” is unclear - especially in the face of the rigorous materialism that he asserts and avows over and over again in the course of the two interviews. It is possible that he felt intelligence had to be ascribed to nature itself in order to account for phenomena he felt Darwin’s theory was unable to explain. We must remember that Edison was speaking just five years after the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in genetics, and it would be decades yet before genetics could be integrated with Darwinian theory. It seems highly likely that Edison would have scrapped his idea of intelligence in nature had he lived into the 1960s, when the “Grand Evolutionary Synthesis” was developed - a synthesis capable of explaining the origins of eyes, brains, and even altruism in terms of natural selection acting upon chemical changes (mutations) in DNA. The triumph of materialism in biochemistry and physiology would have delighted him. He would have taken up genetic engineering, I am certain.

Links:

Interview 1

Interview 2

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