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“Why, during the seventeenth century, did people who knew all the arguments that there is a God stop finding God’s reality intuitively obvious?” This, says Alec Ryrie in his Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019), is the heart of the question of early modern unbelief (136).
Ryrie’s point is that arguments pro or contra theism, and the influence of philosophical and scientific developments upon these arguments, are not actually crucial to the possibility of unbelief. The currents that run underneath these arguments are instinctive, emotional, and these are what we should look at if we want to understand doubt and denial of Christian theism historically. The history of unbelief is not primarily the history of eighteenth-century Enlightenment radicals and nineteenth-century science warriors, but of premodern anger and anxiety.
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