Had he not openly rejected Christianity and God, Ingersoll’s speaking skills would have taken him a long way in the political arena, perhaps to the highest office in the land. Few could match his ability to appeal to both heart and intellect at once.

His books and speeches are still impressive today; they are intelligent and eminently quotable despite the patina of more than a century between his time and ours.

He was, for example, a great story-teller.

When I say I want a miracle, I mean by that, I want a good one. All the miracles recorded in the New Testament could have been simulated. A fellow could have pretended to be dead or blind, or dumb, or deaf. I want to see a good miracle. I want to see a man with one leg, and then I want to see the other leg grow out. I would like to see a miracle like that performed in North Carolina. Two men were disputing about the relative merits of the salve they had for sale. One of the men, in order to demonstrate that his salve was better than any other, cut off a dog’s tail and applied a little of the salve to the stump and, in the presence of the spectators, a new tail grew out. But the other man, who also had salve for sale, took up the piece of tail that had been cast away, put a little salve at the end of that, and a new dog grew out, and the I last heard of those parties they were quarrelling as to who owned the second dog. Something like that is what I call a miracle. —”Miracles and Immortality” The Dispatch, Pittsburgh, PA. December 11, 1880

He could be elegant.

To-day we remember all the heroes, all the generous and chivalric men who came from other lands to make ours free. Of the many thousands who shared the gloom and glory of the seven sacred years, not one remains. The last has mingled with the earth, and nearly all are sleeping now in unmarked graves, and some beneath the leaning, crumbling stones from which their names have been effaced by Time’s irreverent and relentless hands. But the Nation they founded remains. The United States are still free and independent. The “government derives its just power from the consent of the governed,” and fifty millions of free people remember with gratitude the heroes of the Revolution. — Decoration Day (Veterans Day) Oration, 1882

He could be honest.

When peace came, when the independence of a new Nation was acknowledged, the great truth for which our fathers fought was half denied, and the Constitution was inconsistent with the Declaration. The war was waged for liberty, and yet the victors forged new fetters for their fellow-men. . . .

Let us be truthful; all our fathers were not true to themselves. In war they had been generous, noble and self-sacrificing; with peace came selfishness and greed. They were not great enough to appreciate the grandeur of the principles for which they fought. They ceased to regard the great truths as having universal application. “Liberty for All” included only themselves. They qualified the Declaration. They interpolated the word “white.” They obliterated the word “All.” — Decoration Day (Veterans Day) Oration, 1882

He could be effusive.

To-day we reverently thank the abolitionists. Earth has no grander men — no nobler women. They were the real philanthropists, the true patriots. When the will defies fear, when the heart applauds the brain, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death, — this is heroism. The abolitionists were heroes. He loves his country best who strives to make it best. The bravest men are those who have the greatest fear of doing wrong. Mere politicians wish the country to do something for them. True patriots desire to do something for their country. Courage without conscience is a wild beast. Patriotism without principle is the prejudice of birth, the animal attachment to place. These men, these women, had courage and conscience, patriotism and principle, heart and brain. — Decoration Day (Veterans Day) Oration, 1882

He could be adamant.

That is the problem with this Christian religion. Leave your father, leave your mother, leave your wife, leave your children, leave everything and follow Jesus Christ. I will not. I will stay with my people. I will not sacrifice on the altar of a selfish fear all the grandest and noblest promptings of my heart.

There may be a God for all I know. There may be thousands of them. But the idea of an infinite Being outside and independent of nature is inconceivable.

Perceptive.

To account for anything by supernatural agencies is, in fact to say that we do not know. Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature. – Some Mistakes of Moses

When you endeavor to explain the mystery of the universe by the mystery of God, you do not even exchange mysteries — you simply make one more. Nothing can ever be mysterious enough to be an explanation.

I believe there is room everywhere for thought, and the more liberty you give away, the more you will have. In liberty, extravagance is economy.

If God created the universe, there was a time when he commenced to create. Back of that commencement there must have been an eternity. In that eternity what was this God doing? He certainly did not think. There was nothing to think about. He did not remember. Nothing had ever happened. What did he do? Can you imagine anything more absurd than an infinite intelligence in infinite nothing wasting an eternity? — Some Mistakes of Moses

Succinct.

A library is an arsenal.

To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.

Ignorance is the soil in which miracles grow.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.

Witty.

Beyond the region of the Probable is the Possible, and beyond the Possible is the Impossible and beyond the Impossible are the religions of this world.

Ministers say they teach charity. That is natural. They live on Hand-outs.

Well, I’ll give you my opinion: with soap, baptism is a good thing.

His essay, The Ghost of Religion, is of particular interest — although in my opinion largely mistaken.To quote from the above-named book, p. 176-177

Berkeley did not deny the existence of matter. Nothing but ignorance of his meaning and of the history of philosophical speculation could be responsible for a statement of that kind. I admit that the opinion is very common, common from the time that the bombastic Sanuel Johnson imagined he disproved Berkeley by kicking a stone. All the same, Berkeley affirmed the existence of “matter” as clearly and as strongly as the most thorough-going Materialist.

….He affirms its existence over and over again in language as clear and as definite as it is possible to use. He says, if you mean by matter that which can be measured, weighed, tasted, touched, seen or smelled, then I say that matter exists, and exists because it is perceived. He says, I firmly believe in matter in this sense, and in so doing I agree with the vulgar — that is, with the ordinary man and not with those philosophers who argue that apart from the things we know, and which to us constitute matter, there is something else which we do not know, but only infer. And he asks what is that matter which cannot be apprehended by any of the senses? It is the very kernel of his reasoning that matter exists exactly as we see it, and in no other way. He did not question the testimony of the senses, he relied upon their absolute authority. He affirmed “matter” in what he took to be the only intelligible sense of the word, as connoting a synthesis of things perceived. When he was told that the matter we know through our senses was not the real matter, which was something unseen, unfelt, unsmellable and unweighable, he asked, How do you know? and what is the use of this matter which is unknown to the senses? In the second of his three dialogues, he asks his opponent whether this kind of “matter” does not really answer to “nothing,” since it exists only after an abstraction of all possible and knowable qualities? When, he says, you tell me the table exists, that it has colour, and shape and weight and form, I agree, and assert that this is the real table. What I deny is that apart from the table I know there is another table about which I know nothing, and can know nothing, but which you assert is the real one. To me that is a figment of the imagination.

What Berkeley was giving the world was a new analysis, and a new conception of matter. What he denied was the metaphysical “matter” which others had claimed underlay the world of phenomena….

Berkeley denied the existence of any underlying, unknown “matter,” because when he had abstracted from any object all that was due to sensation and its derivatives, what was left was nothing.

Cohen is in complete agreement with Berkeley to this point, and even castigates another atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, for not being a naive materialist. But before explaining why Cohen is wrong, let’s first take a quick look at where he and Berkeley part company.

As we have seen, Berkeley defined matter as being exactly equal to our empirical perceptions of it. Whatever properties we detect of the table in front of us, that is exactly what the table it. Its shape, its color, its hardness — everything we perceive about the table is what the table is. Take away all our senses perceive about the table and, according to Berkeley, nothing existing remains. To put it crudely, evidence = existence if by evidence we mean whatever our mind perceives.

In other words, for Berkeley, if you take away our perceptions of the table, nothing remains. But this creates a problem. How does the table continue to exist if no one is in the room to perceive it? If the table’s “material” is our sensual perceptions of it and nothing else, then when we walk out of the room and the table is no longer perceived by anyone, it must cease to exist!

Perhaps that is not a problem. When we walk back into the room and begin to perceive the table again, suddenly it pops into existence again. But why is it the same — why is there an apparent continuity of its properties between when it ceased to exist after we left the room to when it now begins to exist again after our return? Makes one think that maybe the table does not equal its perceived properties after all.

But Bishop Berkeley had a different solution to this dilemma in mind. The table doesn’t cease to exist when we leave the room because even after we are gone, God still remains and perceives the table. God provides the continuity. Material objects don’t have to pop in and out of existence when we stop looking because God never stops looking.

When we understand Berkeley’s meaning, we realize that he denies the existence of a “real” material world outside of our (or God’s) thoughts and perceptions.

Berkeley realized — correctly — that our experiences, that is, our sensual perceptions of light, color, sound, etc, are mental — their realm of existence is in our mind — and God’s mind. Cohen agrees with this, striking the God part.

But this naive materialism simply won’t stand up to what we know about how sensual perception actually works. Unlike Berkeley, Cohen mistakenly believes that the sensual “properties” we perceive actually belong to the material things outside of us. That redness, for example, exists outside of our mind’s experiences (that is to say, Cohen mistakenly assumes that redness is a “thing” and not a mental experience of some sort.)

But scientists know that photons don’t have color. And that there is no “color property” that the sensor cells on our cornea are capable of detecting. They detect not color or hue or saturation, but photons. From the patterns (spatial and temporal) in which photons are detected by the cells on our cornea, our mind creates experiences of hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc., properties which do not belong to photons at all, but certainly are “about” those photons our cornea detected. In short physiologically there is no way our experiences can be of the same nature as the things outside of us which those experiences are “about”.

What is paradoxical about Cohen’s essay is that he castigates Bradlaugh for clinging to the “ghost of religion” because Bradlaugh rejects naive materialism. Cohen prefers to deny that anything unknowable or undetectable can exist, because he knows that religion is ultimately about worshipping the unknowable or undetectable. Cohen embraces Berkeley’s formula that matter = sense perceptions precisely because he doesn’t want to admit that anything mysterious and ineffiable exists, for that whiffs of religion in his mind.

But since it is impossible for sense perceptions and “properties” to exist outside of our minds (the simulacrums created by our minds), Cohen gets pushed (though he doesn’t realize it) into the conclusion that all existence is mental, and that what he calls matter is mental as well.

That view fails scientifically for it leaves nothing for photons to “be” outside of us. And of course, as Berkeley saw, his position necessitated some permanent, all-pervading mind which keeps things in existence when we’re not looking. As an atheist, Cohen needs a different solution to this problem, and he apparently doesn’t realize it.

The unavoidable conclusion, I believe, is that stuff really does exist outside of our minds — and outside of God’s mind, if there is a God. There is a “real” world. (Not to say that our perceptions, feelings and thoughts aren’t “real”, but they are real in a way that is distinctly “other” than the world outside.) And this “real” world is inevitably unknowable to us. It is impossible to perceive its nature, because its nature is not sense perception, not — that is to say — any sort of human experience.

But if the material world is ultimately unknowable and imperceptible, doesn’t that open the door to religion?

Yes, I think so.

And it may also open the door to God — if by God we mean something unknowable and imperceptible and completely “other” than mental or spiritual* in nature.

But if so, it is a bodily and not a spiritual God. In fact “God” is a confusing term to imbue with this sort of meaning, since by conventional use the term “God” refers to a spiritual being of some kind, and what we have in mind must be characterized as an unknowable material being.

It also potentially opens the door to God in a different way. If an ultimately unknowable material world is admitted to exist, then why not an ultimately unknowable spiritual existence? Like, say, a supernatural deity.

But there is a solid basis for inferring the existence of unknowable matter. Is there a solid basis for inferring a spiritual God? Berkeley’s won’t do.

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* I use “spiritual” here in its usual sense of referring to aspects of our personal experiences and feelings and not in the sense of referring to the material or “real” world outside of our minds.

Suppose, however, that God did give this law to the Jews, and did tell them that whenever a man preached a heresy, or proposed to worship any other God that they should kill him; and suppose that afterward this same God took upon himself flesh, and came to this very chosen people and taught a different religion, and that thereupon the Jews crucified him; I ask you, did he not reap exactly what he had sown? What right would this god have to complain of a crucifixion suffered in accordance with his own command?”– Robert G. Ingersoll, “Some Mistakes of Moses”