When Voltaire wrote that, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” in 1768’s ‘Épître à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs,’ he was pushing back against an atheistic refutation of the divine from the “insipid writer” Arthur Machen, Voltaire’s counterpoint being that judgement from above holds civil society together by discouraging crime beyond mere jail.
He feared the presumed amorality of a godless world, but in the years since then, the punchiness of the phrase has tempted countless others to misconstrue his words as a finishing blow of doubt. The malleable openness of this axiom speaks to the faithful and secular alike for their ultimate agreement on the fact that God – whether we created him or vice versa – attends to some fundamental need in the human psyche.
The most common Western image of the almighty as a greying yet robust white male points to a wish for paternal assurance in the absence of a biological
