ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment inaugurated a bitter debate over the proper place of religion in human life that has still not subsided. Popular debate over that issue has indeed intensified in recent years, and many academics, in various disciplines, have felt compelled to weigh in on it: mostly in defence of atheism but sometimes of Christianity, or of the importance of religious faith, of whatever kind, to a stable social and political order. Griswold takes a passage that Smith quotes from a sermon by the bishop of Clermont to show that Smith could not accept the idea that a good God is the author of the people world. Something similar can be said of the way Rothschild understands Smith’s remark that “the very suspicion of a fatherless world must be the most melancholy of all reflections” to a person of universal benevolence.
