He was an Idealistic Agnostic, a rare figure whose skepticism was not cold or clinical, but warm, poetic, and deeply rooted in compassion.
Unlike many modern atheists and agnostic, figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, whose critiques often lean toward materialism and reductionism, Ingersoll’s worldview was expansive and emotionally rich.
Where others might reduce love to hormones or morality to evolutionary utility, Ingersoll elevated these human experiences to sacred heights.
He believed that “the brain wants light, the heart wants love,” and he never lost sight of either.
Ingersoll was not a scientist or academic debating in televised forums. He was a writer, a lawyer, and a masterful orator, an artist of ideas.
His agnosticism was not a void, but a foundation for a life centered on justice, kindness, and joy. He embraced the American idealism that gave rise to Lincoln and Roosevelt, and in many ways, he embodied the spirit of the American dream: liberty of conscience, equality before the law, and the pursuit of happiness.
In Volume One of his work, Robert Ingersoll explores the provocative idea that gods are not divine revelations but human inventions, reflections of their creators and the societies that shaped them.
He describes Gods as:
"An Honest God is the Noblest Work of Man,"
encapsulates this belief with striking clarity.
Ingersoll argues that each nation fashioned its own god, and these deities invariably mirrored the traits, prejudices, and desires of their creators.
Gods adopted the hatreds and loves of their worshippers and were consistently found on the side of those in power.
They were imagined in grotesque and fantastical forms, some with a thousand arms, a hundred heads, or necklaces of living snakes.
They wielded clubs, swords, shields, and wings, embodying the violence and mysticism of their times.
He writes:
"Many gods were jealous, foolish, revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant,”
Often relying on their priests for information.
Their ignorance was so profound that they didn’t even know the shape of the worlds they supposedly created, believing them to be flat. Some thought the sun could be stopped to lengthen the day, or that horns could bring down city walls.
These gods condemned reason, observation, and experience as sins, and were described as:
"deficient in geology and astronomy and miserable legislators and executives."
Their demands were equally harsh. They required "abject and degrading obedience," insisting that people humble themselves in the dust.
They favored their creators, aiding them in acts of robbery, destruction, and conquest.
Nothing pleased them more than the "butchery of unbelievers," and nothing enraged them more than the denial of their existence.
Ingersoll notes that gods were created with such ease and so little substance that:
"the god market was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms."
These deities were imagined to meddle in all human affairs, from the fall of a sparrow to the motion of planets.
They descended to earth to offer instructions, sometimes trivial, such as how to cook a goat or how a priest should wear an apron.
Ingersoll finds the origin of gods and devils to be a "perfectly natural production," born of human imagination and likely to be recreated under similar conditions.
Man models gods after himself, giving them human features and languages, along with the same historical, geographical, and astronomical errors.
No god, he insists, was ever more advanced than the nation that created him.
He points to examples like black-skinned deities for Africans, yellow-complexioned ones for Mongolians, and the patient faces of Egyptian gods—all reflections of their worshippers.
Common people often mistook carved or painted images for the gods themselves.
The dominance of male deities, Ingersoll suggests, stems from man’s physical superiority over woman; had the reverse been true, the rulers of nature would have been female.
All human ideas, God, the devil, heaven, and hell, are shaped by the environment and experiences of those who conceive them.
Man exaggerates, diminishes, combines, and distorts reality to create these divine figures, but cannot invent beyond nature.
Ingersoll concludes with a stark observation:
"In the vast cemetery, called the past, are most of the religions of men, and there, too, are nearly all their gods."
He declares that "the gods created by the nations must perish with their creators.
“ They were created by men, and like men, they must pass away."
The deities of one age become "the by-words of the next," and intelligent men now understand that :
"all religions and sacred books are made by men, and gods and devils are phantoms."
Ultimately, Ingersoll insists that gods and devils were born not of divine truth, but of ignorance, fear, and cunning.
