It did not occur to us that Old Nobodaddy, instead
of being a ridiculous fiction, might be only an impostor, and that the
exposure of this Koepenik Captain of the heavens, far from proving that
there was no real captain, rather proved the contrary: that, in short,
Nobodaddy could not have impersonated anybody if there had not been
Somebodaddy to impersonate. We did not see the significance of the
fact that on the last occasion on which God had been 'expelled with a
pitchfork,' men so different as Voltaire and Robespierre had said, the
one that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, and
the other that after an honest attempt to dispense with a Supreme
Being in practical politics, some such hypothesis had been found quite
indispensable, and could not be replaced by a mere Goddess of Reason. If
these two opinions were quoted at all, they were quoted as jokes at the
expense of Nobodaddy. We were quite sure for the moment that whatever
lingering superstition might have daunted these men of the eighteenth
century, we Darwinians could do without God, and had made a good
riddance of Him.
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