One evening, probably in the mid-1760s, the Neopolitan ambassador to Paris, the abbé Ferdinando Galiani, found himself bemused by an exposition of atheistic materialism that he witnessed at d’Holbach’s salon. Galiani was a close friend of the baron, and had been attending his dinners regularly since 1759. He was therefore unlikely to have been shocked by the opinions expressed there, certainly not those of d’Holbach and his fellow radical regular guests Diderot and Augustin Roux. Yet, something about the extremity of this particular account, which was probably made by Diderot and came around the time that his and d’Holbach’s materialist views were crystallising towards their published and manuscript forms, stirred him to comment. Galiani interjected that, since he was neither the pope nor a French monarch, and thus had neither the powers of the Inquisition nor Bastille at his disposal he would have to be content with refuting their ideas at the following dinner.

Several days later, he sat cross-legged in an armchair in the baron’s drawing room and delivered his defence of the existence of a divine creator, beginning with a tale of loaded dice. Holding his wig in one hand and gesticulating with the other, he addressed Diderot directly, insisting that if an opponent was to consistently throw sixes during a game of dice, the gamer would assume that the dice were loaded and the man a scoundrel. Therefore, he reasoned, given that nature throws up combinations of matter a thousand times less probable, it is logical to conclude that the world too had been ‘loaded’ by a creator.

In essence the argument was ancient, dating back to Aristotle’s discussion of whether blind matter and chance could result in complex and brilliant writings like the Iliad. Some twenty years previously, Diderot himself had discussed Aristotle’s dilemma in the twenty-first thought of his Pensées philosophiques. Other versions of the same line of reasoning litter intellectual history. For example, in the late seventeenth century, John Tillotson posed the rhetorical question of how long it might take 20,000 blind men, sent out from different remote points around England, to wander the length and breadth of the country aimlessly until they found themselves arranged in a military row on Salisbury Plain?