Bottom line: You are right. But in a historical context, he is saying something we can understand. He is saying that claims by both the Catholic theologians (scholastics) and their new opponents, the deists, that what they call God can be known by reason and logic is wrong and futile. Reason is too weak, and he spends his career trying to demonstrate that. And so, the only alternative is faith, believing what you wish to believe without reference to facts or logic, or as Ayn Rand put it, "the claim to a non-rational, non-sensory form of knowledge." This is an important aspect of the Enlightenment because the reigning, absolute monopoly of the Catholic Church over all education is being challenged not only the the science and reason of the Enlightenment, but by a new-old approach to religion, fideism or pure faith. It is part of the story. And also important because when the intellectuals of the Enlightenment set themselves squarely against Christianity, to de-Christianize Europe, they borrowed very heavily from Bayle's attacks on the "reasoned," "factual," "historical" arguments claimed by theologians. In effect, Bayle armed the Enlightenment intellectuals in their attack on Catholic and other theology in the name of reason--as Bayle had attacked in the name of restoring "faith."

I had to jump ahead in reading your book to get to Pierre Bayle. He appears to be an exemplar of a centuries long problem in Philosophy: viz. using words or concepts which have no corresponding existent evident to our senses. That is, using terms such as Good, Evil, Government, God, etc. as if they existed in Nature and are definable and clearly understandable by all.

Ayn Rand began her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Foreward) by calling this “the problem of universals” and quoting “All knowledge is in terms of concepts. If these concepts correspond to something that is to be found in reality, they are real and man’s knowledge has a foundation in fact; if they do not correspond to anything reality, they are not real and man’s knowledge is of mere figments of his own imagination.” (Edward C. Moore, American Pragmatism: Pierce, James, & Dewey, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1961, p 27.)

Hence, when I read that “He argued that pure faith in God is our most certain and important knowledge; reason, by contrast, is weak, fallible, and overrated.”, I can only conclude that he is following a centuries long pattern of spouting “…mere figments of his own imagination…”

This was one of some 50 essays on Enlightenment figures that I published with The Liberty Fund. So I am not expressing my views or preferences. Bayle loomed very, very large at the time--part of the story of the Enlightenment and one of the profiles in my new book, "How Philosophers Change Civilizations: The Age of Enlightenment."

I think people who try to 'explain' God are wasting their breath. Who cares what 'they' think about religion? We all have our preferences.

Old Testament vs New

very different ways in which God treated us

we are now supposed to be Adults