In Voltaire’s vision of a Utopia, he tries to create the philosophy of there being only one god, and really just different aspects of the same god.
The philosophy of his Utopia also shows a bit of ignorance where the old man is not open to the possibilities of other godly beings than the one he worships.

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Candide has his own reasons for journeying through South America. However, as regards the historical explorers, it is important for us to keep in mind the heady effect that all this uncharted land in the Americas had on Europeans; indeed, parts of the Northwest Pacific remained unmapped until the late 19th Century. What a spur this was for speculation, both literal and figurative! For Spanish, English, French and Portuguese explorers and settlers, the idea that the perfect place might lie just over the horizon was irresistible, and it powered the drive West in South, Central, and North America. Some of the most intriguing artefacts from this period are what one might call speculative maps: when cartographers lacked information, they often simply guessed instead of designating the area in question terra incognita. For example, one Spanish map situates a kind of Silverado in what is now known as Oregon and Washington State. (Argentina is of course named for silver as well.) Another posited a massive inland sea covering the West.

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The old man considers Candide’s questions to be strange because the truth, once revealed, is single and self-evident. The religion of El Dorado reflects Voltaire’s ideals. There is no religious hierarchy; all are priests and spend their devotions in wonderfully musical thanksgiving. Since God has given them everything they could possibly desire, there is no need for affective prayer. In fact, such prayer would be considered churlish in the face of such divine generosity. Religious conflict is unknown. In Voltaire’s eyes, this religion is a marvel of rationality.

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Perhaps to establish that he was not himself a dreamer, Voltaire locates his utopia in a place widely known by that time to be imaginary. He writes in a tradition that begins with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1517), and includes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). All three authors present mock travelogues, books which describe wanderings into the great beyond, but announce their status as fiction at every turn.

Contrary to popular belief, More’s Utopia is a playful book– in more than one sense. We have only to analyze More’s coinage, “utopia”, to see this. The term plays upon two Greek words: eutopos, meaning “a good place”, and outopos, meaning “no place” or “nowhere.” More would have expected his audience to pick up on this jest, this oscillation, immediately, for the community of scholars in Europe used Latin among themselves (Utopia was originally published in Latin) and studied Greek as a matter of course.

All through the book, Greek-derived place-names and other words enhance the joke: the good place is no place at all. The degree to which More intended his text to be read as a series of serious proposals is the subject of much debate. Voltaire’s case is much clearer. We have every reason to think that he approved of the conditions in his “El Dorado”– as outsiders insist on calling it.

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