How did Pierre Bayle use skeptical arguments against philosophical and theological systems?

Pierre Bayle, a prominent 17th-century philosopher, utilized his skills as a dialectician to challenge the validity of philosophical, scientific, and theological systems by demonstrating that they all inevitably led to perplexities, paradoxes, and contradictions.1

In his monumental Dictionnaire historique et critique, Bayle employed a subversive method of criticism. While the main articles often presented standard expositions, he used extensive, erudite annotations to systematically undermine the orthodoxies contained within them. By applying skeptical arguments regarding sense information, human judgment, and logical criteria, he sought to dismantle confidence in human intellectual activity.21

Bayle argued that the systems of thinkers such as René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Benedict de Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, when analyzed skeptically, cast doubt on all knowledge, including the existence of the world. Ultimately, he suggested that because rational inquiry leads to universal skepticism, humans should abandon such efforts and rely instead on blind faith and revelation, following their conscience without a definitive criterion for truth.12