The Age of Reason, Part I
By Thomas Paine
Available online at (among other web sites):
http://www.infidels.org/library/hist...son/part1.html
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Thomas Paine coined the term "The United States of America."
Thomas Paine wrote the most influential political pamphlet in human history, "Common Sense," which showed the American colonists why they need not respect the authority of a king who claimed to rule by divine right.
When the colonists and the redcoats broke into open combat, Paine wrote "The American Crisis," which maintained the colonial spirit with its stirring words:
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THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
It is not hyperbole to say that without Paine's efforts, the USA's separation from Great Britain would not have been accomplished in 1776.
Yet there is no statue to Paine in Washington DC, and men who deemed themselves great patriots have vilified him. And why is this?
It is because Paine also wrote "The Age of Reason," a profoundly religious work that stirred up great religious hatred against him, to the point that his contributions to American independence were all but written out of the history books.
What a devastating work "The Age of Reason" must be. How subversive, how offensive, how un-American it must be.
Yet it is none of these.
"The Age of Reason" is in two parts, but this essay shall be restricted to Part I. Part I is the nobler of the two, with more reasoned analysis, a less angry tone and a wider topical scope.
Paine targets the notion that a revealed religion—and although Paine addresses the popular Christianity of his day, his rationale applies to ANY revealed religion—is likely to be true.
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EVERY national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.
The nature of revelation, Paine notes, is for The Word to be hearsay, and when The Word is told and retold, it becomes hearsay upon hearsay. From the very outset, therefore, religions based upon revelation have a serious evidentiary problem:
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It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
The standard answer to this quite legitimate evidentiary problem is that the hearer must have faith. But faith in what?
One of Paine's repeated themes is that what is called faith in God is not really faith in God at all. It is, rather, faith in people. It is faith that the one who tells the story knows what he is talking about, and that the one who told him relayed the account honestly, and so on and so on. The accounts in the Bible show overt signs of being multigenerational hearsay, and further it seems clear that many were written by individuals other than the persons to whom they are credited. One cannot be sure who the people are, in whom one is asked to have faith.
It is not difficult to smell rats in this system. For one thing, Christianity reeks with the incorporation of old mythology:
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It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both.
Even more troubling, there is the very serious concern about hypocrisy associated with pretending to model the church upon Christ, while in fact acting contrary to the very stories that they supposedly revere:
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(T)he church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.
Perhaps most troubling of all, there are principles in Christianity that place it at odds with moral justice, thereby suggesting very strongly that its message has a human, rather than divine, origin. Paine offers many examples, including the tale of Adam, which he calls "the outrage offered to the moral justice of God, by supposing him to make the innocent suffer for the guilty." But perhaps none is so damning as the moral injustice at the very heart of Christian belief:
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If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge.
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From the time I was capable of conceiving an idea, and acting upon it by reflection, I either doubted the truth of the christian system, or thought it to be a strange affair; I scarcely knew which it was: but I well remember, when about seven or eight years of age, hearing a sermon read by a relation of mine, who was a great devotee of the church, upon the subject of what is called Redemption by the death of the Son of God. After the sermon was ended, I went into the garden, and as I was going down the garden steps (for I perfectly recollect the spot) I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man, that killed his son, when he could not revenge himself any other way; and as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they preached such sermons.
If revelation does not lead to truth, what practice does lead to the truth? Paine answers thus:
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It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation.
This can be said to be one of the principal bases of deism. The Almighty is in nature. Science, not revelation, shall therefore be the path to truth.
And yet, Paine takes his argument too far, by saying that the divine will can be inferred from what humankind observes in creation. Paine's own examples show that the inferences are—perhaps entirely—in the eye of the beholder. The message may be noble, but it is hard to put one's faith in Paine that he reports the message accurately:
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The Almighty lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if he had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, "I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, AND LEARN FROM MY MUNIFICENCE TO ALL, TO BE KIND TO EACH OTHER."
Against the background of what path leads to genuine truth, Paine turns to the question of whether Christianity can be a path to truth. Right away there is a problem, for Christianity holds itself out as having the truth from the Divine, and therefore it is loathe to admit mistakes, even when science has shown the church to be in error:
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There was no moral ill in believing the earth was flat like a trencher, any more than there was moral virtue in believing it was round like a globe; neither was there any moral ill in believing that the Creator made no other world than this, any more than there was moral virtue in believing that he made millions, and that the infinity of space is filled with worlds. But when a system of religion is made to grow out of a supposed system of creation that is not true, and to unite itself therewith in a manner almost inseparable therefrom, the case assumes an entirely different ground. It is then that errors, not morally bad, become fraught with the same mischiefs as if they were. It is then that the truth, though otherwise indifferent itself, becomes an essential, by becoming the criterion that either confirms by corresponding evidence, or denies by contradictory evidence, the reality of the religion itself. In this view of the case it is the moral duty of man to obtain every possible evidence that the structure of the heavens, or any other part of creation affords, with respect to systems of religion. But this, the supporters or partisans of the christian system, as if dreading the result, incessantly opposed, and not only rejected the sciences, but persecuted the professors.
Christianity is also hopelessly handicapped by its reliance upon Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy. All three actively work against the discovery of truth:
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With respect to Mystery, everything we behold is, in one sense, a mystery to us.
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But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. The God in whom we believe is a God of moral truth, and not a God of mystery or obscurity. Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never invelops itself in mystery; and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped, is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
Religion, therefore, being the belief of a God, and the practice of moral truth, cannot have connection with mystery.
As to the notion of miracles, Paine one again makes the point that miracles direct faith not in the Almighty but in a human being, who is more likely than not, being untruthful:
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In the same sense that every thing may be said to be a mystery, so also may it be said that every thing is a miracle….
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Since then appearances are so capable of deceiving, and things not real have a strong resemblance to things that are, nothing can be more inconsistent than to suppose that the Almighty would make use of means, such as are called miracles, that would subject the person who performed them to the suspicion of being an impostor, and the person who related them to be suspected of lying, and the doctrine intended to be supported thereby to be suspected as a fabulous invention.
Of all the modes of evidence that ever were invented to obtain belief to any system or opinion to which the name of religion has been given, that of miracle, however successful the imposition may have been, is the most inconsistent. For, in the first place, whenever recourse is had to show, for the purpose of procuring that belief (for a miracle, under any idea of the word, is a show) it implies a lameness or weakness in the doctrine that is preached. And, in the second place, it is degrading the Almighty into the character of a show-man, playing tricks to amuse and make the people stare and wonder. It is also the most equivocal sort of evidence that can be set up; for the belief is not to depend upon the thing called a miracle, but upon the credit of the reporter, who says that he saw it; and, therefore, the thing, were it true, would have no better chance of being believed than if it were a lie.
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Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.
If there is one exceptionally profound thought in the above-quoted passage, it is that a claimed miracle "implies a lameness or weakness in the doctrine that is preached." It is one thing to say observe that a doctrine of moral justice needs no miracle to attest to it, and quite another to say that the assertion of a miracle affirmatively indicates a weakness in the doctrine. Were Paine to write today, he might well cite examples of other things that imply a lameness or weakness in the doctrine. Forced conversion at the point of a sword or gun barrel is such a thing, as the one converted cannot be won over upon the merits of the philosophy. Another phenomenon that indicates a lameness or weakness in doctrine might be religiously motivated terrorist activity, and still another might be efforts to force specific religious principles upon citizens through the machinery of government.
Paine also points out that because Christian dogma holds that the devil can perform supernatural feats, miracles are not necessarily indicative of the presence, will or intent of the Almighty.
On the subject of prophesy, Paine points out problems that afflict not only Bible prophets, but modern-day soothsayers: retrofitting the facts, forgetting or discounting the incorrect guesses, and predicting the future with incomprehensible language:
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The supposed prophet was the supposed historian of times to come; and if he happened, in shooting with a long bow of a thousand years, to strike within a thousand miles of a mark, the ingenuity of posterity could make it point-blank; and if he happened to be directly wrong, it was only to suppose, as in the case of Jonah and Nineveh, that God had repented himself and changed his mind.
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If by a prophet we are to suppose a man to whom the Almighty communicated some event that would take place in future, either there were such men, or there were not. If there were, it is consistent to believe that the event so communicated would be told in terms that could be understood, and not related in such a loose and obscure manner as to be out of the comprehension of those that heard it, and so equivocal as to fit almost any circumstance that might happen afterwards. It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty, to suppose he would deal in this jesting manner with mankind; yet all the things called prophecies in the book called the Bible come under this description.
Although there have been provided extensive quotations, there is much more to Paine's work. Paine writes exceptionally well, and although his sentences tend to run on too long for modern taste, it is worthwhile to work one's way through his work to discover many careful points and nuances.
Paine makes a few errors in his work. Some of the errors are due to the fact that Paine did not have a Bible handy when he wrote Part I. (He did have a Bible handy when he wrote Part II, however, and he wielded it like a sledgehammer.) But virtually none of the errors detracts from his principal arguments.
Paine's message is frank, but not overtly insulting. In a sense, what he did to Christianity was to apply some "tough love." If it wishes to continue to call itself a vehicle of truth, every revealed religion in general, and Christianity in particular, must answer Paine's arguments. In the more than 200-plus years since Paine put his arguments to paper, many of them go unanswered, and Paine himself continues to be denigrated.
Might this imply a lameness or weakness in the doctrine that is preached?
