The Age of Reason Thomas Paine

The Age of Reason is divided into three sections. In Part I, Paine outlines his major arguments and personal creed. In Parts II and III he analyzes specific portions of the Bible to demonstrate that it is not the revealed word of God.

Analysis

At the beginning of Part I of the Age of Reason, Paine lays out his personal belief:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.[21]

Paine's creed encapsulates many of the major themes of the rest of his text: a firm belief in a creator-God; a skepticism regarding most supernatural claims (miracles are specifically mentioned later in the text); a conviction that virtues should be derived from a consideration for others rather than oneself; an animus against corrupt religious institutions; and an emphasis on the individual's right of conscience.[22]

Reason and revelation

Paine begins The Age of Reason by attacking revelation. Revelation, he maintains, can be verified only by the individual receivers of the message and so is weak evidence for God's existence. Paine rejects prophecies and miracles: "it is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it."[23] He also points out that the Christian revelations appear to have altered over time to adjust for changing political circumstances. Urging his readers to employ reason rather, than to rely on revelation, Paine argues that the only reliable, unchanging, and universal evidence of God's existence is the natural world. "The Bible of the Deist," he contends, should not be a human invention, such as the Bible, but rather a divine invention—it should be "creation".[24]

Paine takes that argument even further by maintaining that the same rules of logic and standards of evidence that govern the analysis of secular texts should be applied to the Bible. In Part II of The Age of Reason, he does just that by pointing out numerous contradictions in the Bible.[25][26][27] For example, Paine notes, "The most extraordinary of all the things called miracles, related in the New Testament, is that of the devil flying away with Jesus Christ, and carrying him to the top of a high mountain, and to the top of the highest pinnacle of the temple, and showing him and promising to him all the kingdoms of the World. How happened it that he did not discover America, or is it only with kingdoms that his sooty highness has any interest? "[28]

Analysis of the Bible

After establishing that he would refrain from using extra-Biblical sources to inform his criticism, but would instead apply the Bible's own words against itself, Paine questions the sacredness of the Bible and analyzes it as one would any other book. For example, in his analysis of the Book of Proverbs he argues that its sayings are "inferior in keenness to the proverbs of the Spaniards, and not more wise and economical than those of the American Franklin."[29][30][31] Describing the Bible as "fabulous mythology," Paine questions whether or not it was revealed to its writers and doubts that the original writers can ever be known (for example, he dismisses the idea that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or that the Gospel's authors are known).

My intention is to show that those books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them; and still further, that they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterward; that they are no other than an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived, and also of the times prior thereto, written by some very ignorant and stupid pretenders to authorship, several hundred years after the death of Moses.[32][33] ... The books called the Evangelists, and ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; ... they have been manufactured, as the books of the Old Testament have been by other persons than those whose names they bear.[34]

Using methods that would not become common in Biblical scholarship until the 19th century, Paine tested the Bible for internal consistency, questioned its historical accuracy, and concluded that it was not divinely inspired. Paine also argues that the Old Testament must be false because it depicts a tyrannical God. The "history of wickedness" pervading the Old Testament convinced Paine that it was simply another set of human-authored myths.[35][26][36] He deplores people's credulity: "Brought up in habits of superstition," he wrote, "people in general know not how much wickedness there is in this pretended word of God." Citing Numbers 31:13–47 as an example, in which Moses orders the slaughter of thousands of boys and women and sanctions the rape of thousands of girls at God's behest,[37] Paine calls the Bible a "book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty!"[38]

Church and state

Paine also attacks religious institutions, indicting priests for their lust for power and wealth and the Church's opposition to scientific investigation. He presents the history of Christianity as one of corruption and oppression.[39][40][41] Paine criticizes the tyrannical actions of the Church as he had those of governments in the Rights of Man and Common Sense, stating that "the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue."[42] That kind of attack distinguishes Paine's book from other deistic works, which were less interested in challenging social and political hierarchies.[12] He argues that the Church and the state are a single corrupt institution that does not act in the best interests of the people and so both must be radically altered:

Soon after I had published the pamphlet "Common Sense," in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of Church and State, wherever it has taken place ... has so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.[43]

As Jon Mee, a scholar of British radicalism, writes: "Paine believed ... a revolution in religion was the natural corollary, even prerequisite, of a fully successful political revolution."[44] Paine lays out a vision of, in Davidson and Scheick's words, "an age of intellectual freedom, when reason would triumph over superstition, when the natural liberties of humanity would supplant priestcraft and kingship, which were both secondary effects of politically managed foolish legends and religious superstitions."[45] It is this vision that scholars have called Paine's "secular millennialism" and it appears in all of his works. He ends the Rights of Man, for example, with the statement: "From what we now see, nothing of reform in the political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for."[46] Paine "transformed the millennial Protestant vision of the rule of Christ on earth into a secular image of utopia," emphasizing the possibilities of "progress" and "human perfectibility" that could be achieved by humankind, without God's aid.[47][48][49]

Intellectual debts

Although Paine liked to say that he read very little, his writings belied that statement;[50] The Age of Reason has intellectual roots in the traditions of David Hume, Spinoza, and Voltaire. Since Hume had already made many of the same "moral attacks upon Christianity" that Paine popularized in The Age of Reason, scholars have concluded that Paine probably read Hume's works on religion or had at least heard about them through the Joseph Johnson circle.[51][52] Paine would have been particularly drawn to Hume's description of religion as "a positive source of harm to society" that "led men to be factious, ambitious and intolerant."[53] More of an influence on Paine than Hume was Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-politicus (1678). Paine would have been exposed to Spinoza's ideas through the works of other 18th-century deists, most notably Conyers Middleton.[54][55]

Though these larger philosophical traditions are clear influences on The Age of Reason, Paine owes the greatest intellectual debt to the English deists of the early 18th century, such as Peter Annet.[56] John Toland had argued for the use of reason in interpreting scripture, Matthew Tindal had argued against revelation, Middleton had described the Bible as mythology and questioned the existence of miracles, Thomas Morgan had disputed the claims of the Old Testament, Thomas Woolston had questioned the believability of miracles and Thomas Chubb had maintained that Christianity lacked morality. All of those arguments appear in The Age of Reason albeit less coherently.[57][58]