Person

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an English-born writer whose pamphlets helped make the case for American independence and who later became the most widely read critic of the Bible in the English-speaking world. Common Sense (1776) argued that the American colonies should break with Britain; The American Crisis rallied the cause in its darkest months; Rights of Man (1791-1792) defended the French Revolution and attacked hereditary monarchy. The Age of Reason (Part I 1794, Part II 1795, with a further part on prophecy in 1807) rejected the Bible as revelation and argued for a religion of reason alone.

Paine was a deist, not an atheist. He believed in one God, the Creator, known through the created order and through reason, and he hoped for life after death. What he rejected was revelation: the claim that God has spoken in Scripture, worked miracles in history, or become incarnate in Jesus. He wrote The Age of Reason in part, by his own account, because he feared that the collapse of established religion in revolutionary France would carry belief in God and morality down with it. Calling him an atheist, as many of his enemies did, misstates his position. See Deism for the movement he popularized and Deism vs the Christian God for the comparison.

Life

England

• 1737, born January 29 in Thetford, Norfolk, to a Quaker father who made corsets (stays) and an Anglican mother
• Early career, worked as a staymaker, a teacher and, from the 1760s, an excise officer in the English tax service. He was dismissed from the excise in 1774 after campaigning for higher pay for its officers
• 1774, met Benjamin Franklin in London and, with a letter of introduction from him, emigrated to Philadelphia, arriving late in the year

America: Common Sense and The American Crisis

• 1775, edited the Pennsylvania Magazine in Philadelphia
• 1776, published Common Sense anonymously in January. It argued in plain, forceful prose for independence and a republic, and it sold in very large numbers. Its arguments against hereditary monarchy drew heavily on the Old Testament account of Israel asking for a king in 1 Samuel 8
• 1776-1783, wrote the series of pamphlets known as The American Crisis. The first, published in December 1776 during the retreat across New Jersey, opens with the line "These are the times that try men's souls"
• 1777-1779, served as secretary to the Continental Congress's Committee for Foreign Affairs, resigning after a public dispute over the conduct of the envoy Silas Deane

Britain and France: Rights of Man

• 1791-1792, published Rights of Man in two parts, answering Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It defended the Revolution, attacked hereditary government and proposed public welfare measures. The British government charged him with seditious libel; he was tried in his absence in December 1792 and outlawed
• 1792, made an honorary French citizen and elected to the National Convention
• 1793, argued in the Convention against executing Louis XVI, proposing exile to America instead. He was arrested in December during the Terror and held in the Luxembourg prison
• 1794, released in November after the new American minister to France, James Monroe, claimed him as an American citizen

The Age of Reason

Paine completed Part I shortly before his arrest, and it was published in 1794. Part II, written after his release, followed in 1795. A further work on the New Testament's use of Old Testament prophecy appeared in 1807 and is often printed as Part III. The book was cheap, direct and written for ordinary readers, which is why it alarmed its critics more than the learned deism of earlier writers. Its arguments are set out in the next section.

Last years

• 1796, published a bitter open letter attacking George Washington, whom he blamed for not securing his release from prison
• 1802, returned to the United States. Much of the American public now knew him chiefly as the author of The Age of Reason, and he found himself largely shunned
• 1809, died on June 8 in New York City. The Quakers declined to bury him in their ground, and he was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, New York, with very few mourners present. In 1819 the English radical William Cobbett dug up his remains to take them to England for a memorial; they were later lost

Stories that Paine recanted on his deathbed circulated after his death. The best evidence is that he did not.

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His deism

Paine opened The Age of Reason with a profession of faith. Its first sentence of belief reads: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life" (The Age of Reason, Part I, 1794). He added that he believed in the equality of all people and that religious duty consists in doing justice, loving mercy and trying to make others happy. He then rejected the creeds of every church he knew, Jewish, Roman, Greek, Turkish and Protestant, and wrote: "My own mind is my own church."

The positive core of his religion was natural theology. The only true word of God, he argued, is the creation itself, which every person in every nation can read, which cannot be forged or corrupted in copying, and which needs no translator. The order and power of the universe show a wise and powerful Creator. A book, by contrast, can be altered, mistranslated and misused. This is the classic deist position, and it is why Paine's critique of the Bible is not a critique of belief in God.

His critique of revelation and the Bible

Paine's case in The Age of Reason, stated in its strongest form:

1. Revelation is hearsay to everyone but its first recipient. If God reveals something to one person, it is revelation to that person. When that person reports it to others, it is only their testimony, and others are under no obligation to believe it. All scriptural revelation reaches us this way
2. Miracles are less likely than lies. Faced with a report of a miracle, a reasonable person asks which is more probable: that nature went out of its course, or that a human being told a lie. Experience shows plenty of lies and no confirmed suspensions of nature. The argument runs parallel to David Hume's "Of Miracles" (1748)
3. The books are not by their traditional authors. Part II argues that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, since it records his death and refers to him in the third person, and that many other Old Testament books were written later than tradition holds. He argued that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and that their resurrection accounts contradict one another
4. The Bible's morality is unworthy of God. Paine singled out the Old Testament accounts of conquest and slaughter, arguing that a good God could not have commanded them and that attributing them to God dishonours him
5. The Christian story borrows from mythology. He treated the virgin birth as a story of the same kind as pagan tales of gods fathering children with human women. He called Jesus a virtuous and amiable man, but rejected his divinity and the doctrine that one person's death can redeem another's guilt
6. Prophecy proves nothing. In the 1807 work he argued that the New Testament writers applied Old Testament texts, such as Isaiah 7:14, to Jesus in ways their original context does not support

Reception

The Age of Reason became one of the most widely read religious controversies of its age, among working people in Britain and America as well as among the educated. British publishers and sellers of the book were prosecuted for blasphemous libel in the years that followed. In America it cost Paine most of the standing Common Sense had won him. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in his 1888 life of Gouverneur Morris, called him a "filthy little atheist," which is wrong on the point of fact. Nineteenth-century freethinkers such as Robert Ingersoll revived his reputation, and his arguments still circulate, often without his name, in popular skepticism today. See Cains Wife Objection for one example of an objection he helped popularize.

Christian replies appeared quickly. Joseph Priestley, himself a Unitarian, answered Part I in 1795. Elias Boudinot, a former president of the Continental Congress, published The Age of Revelation (1801). The classic reply is by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff: An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine (1796), which went through many editions. Watson answered Paine point by point, courteously, defending the authenticity of the Old and New Testament books. Among his arguments: a few later notes in the Pentateuch, such as the account of Moses' death, show at most that later hands added to the text, not that Moses wrote none of it; and minor differences among the Gospel writers about the details of the resurrection are what independent witnesses produce, and do not overturn the event they agree on.

The Christian assessment

Paine deserves a serious answer. He wrote clearly, asked real questions, and showed physical courage in more than one revolution. The Christian response is that his case fails at several points, and that his own deism is less stable than it looks.

The hearsay argument proves too much. Almost everything anyone knows about the past, including Paine's own reports of the American and French revolutions, comes by testimony. The question is never whether a claim is testimony but whether the testimony is good. The New Testament presents itself in exactly those terms:

For we did not follow cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. (2 Peter 1:16, ASV)

The resurrection was proclaimed publicly, in the city where it happened, by people who claimed to have seen Jesus alive. That can be weighed like other historical testimony. See Minimal Facts Argument, NT Authorship and Eyewitness Apologetics and Anonymous Gospels Objection Defeater.

A God who can create can act. Paine's God made the universe and its laws. Laws of nature describe what happens when nature is left to itself. They do not forbid its Maker from acting within it. Once creation is granted, the question whether a miracle happened is a question of evidence, not of impossibility. See Argument from Miracles and Miracles.

His hope needs more than deism gives. Paine hoped for happiness beyond this life. A Creator who never acts again in history gives no ground for that hope. The hope is reasonable on Christian terms, because God has already acted in raising Jesus. On deist terms it is only a wish. Deism vs the Christian God develops this point.

Creation speaks, but does not say everything. Christians agree with Paine that the created order reveals God. Romans 1:20 says so. But creation shows power and wisdom; it does not tell a guilty person whether, or how, God forgives. That is why Christianity holds that general revelation needs special revelation to complete it. See General Revelation and Natural Theology.

On the specific charges, the codex answers each at length:

• authorship of the Pentateuch: Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch and Documentary Hypothesis
• the resurrection accounts: The Resurrection Accounts Contradict Objection Defeater and Bible Contradictions Objection Defeater
• the conquest of Canaan: Canaanite Conquest Objection Defeater and Canaanite Conquest and Herem
• the virgin birth and pagan parallels: Virgin Birth and Copycat-Christ Hypothesis
• Isaiah 7:14: Almah vs Bethulah Objection Defeater and Isaiah 7-14 Was Mistranslated Objection Defeater
• substitutionary atonement: Penal Substitutionary Atonement

His moral objections borrow Christian capital. Paine judged the Bible by standards of justice, mercy and the equal worth of every person. Those are standards the biblical tradition did much to give the Western world. The objection is serious and deserves the careful answers listed above, but the moral standard it appeals to fits more easily in a world made and governed by a personal God than in the distant Creator of deism. See Moral Argument.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• Elias Boudinot, The age of revelation (1801). Open Library
• Elias Boudinot, The Age of Revelation, Or, The Age of Reason Shewn to be an Age of Infidelity (1801). Open Library
• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Open Library
• Thomas Paine, The American crisis (1776). Open Library
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776). Open Library
• Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791). Open Library
• Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (1794). Open Library
• Theodore Roosevelt and John Morse, Gouverneur Morris (1888). Open Library
• Richard L. Watson Jr, An apology for the Bible (1796). Open Library

See also

• Deism, the movement Paine popularized for ordinary readers
• Deism vs the Christian God, the side-by-side comparison, including Paine's hope for an afterlife
• Argument from Miracles, the answer to his probability argument against miracles
• David Hume, whose essay "Of Miracles" Paine's argument parallels
• Antony Flew, the twentieth-century atheist philosopher who became a deist
• Jean Meslier, whom Voltaire presented as a deist though he was an atheist
• Atheism, the position Paine rejected and was often wrongly accused of
• General Revelation, what creation shows of God, and what it does not
• Minimal Facts Argument, the historical case for the resurrection on public testimony