Philosophy of Religion

The Age of Reason

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Thomas Paine

1794

Written partly in a Paris prison while Paine awaited possible execution during the Terror, The Age of Reason is the most controversial of all his works and the one that cost him his popular reputation. It is a defence of deism against both atheism and revealed religion: Paine believed in God, but not in the Bible, the Church, or any system of theology derived from supposed divine revelation. He subjected the Old and New Testaments to systematic rational scrutiny — noting inconsistencies, contradictions, and historical improbabilities — and concluded that they were human compositions, not divine dictation. The true religion, he argued, is the study of creation itself: God reveals himself in the order and beauty of the natural world, not in books written by men. Denounced as an atheist (a charge he repeatedly denied), Paine died in 1809 largely abandoned by the country he had helped to found.