The True Theology

Paine's central positive claim in The Age of Reason is that the natural world — its order, its regularity, its beauty, its mathematical structure — is the genuine word of God, infinitely more reliable than any human text claiming divine authority. The movements of the planets follow laws that any person with the necessary mathematics can verify. The structure of living organisms reveals a design intelligence of extraordinary refinement. These are not claims dependent on testimony or tradition but observable facts that any person with eyes and an open mind can confirm. If you want to know about God, study nature.

Paine's deism is not merely intellectual but moral: if God is known through creation, and if that creation includes human beings with the capacity for reason, love, and justice, then the moral demand of religion is to cultivate and exercise these capacities for the benefit of all. Religious duty consists, as Paine states in his creed, in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy — not in performing rituals, assenting to creeds, or deferring to clerical authority. The practical ethics of deism converges, interestingly, with Tolstoy's stripped-down Christianity: love and justice, without the metaphysical apparatus.

Paine's most consistent target throughout The Age of Reason is the professional clergy — in every religion, not just Christianity. The clergy's interest is institutional: they are paid to maintain the authority of their particular tradition and have every incentive to discourage the kind of independent rational inquiry that Paine regards as the only path to genuine religious knowledge. The invention of a God who communicates through priests and sacred texts that only priests can properly interpret is, Paine argues, a mechanism for ensuring that the priesthood remains indispensable — and that ordinary people remain dependent on their authority rather than developing their own relationship to the divine through reason.

Paine's positive theology in The Age of Reason is in the tradition of English deism (Toland, Tindal, Collins) and draws on Newton's picture of a universe governed by rational laws as evidence of divine intelligence. His argument that the sciences are the truest theology anticipates themes that would later appear in natural theology (Paley) and then in the conflict between science and religion that marked Victorian Britain.