Reason and Revelation
Paine begins The Age of Reason by attacking revelation. Revelation, he maintains, can only be verified by the individual receivers of the message and is therefore weak evidence for God's existence. Paine rejects prophecies and miracles, writing: "it is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it". 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". Paine takes this argument even further, 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 will do just this, pointing out numerous contradictions in the Bible.
Read more about this topic: The Age Of Reason, Structure and Major Arguments
Famous quotes containing the words reason and/or revelation:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal father of light, and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural facilities: Revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives, that they come from God.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)