Thomas Paine pwns organized religion, part 1: Miracles

I've finished Part I of The Age of Reason. It's full of excellent, but it's the last chapter, Chapter XVII, that really shines. You know it's going to be good with a title like this: Of the Means Employed in All Times, And Almost Universally, To Deceive the Peoples.

Paine identifies three things that are used as means of deception: Mystery,

Image by --Tico-- via Flickr

Miracle, and Prophecy. Mystery he dispenses with in a prefunctory manner. Anyone who has heard George Carlin's old routines about growing up Catholic will be familiar with it -- it's a dodge, nothing else, something with which to shove uncomfortable questions away.


Miracles, though, that he spends some time on. I loved his discussion of miracles, not only because of the devastating fusillade that he levels against the notion, but because it exposes an aspect of belief in miracles I had never really considered before: the incredible arrogance it betrays.

His main attack on the idea of miracles is that the whole idea is presaged on knowing what is possible and what is not:

Mankind have conceived to themselves certain laws, by which what they call nature is supposed to act; and that a miracle is something contrary to the operation and effect of those laws. But unless we know the whole extent of those laws, and of what are commonly called the powers of nature, we are not able to judge whether any thing that may appear to us wonderful or miraculous, be within, or be beyond, or be contrary to, her natural power of acting.

Essentially, we don't know all the laws of nature, and unless we do, it is premature to declare an event as being beyond their power, not to mention a bit presumptuous. Paine goes on illustrate with example (how a man floating high in the air would've seemed "miraculous" to people, but then balloons were invented) and then moves on to the second objection, namely Art: it is possible to create the appearance of a thing. He notes a performance in Paris wherein "ghosts" were shown, not to bamboozle, but for entertainment. The effect, he says, was quite astonishing. So, you have to not only know the full extent of natural law, but you have to know how far Art can go in creating illusion, before you can make a claim that something is a miracle.

It really strikes me, mulling over his argument, the arrogance that belief in miracles entails. To claim such knowledge! To claim to know what exactly is possible and impossible, not only in nature, but in art! What amazes me, over two centuries later, is that people still make that kind of claim. Science has been sitting us on our asses again and again. At each stage we find new marvels, new things we didn't even know could exist, and we also learn about whole new realms of knowledge in which we are ignorant. And Art? Could the performers of Paine's day even dream of the kinds of illusion that are created in today's movies, or that magicians like Penn and Teller perform in Vegas?

And they call rationalists arrogant. Hah!

Coming up soon: Prophecy, and the other line of attack that Paine uses on Miracles. Or, why Paine, as a believer in God, is really a bit perturbed the very notion.

A Failure of Imagination

I'm reading Thomas Paine right now, The Age of Reason, and he provides the

Image via Wikipedia

perfect opportunity to talk about one of the themes that will come up here:  imagination, and the failure thereof. Here's Paine, in Chapter 10 of the Part 1:

In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence to himself, that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising from this evidence, that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist; and this first cause, man calls God.

The reasoning here is familiar to everyone. I have no wish to refute it. I'm after a different fish:  how it represents a failure of imagination.

What Paine does here -- and what the whole Argument from Design does -- is a basic exercise of imagination. He takes his own experience, and extrapolates from that to reason about something he doesn't have direct experience of. We can call this the first step in imagination. It's an important one, and damn handy. Heck, it's this ability that probably makes our brains such handy blobs of cells to have on hand. We use it all the time -- in trying to understand nature, and even just to understand each other.

The usefulness of it, though, has limits. Our failure of imagination comes in how often we forget that, and settle for that first step. Whether it's Paine making an analogy about makers, or a person trying to decide why their lover is pissed at them, we often stop right there with the first, simple extrapolation from our own experience. We don't go the next step, and ask the Big Question: Yeah, but is it true? That's when imagination truly soars. It's one thing to posit that Nature, like the items we create, must have a creator -- it's another to then ask, but is that true, or could something else be true? Do our experiences fail us here?

Science has shown us, after all, that our experiences and perceptions fail us all the time. Our senses only show us part of the universe. Our brains don't wrap themselves easily around Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. And Evolution has shown us that the appearance of design is by no means a sure sign that design, in fact, exists.

My biggest gripe with religion is just that failure of imagination:  it settles for the simple analogy, with its horizons set firmly in the boundaries of the human mind. I won't beat up on religion too hard, though, because it's a common human failing -- heck, I could write several books about the ways I've fallen into that trap. But all the incredible stuff we humans have accomplished in the past few hundred years -- all the science and technology, the social advances, you name it -- has come from that second step of the imagination, the daring to envision the possibility that there could be another answer, another possibility. The daring, at the end of the day, to imagine possibilities outside of the confines of our own heads.