Thomas Paine pwns organized religion, part 2: Prophecy

Before the Great Death Plague '09 hit me, you may recall that I had a post on Thomas Paine's discussion of the three tools that organized religion uses to bamboozle people: Mystery, Miracles and Prophecy. Mystery he dispensed with quick contempt; Miracles he spent a bit more time on. He finishes his discussion with the notion of Prophecy.

Paine basically has two points to make about Prophecy:

First, if God did choose to communicate future events to chosen "prophets," one would expect that those communications would be a lot clearer than the ones we see in the Bible. Instead of clarity, we have confusion; instead of easily comprehensible meaning, we have obscure statements that can be twisted to fit most anything. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty," Paine says, "to suppose he would deal in this jesting manner with mankind; yet all the things called prophecies in the book called the Bible come under this description."

But secondly, and more devastatingly, Paine simply notes this:  it ain't no never mind, kids. It's exactly the same situation as with Miracles -- say you get a Prophecy from God. Fine. How do the rest of us know you did? We don't. We can't. We can't tell if you are lying, or telling the truth. Imagine if Isiah, say, was in fact given important facts about the life of Jesus -- none of the people around him would have any ability to tell whether he was telling the truth or not, because those events lay far in the future. And even if he were to speak of things in the near future and get them right, how do we know he did so because God spoke to him? We can't. He could be a savvy observer of events; he could've guessed and gotten lucky. He could've read something from a savvy observer. Prophecy is personal experience, and thus can't be considered in any kind of rational thought process. It's like expecting other people to believe you saw a ghost just because you're sure you did.


What I find most interesting, though, is the attitude that Paine shows in all of this. It's contained in that quote I used above. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty..." Paine is a believer. He believed in God. He believed God to be powerful, an Beneficent Creator who had showered mankind with gifts. When push comes to shove, Paine's beef is simply this:  Christianity, and indeed all organized religion, spits in the face of God, hacks away at Him until he is a small and puny thing fit to sit in the confines of weak human imagination. A God who would use such tricks as Mystery, Miracle and Prophecy is worse than a clown, and simply not something worthy of worship.

As an atheist, I sympathize with Paine here. My biggest complaint with religion

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has always been just that -- it is so small, so limited, putting up images that don't challenge our small imaginations in any way. It's easy to laugh at people who, say, see Jesus in a tortilla or a dog's butt -- but really, that's pretty much what organized religion does. It creates small, tiny plays, with small, tiny actors, played out on small, tiny stages. The "religious imagination" is so easily pleased! The vaguest statement can be accepted as a stirring Prophecy. The silliest, flimsiest events can be declared a Miracle. And when in doubt, simply declare something to be a Mystery. Paine, as you may recall from the last post, titled this chapter "Of the Means Employed in All Time, and Almost Universally, to Deceive the Peoples." He forgot, perhaps, to note that they are as much the ways that "the Peoples" deceive themselves. This priestly tricks work because people are so willing to let them work.

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,

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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

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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.