Thomas Paine - Deist or Quaker - Book Report/Review Example

Thomas Paine - Deist or Quaker? Civilizations are created through the existence of human institutions that serve some purpose beyond the fact of their organizing and unifying power. The largest human institutions have typically taken, in Western civilization at least, the form of religions, which give individuals some structural doctrine and a way to practice this doctrine. This concept of organized religion, around the exclusive revelation of a prophet, gives great power to the central Church. In modern times, such religious institutions have given ground to scientific institutions in the form of Universities, research institutions, and other intellectually-driven associations. The gradual changes that have occurred with these shifts from religious to scientific institutions gives one a general idea of religious or scientific progress, where progress is the positive development toward achieving a worthwhile goal. Notions of progress are especially apparent in literature such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason”, which propose and account for different kinds of progress. Although these two works account for these different kinds of progress, they still bear striking similarities in tone and content. This may be explained by the convergence of scientific and religious explanations for the same phenomena in the modern world, especially as science and religion are being pushed into a single realm: the realm of reason. Thomas Paine envisioned a world in which all aspects of human life are critically evaluated with a rational frame of mind. Therefore, Paine advocates a kind of “rational religion” of deism, which escapes the apparent emotionalism and claptrap of divine revelation. The convergence of science and religion into the realm of reason results in a work like Hawking’s, which is focused on the interplay of different kinds of explanation that have existed throughout time. Fundamentally, however, both Hawking and Paine support the gradual shift of all human intellectual and investigative affairs into the realm of what makes a person essentially a human being: the faculty of reason. The means of communication called writing takes a form on the page that other forms of communication, like speaking or listening, cannot. Often, a writer will try to emulate a form of speaking that fits with the theme of the content. The advantage of writing is that one can spread his or her message to a wider audience, wider than if one engaged audiences in speaking. Thus, it is important before even looking at the content of one’s writings, to look at the typology of how the written word is put on the page, and the context in which it is put on the page. Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason” was written in the form of a pamphlet, a popular form of written literature in particularly 17TH and 18th century Britain and America. Paine used the pamphlet to compress his ideas and arguments into a tight space, and to disseminate these ideas to a very wide audience, because of the cheap production costs of printing the pamphlets. Therefore, Paine’s rhetoric is both rich and dense. The pamphlet of this earlier time in American history can be compared to the place that the paperback book has in a contemporary context. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is considerably longer than Paine’s work, and as such contains much more history than Paine contains, but also contains far fewer direct lines of argument. Hawking’s book tries to inform the reader of a certain line of history, in order to let the reader participate in a conversation with the writer. The writer, once the reader is well-informed, can engage the reader with subtle hints at a new worldview that stresses the importance of a mainly and thoroughly naturalistic conception of the universe. Hawking’s book is constructed around the kind of knowledge he wants to pass on to his readers, with chapters titled “The Uncertainty Principle” and “Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature”. Hawking ties these subject matters in the physical sciences to his Chapter 12 conclusion, which extrapolates on observations made throughout the course of the book, applying them to issues such as religion and reason, which are subjects that are incidentally very important to Paine. These differences in format, of course, consequently lead to notable differences in the writing styles of the two authors. Thomas Paine is known for his simple, clear, and straightforward use of language to persuade his audiences (Foner). This is because his pamphlets reached a wide variety of people, due to their cheapness and wide dissemination. He used this clear and concise style with great effectiveness, especially in “The Age of Reason”, in which he tries to convince everyday people of the rational religion and the evils of institutionalized worship. However, the underlying purpose of using the conciseness that Paine’s language shows is primarily rhetorical in Paine. In Hawking, on the other hand, who also uses a simple, clear, and straightforward writing style, the purpose is instructive. Like a good teacher, Hawking explains things for a general audience. Nevertheless, it may be the case that Hawking is attempting to educate his readership so that they can engage in arguments on the subject, which would make the purpose behind his writing style rhetorical as well. But this does not change the fact that the first-order purpose of the way Hawking, a university professor, writes is to educate and inform. This question of the way in which both authors writes leads directly into the question of the content of what they are writing. Paine’s writing caused his critics to condemn him for vulgarity, which refers to language directed at lower- and middle-classes. This made his content accessible to all people, and not just the aristocrats who were often the ones reading and writing about complex theological questions like that of deism. Likewise, Stephen Hawking writes about very intricate, mathematical topics like the general theory of relativity and quantum physics in an approachable, qualitative fashion, which lowers the intellectual barriers to entry into the subject for his readers. Because his readers can access the information and concepts he is putting down on the page, they are able to take part in conversations about these topics, which will in turn enable them to agree with, and argue for, Hawking’s central ideologies. Paine’s arguments deal almost exclusively with the place of religion in Western society, and in particular, the daily lives of the people in his post-colonial American community. Paine saw political change like that seen during the Revolutionary War as only possible with widespread change in the religious lives of those in the shift toward individual liberty (Prochaska). A focus on religion and politics thematically separates Paine from Hawking in their respective works. However, Hawking’s treatment of science follows the kind of track that Paine rides down toward a belief in the necessity of a rational religion. Hawking’s work, it seems, displays an incredible subtly when it comes to topics of values rather than facts. A Brief History of Time is a book constructed around information from an esteemed professor and his expert testimony. These facts are laid down in the form of a history of ideas relating to the physical sciences. But Hawking chooses to slip elements of ideology between the facts to fill the gaps and resolved the “unresolved conflict” (Sachs 543). The injection of beliefs into scientific facts makes differentiating the two difficult. But Paine engages in the same practice through “The Age of Reason” as he attempts to defend religious belief and criticism of existing institutions by means of Newtonian physics, an outdated scientific paradigm. The objective, knowable universe Newton generated in his theories left little room for revelation in Paine’s view, and that “knowledge” through revelation is unverifiable and hearsay. On these points, Paine develops his deistic conception of the godhead, essentially filling in the gaps (inconsistencies in religious doctrine with physical science). This parallel between Paine and Hawking is interesting as well since, as Mendel Sachs points out, “such claims have been made throughout the history of science, each time not too long before some major upheaval in scientific ideas” (Sachs 543). Hawking’s claims about a place of religion are based on scientific theories that could turn out to be false, much like Paine’s use of Newtonian physics. But Paine ties science to his minimalist religion in a way that Hawking simply does not or cannot. He says in Chapter XI of Part I, “The Almighty lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if he had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, ‘I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts’” (Paine). Paine therefore regards the deistic god as the center and creator of the universe, but involved only indirectly in the current affairs of the universe. God, to Paine, is still necessary for science, but not as a separate and mutually exclusive explanation as people today tend to think. The alternate way of thinking is expressed often in Hawking as incommensurability between a belief in the Big Bang in terms of a scientific, quantum explanation of a singularity, and a belief in the ex nihilo creation of the universe. Paine talks about the teaching of science in terms of the accomplishments of individual scientists as the cause of atheism, which Paine clearly does not support. To be clear, there exists a much wider gulf between atheism and deism than there does between deism and theism. Deism, a form of theism, does not adhere to the kinds of human institutional forms that set apart traditional forms of theism. Therefore, Paine does not support secularization of ideas. He supports the idea of “teaching science religiously in addition to the idea of teaching religion scientifically” (Roper 102). Hawking paints the contrast between religious and scientific explanations as mutually exclusive by saying God (and therefore religious understandings) is confined to areas science cannot understand (Hawking). Paine’s deistic view of the universe also propels him to understand the world not in terms of opinions from printed sources, but in terms of the “book of creation” or “God’s book”, by which he means nature (Roper 104). Paine sees a natural world as the subject of science, and a natural world as equivalent to God. The issue of the natural world is an interesting one when we consider contemporary debates about a belief system called naturalism, which refers to a doctrine rejecting all spiritual (or rather supernatural explanations of the world), that often summarizes scientific views characterized by those of Hawking in A Brief History of Time. To the devout religious Christian, a history of time is already given in the Scriptures, which reflects the infallible (that point is disputed by Paine) Word of God. However, Hawking’s beliefs conform to a form of naturalism that seeks a separate truth outside of that provided by Christian theists. This contrast between Hawking’s naturalism and the Christian theism he has in mind as he is writing, is a result of a scarcity of deist perspectives like that of Paine and other Enlightenment thinkers. The opposition between religion and science that is broken down in Paine’s pamphlet is unthinkable in the context of Hawking’s work, because of the dominance of theism, which incorporates the element of revelation that Paine so eloquently rejected in “The Age of Reason”. Paine’s deist perspective allows him to ground the principles, or laws, of nature in a perfect creator, which is something Hawking cannot do definitively near the end of his book. He discussed the determinism of Laplace and how nineteenth-century failed to produce the perfect model of the universe scientists had hoped. Part of the reason for this failure seems to be the lack of an explanation for why, even though he claims scientists can explain the how fairly well. He says that even if there is one unified theory, in the form of a set of rules and laws, there still must be something that “breathes fire” into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. Paine, unlike Hawking, has no trouble explaining this, and explaining it in his view rationally. However, Hawking cannot tie a theistic conception of the universe to a scientific one. Although the two writers encounter the same problem, they are working in two very different sets of intellectual circumstances. Hawking’s writings in this conclusion seem to suggest, or hint at, the existence of a divine order that organizes and galvanizes universal laws of nature. Nevertheless, the assumption that laws of nature are actually existing things (which Paine shares) is just that: an assumption. Moreover, this assumption that there are laws of nature governing the order of the universe does seem to entail the existence of an organizing principle, as Hawking suggests. Hawking has claimed that, “My goal is the complete understanding of the universe” (Beers 47), suggesting the possibility of some kind of derived, god-like knowledge of the reality behind the appearances. On that point, the professor does seem to acknowledge an argument like that of Paine, except not being as explicit as Paine is in terms of a religious sentiment. Hawking is careful neither to advocate nor to rule out certain spiritual systems, such as deism, atheism, and theism. He often acknowledges that a god may have created the universe, but questions why such a god would be necessary given the system he created. In terms of explanation, Hawking does acknowledge that the role of God is shrinking, and has been ever since the renaissance in physics that began with Galileo and Kepler. This is interesting, given the role of god in explanation in American society during Paine’s time. The deism Paine favors requires “reason for knowledge of its god” (Falk 53). Theism, according to Paine’s criticism, is driven by a belief in revelation, which seems to be a faculty outside of reason, since the perception of revelation is by definition available only the perceiver, whereas reason is a universal faculty. Therefore, as religious belief moves away from reason and toward emotion, the gulf between reason and science becomes larger. This drifting apart of the two institution leads one to the time Hawking wrote his work in which religion is focused on reasoned investigation, and religion is a matter of piety and faith. Hawking seems to exhibit the same kind of emotional commitment to science that we often see in worshipers of religion. He puts his faith in science in much the same way; trusting science to answer the questions traditionally left to religion. He hopes an answer will come in a form of a unified theory of everything, and in turn give him “the complete understanding of the universe”. In this sense, Hawking and Paine agree on the synthesis of elements from both religion and science. However, the direction each is taking is the opposite from the other. Paine is taking religion and moving it into the realm of reason. Hawking is taking science and forming a religion from faith in its ability to supply answers to man’s deepest questions. Paine does this by reviewing errors in the thinking and practices of religious institutions, while Hawking examines and recounts errors in scientific thinking. Each of these represents religious and scientific progress respectively. Hawking and Paine support the paradigm shift of all human institutions and affairs into the realm of reason. Each author proposes integrations of these institutions, where Paine treats religion scientifically, Hawking treats science religiously. By advocating for these integrations, each author believes himself to be an advocate for a kind of progress that pushes for answers to the questions neither believes one can provide alone. Paine does not believe one can understand the world by ignoring the creation. Hawking does not believe a unified theory of everything is actually complete without an answer to why. These two works, “The Age of Reason” and A Brief History of Time, are similar in their tone, style, and content. Fundamentally, each sees it as necessary to abandon old ways of thinking in exchange for new, rational waves of thought. It is unclear whether Paine or Hawking’s plans for progress will yield the kind of progress they wish to see, but both Paine and Hawking construct their rhetoric in a way that appeals to a general audience, opening up the debate to the masses. Works Cited Beers, David. "Errol Morris, film's best-known bottom feeder, travels through time with a skywalker." Mother Jones Magazine May-June 1992: 46-47. Falk, Robert P. "Thomas Paine: Deist or Quaker?" The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 62, No. 1 (1938): 52-63. Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. London: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam, 1988. Paine, Thomas. "The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology." Philadelphia, 1794. Prochaska, Franklyn K. "Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason Revisited." Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 33, No. 4 (1972): 561-576. Roper, Ralph C. "Thomas Paine: Scientist-Religionist." The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (1944): 103-111. Sachs, Mendel. "On Hawking's A Brief History of Time and the Present State of Physics." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 44, No. 3 (1993): 543-547. Read More