Thomas Paine, plurality of worlds

Thomas Paine and the Plurality of Worlds

(Oscar Howell/Harvard University/@00059792/PHIL-E123/W)


Probably the most original, broadly read and accessible argument of the 18th century for natural religion and the plurality of worlds was written by Thomas Paine in his book The Age of Reason, published in 1796. Thomas Paine was an English born Quaker turned pamphletist and propagandist of the American independence movement. Bertrand Russell writes of him, regarding his appeal to a broad public: “Paine’s importance in history consists in the fact that he made the preaching of democracy democratic” (Russell, Why, 134). The Age of Reason was written as a contrarian view to the secularism of the French revolution.

Thomas Paine was a believer in Deism, as were many of his contemporary men of learning and some politicians. But Paine did not abstain from making his theories public in a language that was open to almost everyman to understand and judge.

Deism, a commonly discussed philosophical position in the 17th and 18th century, equals religious knowledge with scientific knowledge. Therefore, religious knowledge can be obtained by every man using reason and scientific methods. Deism sees the world as a machine that follows immutable natural laws. It is a refutation of revealed religion, messianic redemption, scripture, prophecy and the authority of any church.

At the time of Paine, Deism was regarded by the established churches as a line of thought leading to atheism. Paine himself is very clear that his book, “will alarm many, but it would be paying too great a compliment to their credulity to forbear it in that account” (Paine, ch.6, para.2). As a result of the radicalism of the ideas contained in his book Paine suffered prison, denial of citizenship and social ostracism. In future years the idea of Deism would develop to become an element of modern social, scientific and philosophical thought. So much so that Russell remarks about The Age of Reason that “Nowadays, apart from a few passages in bad taste, there is very little that most clergymen would disagree with” (written in 1934) (Russell, Why, 142).

Paine’s concept of the plurality of worlds is found first in chapter 13 of The Age of Reason, where Paine relates that by the use of an “orrery” he was able to conceive “an idea of the infinity of space, and of the eternal divisibility of matter” (Paine, ch.13, para.10). Paine coupled this lockean idea of corpuscular matter with the fact that the earth is copiously populated at every level of extension. The large scale habitat populated by big biological entities and the microscopic habitat by the smallest of insects. Paine combines Deism with a clear notion of the vast dimension of the universe. This process of thought leads Paine to assert that there is no reason to believe that so vast a Creation should be barren and “lying in eternal waste” (Paine, ch.13, para.16). God has created a plurality of worlds, called planets, which should be inhabited at every level. And in the end, so Paine reasons, the idea of plural worlds should prove the “Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous” (Paine, ch.13, para.11). The aim of the book is to cast doubt on the teachings of organized religion by explaining the irrationality of its dogmas.

Paine’s arguments for the existence of plural worlds are contained in chapters 14 and 15 of the book.

The first argument is about the Almightiness of God. Paine asks why should God, with all His Magnificence and Almightiness, choose to endow Creation with just one little inhabited world, if He could as easily create thousands to occupy the vastness of space for His greater Glory and Adoration? This would be an implicit refutation of the infinite power of God and of His Providence.

The second argument is that of the likeness of worlds. It is a fact that there are in the earth minuscule as well as large worlds inhabited by altogether different creatures. Why should this no be the same in the universe and in the other planets as well? Why should we accept the world of man as the sole world before the eyes of God?

The third argument is the argument of the structure of the universe. The planetary system we know by experience and study is a solar system that consists of separate worlds. The sun is at rest in the center and the planets make regular revolutions around it. This mechanism is the structure of the system. It is probable, by the same idea of likeness and repetition of natural laws, that the fixed stars very distant from us are also suns. And that these suns have their own solar systems of planets and revolutions. The repetition of the same structure goes on in the universe in such a manner that no place of the vast space is wasted, “any more than any part of our globe of earth and water is left unoccupied” (Paine, ch.13, para.16)

The fourth argument concerns the benefit of Creation to Man. In reference to Newton’s work, Paine asserts that “all our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions” (Paine, ch.15, para.1) of the planets. If all matter in the solar system would be united in one body, we wouldn’t have been able to acquire the knowledge of the science of mechanics. We did this by the empirical method of observation of the revolutions. God “made nothing in vain” (Paine, ch.15, para.3), from which follows that the structure of the universe must be to the best benefit of man, since we derive from this knowledge a great many mechanical arts “that contribute much to our earthly felicity and comfort” (Paine, ch.15, para.2).

The plurality of the worlds is therefore a gift of God to man and to the inhabitants of the other planets, so that we can have access to the message of God and credit Him with the wisdom of the Creation.

After the exposition of the arguments supporting the existence of multiple worlds with different inhabitants than man, Paine uses his ideas to give form to a critique of the system of faith of the Christian church. He uses the arguments offered for the plurality of the worlds to explain “the strange construction of the Christian system of faith, that every evidence the heavens affords to man, either directly contradicts it or renders it absurd” (Paine, ch.16, para.3)

The first apparent contradiction in Paine’s view is that it seems impossible that God had chosen our world, out of so great a number that exist, to come and die in human form. If every world in the universe were to have the same rightful claim to a crucified redeemer than that of our world, God would use all of His time traveling to every other world and being crucified and dying, instead of going after his business of being God.

Secondly, an inconsistency is found in that the true religion of man must be one and only one. And it should be deducted from the scientific interpretation of the Word of God contained in the universe. The negation of the evident truth in Creation is what creates multiple and false religions, with fallacious dogmatic constructs rendered in the words of religious scripture. God has given man Reason, and man does not need prophetic Revelation by other men. “The word of God is the Creation we behold: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man” (Paine, ch.9, para.2)

The third argument for inconsistency rests on Paine’s assertion that there was a pious fraud perpetrated by the founders of the church, and then mixed with the teachings of Jesus Christ. The pious fraud was intended to liberate the ignorant men from the idolatry of mythology. With time the fraud was regarded as the truth. This fraud was constructed early by the first Christian preachers, and in the years following begat “a calamitous necessity of going on” (Paine, ch.16, para.4), because it could not be explained. The situation was reinforced by the gains obtained by the preachers that guarded and promoted the fraud as the truth. This is evident in the trade with dispensations that the catholic church sold for the salvation of the soul. “The invention of a purgatory, and of the releasing of souls therefrom, by prayers, bought of the church with money; the selling of pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, are revenue laws, without bearing that name or carrying that appearance. But the case nevertheless is, that those things derive their origin from the proxysm of the crucifixion, and the theory deduced therefrom, which was that one person could stand in the place of another, and could perform meritorious services for him.” (Paine, ch.8, para.15). The form the fraud takes is that of the Revelation in scripture, which the church arguments to be God’s word and law.

Men of science have suffered for many years the persecution and impositions of the church. This Paine offers as evidence that the church somehow knew that the original fraud was committed, and that it could not be maintained over time in light of the evidence obtained by science from the study of the structure of the universe.

Deism seems to be a deterministic system of thought. By deterministic I mean here that it predicts future or interrelated behaviors on the basis of a present body of knowledge. The aim of such a system is the search for causal laws and rules and, following its discovery, the application of the logic of induction to obtain inferred knowledge. This method is a way of expediently using only relevant information, and ignoring possible conflictive results. “In our every-day life we guide our conduct by rules of this sort [causal], but the rules that we use purchase simplicity at the expense of accuracy” (Russell, Religion, 146).

Paine’s arguments for a plurality of worlds are inductive in the sense mentioned above. They are based on empirical facts about the known world and on common sense. The results he obtains by the use of this method contain only a probability of truth. I find that the main difficulty with Paine’s arguments is that his reliance on inductive logic makes for a weak argumentation. Nevertheless, he builds a coherent case for the probability of a world beyond our possibility of experimentation.

One of Paine’s inductive arguments is that of likeness or correspondence. If we find in the world various inhabited sub-worlds of every kind and extension, why should it not be so for the universe as a whole. The argument states only a probability which is inferred from actual experience. It can’t be denied upon examination of the known facts. The argument of the structure of the universe is likewise a proposition of inductive logic. It can’t be refuted on grounds of experience or of revelation. Both can be only accepted or not accepted, depending on one’s system of belief and on one’s evaluation of the logic used.

The argument of the benefit to man is contradictory. It relies upon the idea that man is the recipient of the benevolence of Creation. If God wanted the universe to be so, it must be to the best benefit to man. The contradiction is that this is only valid if man is at the center of Creation. But Deism proposes to remove him from the center and to understand the universe as a machine that operates for its own benefit, irrespective of the ability of man, or any other creature, to behold and understand it. God created the world and set it in motion. That is the extent of His involvement. Deism only expects man to make his best effort to understand what is going on. Further, the idea of the world as a machine set in motion is also an apparent refutation of God’s Almightiness, since the world would come to be an externality removed form His influence.

Paine’s arguments against the Christian system are not very consistent upon examination. I think this is due to the difficulty of trying to refute a religious system that is based on faith and revelation using arguments of reason and empirical experience. It can be argued that religion represents a different way of knowing and of knowledge gathering, and that it is impossible to apply the rules of natural religion to a revealed religion that rests on faith and gnosis. Further, it can be argued that the scriptures of revealed religion are a poetic compendium and tradition of a culture, that enables man to understand truths that are beyond historical and worldly facts. One can compare revealed religion to other valid sources of knowledge gathering used by various cultures, like divination, because “questions, problems and choices arise for which everyday knowledge is insufficient […] That is why divination continues to provide a trusted means of decision making, a basic source of vital knowledge” (Peek, 172). My point here is that not every valid source of knowledge of a culture must be scientific or empirical. Specially when scientific knowledge is not only insufficient but unavailable. For example due to a lack of formal education.

The first problem we encounter in Paine’s arguments is that of the ubiquitousness of God. Why should God, who is regarded as being Almighty by Paine himself, have to travel from world to world eternally to redeem its inhabitants? God is everywhere at the same time. To propose such an argument would mean a refutation of His Almightiness, and consequently of the ability to set in motion the machine of the universe.

Then there is the proposition of the one and only religion, as contained in the structure of the universe, the Word of God. Paine constructs a categorical syllogism, in the form of: All obtainable knowledge is in the structure of the universe, all religion is knowledge, therefore religion must have its origin in the structure of the universe.

This argumentation has several difficulties. the first of which is that it can’t be developed in a deductive form. The assertion that “all obtainable knowledge is in the structure of the universe” is in itself a proposition of Deism, which here is assumed to be true. The justification for this assumption may be that all knowledge comes from the senses, from experience. But one could think of a philosophical system in which there are pure metaphysical ideas that are beyond actual human experience. Without assuming now the burden of proving or disproving any one system, the fact that there are valid alternate views on the origin of knowledge makes the main assumption in the argument invalid. Which in turn invalidates the whole construction of the argumentation.

Secondly, the argument in this form proposes the existence of only one true religion. Such an argument is normative. If we use reason and the same inductive methods that Paine advances, we will be quickly persuaded that the way the world is, and by extension the universe, is that there are as many religions as there are human communities. We would be convinced that this is a fact that can’t be changed, and that there is a plurality of belief systems as well as a plurality of worlds.

Then, lastly, it remains the argument of the original fraud, and its tributary, the persecution suffered by men of science by the keepers of the fraud. To present the Christian religion as fraudulent seems to me to be the best example of the propagandistic intentions of the book. It might well be that the origins of the Christian system are intertwined with the necessity of having a political construct that gave form to the church and to the holy roman empire, and that the considerations of the fathers and bishops of the church were to maintain a position of power than to be guided by the underlying faith. It might be that the true Christian religion got lost in the maze of history, interests and corruption. But there must be a better way to handle this than proposing a fraud in the manner of resentment against the establishment. The argument should be based on theological facts, rather than in a search for wrongdoing on any part. The Christian system is not to be judged, it is to be explained as that what it is, a cultural and historical phenomenon.

Thus, on assessing Paine’s arguments one must concede that the proposition of the plurality of the worlds is a logical and reasonable construct, with a probability of being true. But its denunciation of the Christian system is misguided and calls for a vindication, since it can’t be derived from the plurality of the worlds that the Christian system is evil and faulty. At least not in the terms of Paine’s considerations and expositions.

Moreover, we don’t even need the proposal of the system of plural worlds to make the argument. One only need to regard ancient cultures in every part of the earth, and propose them to be like other worlds or planets, since they had no relation whatsoever to our western community. To advance a proof of the point that the message of Creation is distributed to all in the same fundamental form, one can elaborate on the fact that most cultures arrived to the same empirical conclusions than the western culture. They discovered the movements of the planets and the mathematical and seasonal implications of them, that is, they reaped Paine’s “benefits to man”. Albeit not in the manner and elegance of an Isaac Newton. But the underlying structure is there. But it is also a fact that all of them had widely divergent religious beliefs. This makes an argument for the one and only natural religion codified in the heavens very difficult.



Bibliography.
Paine, Thomas. “The Age of Reason”. The Secular Web Library. http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/part1.html
Peek, Philip M. “Divination: A way of Knowing?”. In African Philosophy. An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies), edited by E. Chukwudi Eze, 171-173. Malden, MA: Wiley, 1997.
Russell, Bertrand. Why I am not a Christian. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1957.
---. Religion and Science. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, Oxford University Press, 1997.