The Age of Reason (segment two and conclusion)
As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species
of Atheism- a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to
believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up
chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism
as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an
opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her
opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this
means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the
whole orbit of reason into shade.
The effect of this obscurity has been that of turning everything
upside down, and representing it in reverse, and among the revolutions
it has thus magically produced, it has made a revolution in theology.
That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole
circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the
study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his
works, and is the true theology.
As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the
study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. It is
not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the
works or writings that man has made; and it is not among the least
of the mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that
it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a
beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag
of superstition.
The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits
to be more ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in
the book called the Bible, are theological orations conformable to the
original system of theology. The internal evidence of those orations
proves to a demonstration that the study and contemplation of the
works of creation, and of the power and wisdom of God, revealed and
manifested in those works, made a great part in the religious devotion
of the times in which they were written; and it was this devotional
study and contemplation that led to the discovery of the principles
upon which what are now called sciences are established; and it is
to the discovery of these principles that almost all the arts that
contribute to the convenience of human life owe their existence. Every
principal art has some science for its parent, though the person who
mechanically performs the work does not always, and but very seldom,
perceive the connection.
It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human
invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every
science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and
unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and
governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.
For example: Every person who looks at an almanac sees an
account when an eclipse will take place, and he sees also that it
never fails to take place according to the account there given. This
shows that man is acquainted with the laws by which the heavenly
bodies move. But it would be something worse than ignorance, were
any Church on earth to say that those laws are a human invention. It
would also be ignorance, or something worse, to say that the
scientific principles by the aid of which man is enabled to