The Age of Reason

Thomas Paine began writing The Age of Reason in Paris in late 1793, while awaiting what he expected to be his execution. He had been arrested by Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety during the Terror — ironically, because he had opposed executing the king. He completed Part One the night before his arrest, entrusting the manuscript to an American friend as he was taken away. He completed Part Two in 1795, after ten months in Luxembourg Prison, during which he came close to dying of illness.

The dramatic circumstances produced a text with unusual urgency. Paine knew he might be writing his last words and chose to write them about the subject he cared most about: the rational foundations of religious belief.

The argument of The Age of Reason is straightforward. Paine was not an atheist — he was a deist, who believed in a God but not in revelation. He accepted the existence of a creator who could be discerned through reason and through the study of nature. What he rejected was the claim that this creator had communicated with humanity through scripture. The Bible, he argued, could not be the word of God because it was internally inconsistent, historically inaccurate, morally objectionable in many passages, and — most fundamentally — had been transmitted through human hands under human circumstances. A book that could have been forged could not be treated as the word of God.

Part One develops the positive case for deism: the universe itself is the revelation, and science is the study of it. Part Two is a systematic examination of the Old and New Testaments, working through specific books and passages to demonstrate their contradictions and implausibilities. It is the earliest sustained work of biblical criticism written in plain English for a popular audience.

The book cost Paine nearly everything. He had returned to America as a hero in 1802, the author of Common Sense. The Age of Reason had turned him into a pariah. Six people attended his funeral in 1809.