Not Quite Deist

Throughout “The Age of Reason”, Thomas Paine criticizes the Bible, calling it "a history of the grossest vices"(Paine 38). Paine suggests that the Bible is unnecessary in proving the existence of God. However, the comparison between the design of Paine’s beliefs of the existence of God and Christianity’s design are much closer than he is willing to admit. Paine claims to be a Deist, although Robert Falk suggests that that he may be more of a mix between deist and Quaker, which may explain he unique view of Christianity. While Paine criticizes the books of the bible and those who blindly cling to them, saying that they are not true revelations but “the works or writings that man has made”(51), he fails to hide his own desire for concrete evidence to the existence of God: “BUT some perhaps will say--Are we to have no word of God --no revelation? I answer yes. There is a Word of God; there is a revelation”( 45). Paine denounces the need for the books of the Bible, saying to “search not the book called the scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation”(46). Yet Paine has a conflicting definition for his idea of scripture, which is defined as: “It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite…. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other” (46).
While Paine may be right that his idea of a revelation and scripture are different from those of the Bible, he is wrong in assuming the purposes of these two things are different. In fact, only his lack of insisting the truth of his ideas of revelations and scriptures differ from those of the Bible. He suggests that scripture called creation shall be spread throughout the world, without the will of man to publish it. But this conflicts with his belief that a true revelation cannot be spread, but instead is only a revelation to the one who had it. In this is where Paine’s and Christianity’s idea of God can be compared, with the result being that Paine’s idea does not require written evidence for the existence of God.

Falk,Robert P. "The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography", Vol. 62, No. 1 (Jan., 1938), pp. 52-63
Paine, Thomas. "The Age of Reason."