Christopher Hitchens read The Age of Reason in his late teens, in the Cambridge of the early 1960s, and called it (in the introduction to his 2006 Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography) the book that “finally cured me of the religion I had been raised in.” Richard Dawkins put a Paine epigraph (Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system) at the front of The God Delusion. Daniel Dennett invokes Paine in Breaking the Spell as the eighteenth-century model for what twenty-first century philosophical atheism should look like. Sam Harris does not invoke Paine, but his prose has the same bones.
Modern atheism has a Painite genealogy. The argument is worth making carefully because the genealogy runs through deism into something else, and the something else is what the New Atheists added.
What Paine actually wrote in The Age of Reason is a deist book, not an atheist one. The opening profession is unambiguous: I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. The case Paine then mounts in two parts is not against the existence of God. It is against revelation as the source of religious authority. The argument: revelations as such cannot bind any third party. A man who reports a revelation has, at most, an experience that he is asking us to believe; a man who reads a written revelation has, at most, a text whose accuracy he cannot verify and whose interpretation is constantly disputed. Both rest on testimony, and testimony in religious matters has been demonstrably unreliable for as far back as we have records.
What Paine therefore substitutes for revelation is what the eighteenth-century deists called natural religion: the inference of a designing intelligence from the regularity and elegance of the natural world. The argument is the argument from design. Paine, who had taught himself astronomy in Lewes in the 1760s, makes the strongest version of it that any deist made. Part One of The Age of Reason contains a long sequence of pages on the planetary system, the inverse-square law, the fine-tuning of orbital mechanics, that read like a Carl Sagan book a century and a half early. The God of The Age of Reason is the God whose existence the Newtonian universe makes evident.
This is the part the New Atheists have to drop.
The argument from design did not survive Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), which Paine had probably read but did not engage with directly, and it did not survive Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). By the time Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris are writing in the early 2000s, the case for natural religion has lost its strongest evidentiary support. The argument from design is no longer an argument that a serious philosophical atheist needs to refute; it is an argument that has been refuted by the science the argument originally appealed to.
What survives, and what the New Atheists pick up directly from Paine, is the case against revelation. The structure of the New Atheist argument is identical to The Age of Reason’s: scripture is contradictory, prophecy is selective and post-hoc, miracles violate the principle of testimony’s reliability, the moral content of revealed religion is a mixture of admirable and abhorrent, and the interpretive infrastructure of organized religion has historically been a tool of social and political power. Paine makes every one of these arguments in The Age of Reason. The 2006 God Delusion makes them again, in the same order, with two centuries of biblical-criticism scholarship attached. Hitchens’s God is Not Great (2007) is, structurally, The Age of Reason with the deist conclusion stripped off and replaced with secular humanist conclusions about ethics.
The intellectual transition from Paine to the New Atheists is the transition from deism (one God, no revelation) to secular humanism (no claim about God either way, ethics derived from reason and human flourishing rather than revealed law). The transition runs through the nineteenth-century freethought movement (Owen, Holyoake, Bradlaugh, Ingersoll), through the early twentieth-century rationalist associations (the BHA, the AAA, the AHA), and lands in the late twentieth-century philosophical atheism that is the New Atheists’ immediate context.
What does Paine give the modern movement that the modern movement does not give itself?
Three things. First, the moral seriousness about scripture: the New Atheists are mostly literary and journalistic; Paine is a Bible reader, and his close-textual case in Part Two of The Age of Reason (the disagreement of the four Gospels on the resurrection chronology, the textual instability of the Hebrew Bible, the historicity of the Pentateuch) is more rigorous than anything the New Atheists have produced because Paine is doing the close-reading work himself. Hitchens makes some of these arguments; he does not make them with Paine’s specificity.
Second, the political embedding of the argument: Paine’s Age of Reason is not a freestanding philosophical critique. It is embedded in his larger case for republican government. Religion mattered to Paine politically because the established churches of England and France were instruments of political power; the case against revelation was simultaneously a case against the political infrastructure that revelation supported. The New Atheists tend to treat religion as freestanding superstition; Paine treats it as part of a power structure. The modern movement is poorer for the loss.
Third, the charity: Paine writes about religious people he disagreed with as if they were doing the best they could with the materials they had. He is not contemptuous of believers. He is contemptuous of priests, and he is contemptuous of scriptures, but he is consistently respectful of the believer who has not had access to the arguments. The contemporary movement, by contrast, has often turned contempt for the religious into its rhetorical signature, and the result has been to make philosophical atheism harder to recommend to the people who would benefit most from reading it.
Reading The Age of Reason in 2026 is reading a book whose conclusion has been overtaken (no serious philosophical case can be made today for the argument from design as Paine made it) but whose method, register, and political embedding are sharper than what came after.
Both parts are at /works/the-age-of-reason/ and /works/the-age-of-reason-part-2/.