Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, Theologian        Butler was born in 1692 and ordained in 1718. In 1726 he publishedFifteen Sermons, preached at the Rolls Chapel in London, andchiefly dealing with human nature and its implications for ethics andpractical Christian life. He maintained that it is normal for a man tohave an instinct of self-interest, which leads him to seek his own good,and equally normal for him to have an instinct of benevolence, whichleads him to seek the good of others individually and generally, and thatthe two aims do not in fact conflict.He served as parish priest in several parishes, and in 1736 was appointedchaplain to Queen Caroline, wife of King George II. In the same year hepublished his masterpiece, The Analogy of Religion, Natural andRevealed, To the Constitution and Course of Nature (often citedsimply as "Butler's Analogy"), a work chiefly directed against Deism, ofwhich more will be said below. Appended to the main work was a treatise,Of the Nature of Virtue, which establishes him as one of theforemost British writers on ethics, or moral philosophy.When the Queen died in 1737, Butler was made Bishop of Bristol. (InEngland at that time, bishoprics and parish churches were supported eachby a separate source of income that had been established for it perhapscenturies earlier, and in consequence the funding was very unequal.Bristol, being the lowest paid of all bishoprics, was where a new bishopusually started. Later, he might be promoted to another diocese. TheReform movement of the 1830's and its aftermath have remedied thissituation.) However, George II had been impressed with him earlier, andin 1746 he was called back to court and the next year offered the post ofArchbishop of Canterbury. He refused the post, but in 1750 he becameBishop of Durham (in the north of England, near the Scottish border, andwell known even then as having a tradition of bishops whose speeches andwritings attract public attention). He died there on 16 June 1752.And now to return to the subject of Butler and Deism.In the early 1700's, Deism was a religion rapidly gaining ground inintellectual circles in England and France. Not all who called themselvesDeists were agreed on the tenets of the system, but in general it may besaid that a Deist believed in God, and believed that God had revealedhimself in two ways: "the starry heavens above us, and the moral lawwithin us," as Kant put it. An examination of the physical world made itclear that it had been designed by some great intelligence. Ourconscience, or moral faculty, made it clear that certain actions arewrong, and will surely be punished, here or hereafter. Thus, Deistsbelieved in God the Creator and Judge, in the Moral Law, and inimmortality, with rewards and punishments to come.What a Deist emphatically did not believe was that God had revealedhimself through prophets, visions, angels, miracles, inspired writings,and the like. Thus, a Deist was not a Christian, or a Jew, or a Moslem,or a Zoroastrian, or.... In the historical context, what chiefly matteredwas that he was not a Christian. In speaking of Christianity, some Deistsused conciliatory language, saying that the essence of Christianity wasChrist's ethical teaching, which confirmed the teachings of the moralfaculty, and so there was no real disagreement. Others were moreassertive, and spoke at length of all the harm that had been done byfalse prophets (on their view the only kind). The second half of ThomasPaine's The Age of Reason is an example of this. In particular, hecomplained that the Old Testament often represents God as approving orcommanding harsh, cruel, unjust, or murderous conduct; and that the NewTestament claim that salvation comes only through Jesus is inconsistentwith the idea of a just God, since justice means rewarding good deeds andpunishing wicked ones. Paine believed that he had found manycontradictions in the Bible, as well as historical inaccuracies andmorally unacceptable teachings, and he did not hesitate to say so. (I amguilty of an anachronism here, in that Paine wrote in the 1790's, longafter Butler was dead. I simply refer to him because he is the examplethat most readers of this list will find most familiar and mostaccessible. He represents in extreme form a point of view that hadexisted long before him, and which by his own time was in retreat, thanksin large measure to Butler.)Butler's reply to the Deist objections to Christianity could besummarized in a single quote from Origen. "Those who believe the Authorof Nature to be also the Author of Scripture must expect to find inScripture the same sorts of difficulties that they find in Nature." Thus,for example, the Deists would say:The Bible says that God visits the iniquities of the fathersUpon the children to the third and fourth generation. In viewof that teaching, can any decent man be a Christian?Butler's reply would be:According to Deists, we have a sufficient revelation of God inNature, which he created. But in Nature, we find that asexually promiscuous father may give syphilis to his childrenand grandchildren. If a pregnant woman abuses her body invarious ways, her child is likely to have a low birth weight,lowered intelligence, and other problems. If we consult theBook of Nature to learn about God, we conclude that he visitsthe iniquities of the fathers on the children. In view of thatteaching, can any decent man be a Deist?He would then add that it is not a simple matter of finding that bothBible and Nature portray God as wicked, in which case it is better torepudiate both Christianity and Deism and adopt atheism as the only moralposition. Rather, we find that God has so made the world that our actionsaffect others as well as ourselves. A world in which no one could hurtanyone would also be a world in which no one could help anyone. Now aworld in which every thinking being had a planet all to himself would bea world without the possibility of injustice between man and man, but itwould also be a world without the possibility of gratitude between manand man (do I really have to explain that Butler normally uses the word"man" in a gender-inclusive sense?), and it is not clear that it would bea better world than the one we have.Again, the Deist complains bitterly against the doctrine that salvationis ours only through the action of Christ, and that the normal way, atleast, of being saved is through faith in Christ. This seems unfair tothe virtuous pagan, not to mention the virtuous atheist. The gist ofButler's reply is the same. He would say:Consider the following speech: I am an atheist, and I figure that I am great shape. I have all my bets covered. I can do anything I want, while my Christian friends are hemmed in by all kinds of silly restrictions. Sometimes they say to me: "But suppose that there is a God after all. Then your choice doesn't make sense in the long run." I reply that it makes perfect sense. If there is a God, he is not going to blame me for acting on my sincere convictions. He is supposed to be fair, and it is not fair to penalize someone for an honest mistake. Therefore, if there is a God, I am going to be right up there in heaven along with the Christians, so I haven't lost anything. And if, as I suppose, there is no God, then I am certainly better off not spending all that time and money on religion, and being otherwise hemmed in. So, as aforesaid, I have all the possibilities covered. Now, some of my friends have said that I ought not to be so sure that I have nothing to worry about if there is a God. But I say that if the Universe is ruled by a Being who is so unfair that he would punish someone for an honest mistake, then I want nothing to do with such a being. He is mean, and nasty, and unjust, and I defy him. So there!Compare it with another speech:Here I sit in my chemistry lab, with a nice cup of coffee inFront of me, to which I have just added a spoonful of sugar,and which I am now about to drink. My lab partner has justsaid, "Stop! Don't drink that coffee. I was watching, andinstead of adding sugar from the sugar jar, you added cyanidefrom the cyanide jar which is just next to it. If you drink it,it will surely kill you." But I shall pay no attention to thiswarning. I do not think that I am likely to make that sort ofstupid mistake. Besides, if by any chance I am wrong, and thisreally is cyanide, I am in no danger, because I truly andsincerely believe that this is sugar. I am a chemist, and Ihave great faith in the Laws of Chemistry. I know that it isthe Laws of Chemistry that enabled life to originate and evolvein the first place. (Some chemists have given reasons forsupposing that, given the Laws of Chemistry, the development oflife on any planet at a suitable distance from its sun isinevitable.) I owe my life to the Laws of Chemistry. I knowthat those laws are pro-life, that they are on my side. Thesuggestion that those laws would penalize me for an honestmistake, for acting on a sincerely held belief, is ridiculousand blasphemous. If the Laws of Chemistry are really as unjustas that, then I defy the Laws of Chemistry. So there!Having mentioned the two speakers, Butler makes his point:It is most perverse of a Deist to complain that Christians doNot believe in a God who forgives honest error. If a Deistreally got his views of God from a study of Nature, as heclaims, he would find no reason to suppose that God makes anydistinction whatever, as to consequences, between an actcommitted in honest error and the same act committed in wilfulcussedness. The Laws of Chemistry, which God created, make nosuch distinction. Why should the Deist believe that God does?And why should he demand that the Christian believe that Goddoes? In fact, we do have some grounds for supposing that Godis gracious to those who do wrong out of honest error orignorance (see Luke 23:34 and 1 Timothy 1:13), butwe findthese grounds in the study of Scripture, not in the study ofNature.Again, the Deist objects:We are agreed that God is Love, and that he cares for all thoseWhom he has made. But the Bible describes him as slaying thefirst-born of Egypt, and commanding the Israelites to slayeveryone in the city of Jericho, right down to the new-bornbabe. Does the Bible reveal a God of Love?Butler replies:Nature shows us entire towns destroyed by earthquakes orVolcanos, or plague. Worse, every human eventually dies. Why isit consistent with the goodness of God to decide that everyonein Pompeii is to die now, and cause a volcano to kill them, butnot consistent with the goodness of God to decide that everyonein Jericho is to die now, and order Joshua to kill them? We areagreed that there is a life after death, and that makes iteasier to see that ending Jones's life on Tuesday is notnecessarily inconsistent with Jones's longterm best interest.It may seem implausible that everyone in Pompeii, or everyonein Jericho, or everyone on the 747 that crashed, was atprecisely that stage in his life where it was best for him tomove on, but as long as we do not claim to be omniscient, wecan hardly say that we know that it would have been better forsome of them to live longer. What is certainly true is thatthis is no more a problem for the Christian than for the Deist.It may seem that Butler, by proving that Deism has as many problems asChristianity, is simply encouraging Deists to become Atheists. He wouldsay:Deists and Christians both have reason to believe in God. BothHave seen that without God the world simply does not makesense. Both see many things, in Nature or the Scriptures orboth, that are not what we would expect from a good andpowerful God. We wonder about the reasons for them. Sometimeswe can make a plausible guess at the reasons. Sometimes wecannot begin to guess at why God caused or permitted someevent, and yet we continue to believe that there is a goodreason. Is this irrational? Why should it be thought so? Ibelieve in what we may conveniently refer to as the laws ofphysics. When I see a good stage magician at work, he doesthings that I cannot explain in terms of the laws of physics.Nevertheless, I remain convinced that there is a perfectly goodnatural explanation for them. Faced with a choice betweenbelieving that Nature is in fact lawless and supposing thatthat there is some way that I have overlooked of sneaking therabbit into the hat, even though I cannot begin to guess whatit is, I opt for the latter every time. Likewise, faced with adeath (for example) that seems to serve no purpose, and forcedto choose between supposing that there is no God and supposingthat God knows more than I do, I opt for the latter every time,because the latter gives me a universe with a few unsolved (byme) puzzles in it, but the former gives me a universefundamentally without meaning.Incidentally, the above are Not quotations from Butler. They are myattempts to express the gist of Butler's arguments. One of thefrustrating things about reading Butler, for me, is that he almost neveruses examples or illustrations to bring an argument to life. Everythingis stated in terms of general principles, and left there. This, plus thetotal lack of any devotional atmosphere, can make the book, in one sense,very dry reading. On the other hand, many of his sayings are perceptive,insightful, and memorable. I suspect that most readers of Butler willfind themselves often pausing to make a check-mark in the margin (not, ofcourse, if reading a borrowed copy) or reading a remark several times soas to remember it and quote it when appropriate.In its own day, the book had a tremendous influence. David Hume, aradically skeptical philosopher, who did not admire most Christianapologists, admired Butler, and unsuccessfully sought permission todedicate his own work to Butler.PRAYER (traditional language)O God, who by thy Holy Spirit dost give to some the word ofWisdom, to others the word of knowledge, and to others the wordof faith: We praise thy Name for the gifts of grace manifestedin thy servant Joseph Butler, and we pray that thy Church maynever be destitute of such gifts; through Jesus Christ ourLord, who with thee and the same Spirit liveth and reigneth,one God, for ever and ever.PRAYER (contemporary language)O God, who by your Holy Spirit give to some the word of wisdom,To others the word of knowledge, and to others the word offaith: We praise your Name for the gifts of grace manifested inyour servant Joseph Butler, and we pray that your Church maynever be destitute of such gifts; through Jesus Christ ourLord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, oneGod, for ever and ever.Psalm 119:89-86 or 1Wisdom 7:7-14Luke 10:25-28 (St1)Unless otherwise indicated, this biographical sketch was written by James E.Kiefer and any comments about its content should be directed to him.The Biographical Sketches home pagehas more information. |
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