Reason, The Only Oracle Of Man: Or a Compendious System of Natural Religion

by Ethan Allen

About the author: Ethan Allen (January 21, 1738– February 12, 1789) was a farmer; businessman; land speculator; philosopher; writer; and American Revolutionary War patriot, hero, and politician. He is best known as one of the founders of the U.S. state of Vermont, and for the capture of Fort Ticonderoga early in the American Revolutionary War along with Benedict Arnold. When he moved to Salisbury, Allen met Thomas Young, a doctor living and practicing just across the provincial boundary in New York. The doctor, only five years older than Allen, taught the younger Allen a great deal about philosophy and political theory, while Allen was able to bring to Young his appreciation of nature and life on the frontier. Young and Allen eventually decided to collaborate on a book intended to be an attack on organized religion, as Young had convinced Allen to become a Deist. They worked on the manuscript until 1764, when Young moved away from the area, taking the manuscript with him. It was not until many years later, after Young's death, that Allen was able to recover the manuscript. He expanded and reworked the material, and eventually published it as Reason: the Only Oracle of Man. he recovered the manuscript that he and Thomas Young had worked in his youth from Young's widow, who was living in Albany, and began to develop it into the work that was published in 1785 as Reason: the Only Oracle of Man. The work was a typical Allen polemic, but its target was religious, not political. Specifically targeted against Christianity, it was an unbridled attack against the Bible, established churches, and the powers of the priesthood. As a replacement for organized religion, he espoused a mixture of deism, Spinoza's naturalist views, and precursors of Transcendentalism, with man acting as a free agent within the natural world. While historians disagree over the exact authorship of the work, the writing contains clear indications of Allen's style. The book was a complete financial and critical failure. Allen's publisher had forced him to pay the publication costs up front, and only 200 of the 1,500 volumes printed were sold. (The rest were eventually destroyed by a fire at the publisher's house.) The theologically conservative future president of Yale, Timothy Dwight, opined that "the style was crude and vulgar, and the sentiments were coarser than the style. The arguments were flimsy and unmeaning, and the conclusions were fastened upon the premises by mere force."Allen took the financial loss and the criticism in stride, observing that most of the critics were clergymen, whose livelihood he was attacking.

This pre-1923 publication has been converted from its original format for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the conversion.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, History

476 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1784

About the author

The "green mountain boys," troops of Revolutionary soldier Ethan Allen, helped to capture Fort Ticonderoga from the British in 1775 for America.

The province of New York settled Vermont, and this early guerrilla leader fought against this settlement and later for independence during the war.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Jim Razinha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Touted on the deism.com website as "a hard hitting attack on superstition and 'revealed' religion while encouraging the replacement of superstition in our lives and in our ideas of God with God-given reason", this book forgets its own objective throughout - and certainly bamboozled the deists over there.

Allen (and Young) criticized organized religion in general and Christianity in particular, but his Deist assumptions fail in the face of actual reason. Now, his arguments are sound (and quite well written), but he seemed to only want to question the organization and not himself. His own superstitions are rampant, but as he casts his beliefs as "reason" based - without qualification or justification - while disparaging Christian dogma as "tend[ing] to superstition and idolatry", the entire text rang sour.

Disappointed, but enlightened. I had not read any Ethan Allen, and so I learned how learned he was.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I became aware of the work from the book Did America Have a Christian Founding which referenced Allen and the book Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. Allen was a colonel in the continental army known for his role in taking Fort Ticonderoga and founding Vermont but this book effectively ruined his reputation. Supposedly this is the first public work on deism in the United States published in 1785 even before Paine’s Age of Reason in 1795, and its title is similar to Charles Blount’s 1693 Oracles of Reason. Allen may not have written the book even though he claimed no other source than the bible. The book doesn’t compare to the style of Paine or other deists and is mainly for historical interest.

Effectively the deist position is firstly that god is known by reason not revelation, secondly that the universe is causally closed (naturalism) so that god does not operate or intervene in the universe outside of natural laws, which ultimately means god cannot be imagined and is indifferent to human activity so is a one way relationship from god causally and one way from humanity emotionally and intellectually. Allen differs from the common understanding of deism in that the universe is eternal, the first cause being literally the first thing in existence rather than first in time which may be called pandeism. Deism is thought of as a stepping stone to atheism but in retrospect was a minimum (or maximum) set of beliefs a reasonable person could hold from reason alone but was not successful in replacing the powerful emotional and social needs of religion. My interest in deism is mainly from a political standpoint as a civil religion in a religiously diverse society such as the United States.

[Peter Pryfogle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a good book to read. I became interested in this book while reading "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic" by Matthew Stewart and I was glad I took the effort to find it and read it. The book provides an interesting look and approach to God from the perspective of a natural God based upon man's ability to increase knowledge and make intelligent and reasonable decisions.

[Peter J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a tremendously powerful work. It should be read by any seeking a god and an understanding of their own soul, in this culture that often thinks of itself as having outgrown such unfashionable notions.
This work very much reminded me of Paine's "Age of Reason", yet was more logical and less vitriolic. Being a deist, I was very much encouraged by this.

[Cormacjosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Precedes the age of reason by about 12 years or so, but its pretty much the same opinions. Praising the enlightenment deistic vision of God, polite yet critical of Jews and Christians. Highly recommended

[Onyango Makagutu · Rating 5 out of 5]

great read

[Patrick Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written before Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason" this book was, some believe, written by Ethan Allen and it is credited to him. Some also believe that Allen did not have the education or thoughtfulness to write in such a way but it has never been proven.

The book is a short read but Allen makes his points clear and concise about Christianity, Judaism and popular religion in general. He is not a fan of the way it is taught or believing it in general, he is a deist through and through and explains why.

It's an interesting read although I preferred "Age of Reason" or Joseph Priestley's religious writings even though they came from a different angle. Thomas Jefferson's letters to his nephew regarding religion were insightful to the time and thought process as well.

[Stephan Naro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pity about the deism (which a little more reflection might have cured him of*), but a lot of very good arguments concerning "revealed religion".

* Since he argues earlier in the book that "God" is supernatural, and that we can know nothing about anything supernatural, his claim at the end of the book that "All our knowledge of things is derived from God" seems poorly thought out.

[Wesley J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A needed and necessary apologetic.

The language, cumbersome and verbose by today’s standards, employed by Allen beautifully articulates the intellectual disconnect between reason and reviled religion. This is a foundational reading for anyone acknowledging the existence of a creator but rejecting the intermediary individuals, dogma and institutional barriers religions place between humanity, as part of nature, and of nature’s creator.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea that God exists, but is more explainable than we think