John Toland’s most interesting argument is about the necessity of rational religion, and that nothing in religion is above or contrary to reason. The concept of divine intervention and Providence are proclaimed widely by Christianity and are referred to by Toland as the Mysteries of the Christian Religion. They tell us that we must revere what we do no and cannot understand. The church does not merely tell you that you must accept these so called truths as infallible, but demands it. They enforce is with such strength that they deem those who dare to question heretics.
John Toland’s First issue is the lack of consistency. The separation of orthodox and Protestant. That if you side with one party, the other declares that you are hell-bound, and that if you do not make a choice, it is not better only worse as both sides proclaim you as going against god.
Many of the church claim that the “mysteries” of the Gospel are only able to be understood in the sense of the “Ancient Fathers” which refers to early christian writers and theologians but Toland criticizes this argument, as it is inconsistent with itself. Those ancient fathers cautioned against Readers from leaning upon their authority without evidence of Reason. Toland also claims that since those Fathers were not authors we cannot claim to have their genuine sense. The worlds they have written have been so wonderfully corrupted and adulterated or are not entirely complete, and if they were then the meaning behind them is so obscure that it is so much less clear and subject to controversy then that of scripture.
Besides the so called “Ancient Fathers” there are also the “Doctors” which refers to individuals like Saints and Archbishops who held religious authority and created or defended doctrines of faith, but Toland rejects these arguments. He claims that these doctors do not agree with each other nor all the Ancient Fathers, and that they were men and woman, not something beyond that. They are just as prone to violence and falsity as anyone else, and that they had no privilege bestowed upon them by Heaven that would allow them to proclaim their word as truth.
Ultimately the first issue Toland seems to have is that even the people at the top, who supposedly are the most faithful, and whose understanding of god greater than the common man, those men cannot even agree upon themselves what is true.
Some people argue that we may use reason as the instrument but not the rule of our belief, meaning that they will use their senses to understand the world but will reject those senses and reason if it goes against religion. Others claim that mystery is not contrary reason but above it. Toland rejects both of these arguments.
Reason is the foundation of all certitude, and nothing that is revealed whether as to its manner or existence is more exempted from its disquisitions, than the ordinary Phenomena of Nature, and thus there is nothing in Gospel that is contrary to reason nor above it, and no Christian Doctrine can be properly called a Mystery. This essentially means that 1. Reason is the only way to be certain of anything. 2. That not even religion is exempt from rational investigation, and that 3. Any religious doctrine that cannot be understood by reason cannot be accepted as divine truth.
All of the above is the basics of Tolands argument. Now, we will discuss the proof.
First, reason, or rather what is not reason. One misconception is that the soul is reason. This is inaccurate rather reason is the soul acting in a particular way. Reason is also not “That order, report or relation which is naturally between all things” because it is not this but instead the thoughts that the soul forms according to it that can be called reason.
Everyone has within themselves the capacity for the formation of thought. the formation of ideas or perceptions of things, of affirming or denying, of agreeing or disagreeing and of loving or hating. The correct use of this ability is called common sense, or Reason in general. Simply receiving ideas in the mind, your sense perception is simply consciousness.
Knowing, Affirming, or Denying without further thought is not reason, but the soul acting passively. When you look at something, you not only have an idea of a picture, but you also consider it. You think “do I like this?” and “do I want this to be mine?” there is a second level to simple perception.
The word idea means :”the immediate Object of the Mind when it thinks, or any Thought that the Mind employs about any thing” so ideas can be a mental image, a sensation that the body feels, or an abstract/intellectual thought.
Simple agreement or disagreement with an idea cannot be called reason however. Take the idea that 2+2 = 4, or that red is not blue. This is not reason though it is our highest degree of evidence. There is no necessity for discourse or probation, these statements are simply self-evident. There is nothing to prove or disprove as they are simply true. These are commonly called axioms and maxims, and their are infinitely many of them.
Secondly, when two things are not close enough to be immediately compared, the mind applies intermediate ideas to discover the comparison. For example we can find that Air and Body are equal meaning air is a body, because we can find that air has solidity and extension, and thus it is a body just as wood or stone. The Solidity and Extension are the intermediate ideas that connect the two disconnected concepts of air and body. This is what reason is. The faculty of the soul that discovers the certainty of the uncertain by comparing it with something already known.
Thus, we know that the intermediate ideas that connect our larger ideas must be evident, we must be able to be certain that those intermediate ideas are correct. This means that while self-evidence is not reason, demonstration of reason becomes self-evident. When we have no notions or ideas about a thing we cannot reason about it, and if we have no intermediate ideas between two things that we have ideas about, we cannot go beyond probability. One example given is that we have the concept of the moon, and we have the concept of inhabited, but there is no intermediate idea that allows us to connect these two ideas and thus we cannot have certainty that the moon is inhabited. (Though based on modern science we believe that it is not)
Since Probability is not Knowledge. Toland removes all hypotheses from his philosophy. If we cannot be certain that our intermediate ideas are one hundred percent correct, we may come to the wrong conclusion about one thing thus resulting in a cascade of errors. Where we arrive at knowledge we can be satisfied, but with probability we must suspend our judgement and search for certainty.
Next we define our means of information. There is Experience and Authority. Experience can be external which give us ideas about sensible objects, or internal which gives us ideas about the operations of our minds.Authority however is information received without examination. This authority can be further split into humane or divine authority. Humane authority can also be called Moral Certitude like when you believe an intelligible relation from a friend because you have no reason to doubt their truthfulness and they have no reason or interest in deceiving you. So based on this, so long as their is no reason or gain behind deceiving me, I can take information that has been attested by people known to them and successively related by others of different Times, Nations or Interests as if it came from my own eyes and ears. I can be just as certain in their evidence as I would be if I saw it myself. But, if these conditions are not met, if there is reason or interest in blurring the truth, than I can only take these ideas as uncertainty.
Divine Authority refers to Manifestation of the Truth by Truth itself, which cannot lie. There is nothing in nature that can come to our knowledge besides these 4 means. The experience of the senses, the experience of the mind, humane authority and divine revelation.
Now we come to the concept of evidence. Evidence is an infallible rule that grounds us, and protects us from taking false testimony as Moral Certitude or human claims as Divine Revelation. We often mistake occasions of senses as parts of the bodies they come from. The sweetness of sugar is no more inherent to it than the Pain is to the knife that cuts me. Yet while these ideas are not truly inherent to their bodies they are properties that renders us knowledge of their use to us. If fire was not hot and did not emit light, what purpose would it serve us. These can be said to be occasional properties.
For our idea of a thing to be evident, it must be a true representation of the thing. It must contain all of its properties, this includes bulk and form, but also occasional properties like color taste and smell, and we cannot doubt this since these properties must either come from their cause or nothing at all, but we known that Nothing can have no properties by self-evidence. Thus we can conclude that the properties of a thing are not something we’ve imagined but must instead belong to their exemplary cause, the object.
Now is where we can connect our ideas of reason and the uncertainty of religion. God is the creator of all, who has enabled us to both perceive and judge things. God is what granted us our power to suspend judgements about whats uncertain and to never assent to anything but clear perceptions. God has denied us the necessity of error, and has privileged us with a means to defend against falsity and discern and embrace the truth.
So then, we know what reason is, we know that we can only reason from ideas that are evident, and we know that god is what granted us both our capacity for reason and our ability to deny what is not clear and certain. How then, can we claim that we must suspend reason for faith. How can we take certainty in the ideas of the Fathers and Doctors that conflict with themselves. How can we take the word of those that hold greed just as any other man, as the truth, with no evidence other then their word. To believe in such a man’s words would be to place moral certitude on that which is not certain, or to confuse human authority for divine revelation.
Why is it that we must deny our reasoning, a gift from our creator. In order to follow our creator. Reason is how we distinguish truth from fiction, god granted us reason, so why must we believe in mysteries of Christianity that go against reason. There is nothing in true religion that goes against reason. If religion goes against reason, it must be either false or misinterpreted.
This is not to say that reason completely contradicts religion or scripture. There are many aspects and ideas in religion that can be found by reason, and those are things we can take as certain. But we hold them as certain not because they are from scripture, but instead because they can be found by reason. The ideas and mysteries of Christianity or any other religion that cannot be determine to be true through reason, cannot be taken as certain, they are probable at best, which in the mind of Toland is no different from being uncertain.