God’s Design

David Reisman
Additional contact information
David Reisman: Nanyang Technological University

Chapter Chapter 13 in Thomas Robert Malthus, 2018, pp 267-292 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Malthus was an ordained clergyman. Explicitly, in the much criticised and rapidly deleted Chapters 18 and 19 of the 1798 Essay, less explicitly throughout the whole of his life, he sought to reconcile the will of the Creator with the vice and misery which result from the population mechanism and the marginal soils that God had created. Malthus preferred to induce the divine purpose from the natural world than to rely on revelation which lacks confirmation. He concludes that the Deity created evil because he wished to shake indolent creatures out of their torpor. Happiness is the result. Malthus owed some of his most promising insights to Hutcheson and Paley, both of them utilitarians but also ministers of religion. Malthus deviates so significantly from Biblical Christianity that the reader wonders if he might secretly have been an Enlightenment deist and not a Christian at all.

Keywords: Enlightenment; Economics and religion; Utility; Paley (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-3-030-01956-3_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783030019563

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-01956-3_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Great Thinkers in Economics from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().