IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/gtechp/978-3-030-01956-3_13.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

God’s Design

In: Thomas Robert Malthus

Author

Listed:
  • David Reisman

    (Nanyang Technological University)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • David Reisman, 2018. "God’s Design," Great Thinkers in Economics, in: Thomas Robert Malthus, chapter 0, pages 267-292, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-3-030-01956-3_13
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-01956-3_13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-3-030-01956-3_13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.