Why Joseph Butler argued that nature is just as messy as the Bible

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 · Updated 25 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Joseph Butler was an 18th-century bishop who challenged the era's leading thinkers. While his peers debated whether nature proved a designer, Butler argued that because nature is full of riddles and cruelty, we should expect revelation to be equally complex. His work shaped moral philosophy for over a century.

Born in 1692, Joseph Butler became a pre-eminent English moralist whose influence spanned from David Hume to Adam Smith. His most famous work, The Analogy of Religion (1736), served as a major defense of Christianity against deists who rejected the Bible due to its perceived contradictions. Butler’s strategy was to point out that the natural world itself is riddled with mysteries and suffering. He argued that if we accept nature as the work of an intelligent designer despite its flaws, we have no logical basis to reject the Bible for similar reasons.

Beyond theology, Butler is remembered for his critique of Thomas Hobbes’s egoism. In his Fifteen Sermons, Butler argued that human nature is not merely a collection of selfish impulses. Instead, he proposed a hierarchical model of the mind where specific appetites like hunger or anger are governed by self-love and benevolence, both of which are ultimately subject to the authority of moral conscience. For Butler, conscience is an inborn monitor that guides individuals toward general happiness, suggesting that unethical behavior is often self-defeating.

Today, Butler’s theological arguments are largely of historical interest, but his critique of John Locke’s theory of personal identity remains widely read. Locke famously claimed that memory is the glue that constitutes personal identity over time. Butler dismantled this by noting that memory presupposes identity; one must already be the same person to have a memory of a past event. By demonstrating that memory cannot be the source of identity, Butler left a lasting mark on the philosophical understanding of the self.

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