Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Butler

Butler is trying to rescue God from the human habit of turning divinity into a slightly upgraded person. The opening clause does the theological cleanup work: no passions, no appetites, no mood swings masquerading as providence. It’s a direct strike against the cozy, anthropomorphic God who gets flattered, angered, or bribed like a local magistrate. For an 18th-century clergyman writing in the era of Newton’s clockwork cosmos and rising deist skepticism, that matters. If God is just a bigger human, He’s also just as unreliable - and just as unbelievable.

The second move is subtler and more strategic: Butler doesn’t stop at negation. He anticipates the emotional fallout of a passionless deity: coldness, distance, indifference. So he pivots from “God isn’t like us” to “God isn’t like us because He’s better.” The line about not seeing or hearing “by any senses like ours” rejects the crude picture of God as a celestial observer peering down through binoculars. God’s knowledge isn’t sensory intake; it’s immediate, comprehensive apprehension - “infinitely more perfect” is doing a lot of work here, replacing intimacy-through-similarity with intimacy-through-superiority.

Subtext: Butler is threading a needle between two threats. On one side, popular piety wants a relatable God with emotions you can read. On the other, Enlightenment rationalism risks evacuating God into an abstract principle. Butler’s solution is rhetorical judo: deny the human features people cling to, then insist the loss is not a downgrade but an upgrade. The quote functions less as consolation than as intellectual discipline, training believers to accept a God they can’t domesticate.