Dialogues between God and Man: Religion and Reason in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year

In Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, the first-person narrator, H.F., a businessman in London, depicts the horror of the approaching death and his spiritual conversion during the plague year of 1665. Confronting the unknown disease. H.F. repeatedly changes Ms statements between two different beliefs. On one hand, he believes in the religious discourse, taking the plague as a punishment from the angry God, and on the other hand, he believes in the medical discourse, assuming the plague a contagious disease spread by physical contacts between people. Obviously, H.F.'s statements contradict each other, and this essay will analyze the inconsistencies in his ideas. This study will focus on H.F.'s simultaneous belief and doubt in both God and men; sometimes he wonders whether the omnipotent God will save men from the dreadfulness of the plague, at other times he looks to human manipulation of science and reason to rescue the suffering men from the hands of Death. Looking into the scientific. philosophical. and intellectual progresses during the English Enlightenment, this paper hopes to examine the odd relationship between religion and science and explain why they could conflict with each other but still coexist harmoniously. This essay proposes that H.F.'s contradicting beliefs are reasonable in the Enlightenment, because the religious and scientific beliefs were superimposing each other in the age when the authority of science was rising and the belief in the Christian God was being challenged.