Edison's spirituality is more similar to 'scientific deism'

Today marks the 170th anniversary of the birth of Port Huron’s most favorite of sons, Thomas Alva Edison.

Local residents swell with some justifiable pride at the mention of the great inventor, even though he did most of his great inventing in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. That lab, incidentally, became part of Greenfield Village in Dearborn at the behest of Edison’s good friend, Henry Ford.

If you have lived anywhere near Port Huron for any length of time, you understand how important Thomas Edison is to the city’s history and heritage. There’s a statue of young Tom near the St. Clair River just south of the Blue Water Bridge.

There’s also the Thomas Edison Museum nearby along Thomas Edison Parkway.

A walk through the oldest section of Lakeside Cemetery reveals the graves of Edison’s parents.

Sadly, Edison didn’t care much for Port Huron. As a youth, he was thrown off the train at Smiths Creek after the laboratory he set up in a boxcar caught fire. He was selling newspapers at the time. Legend has it he lost much of his hearing when the angry conductor boxed his ears.

Later biographers say Edison’s handicap resulted from scarlet fever as a boy and repeated, untreated middle-ear infections. Edison later said his hearing loss resulted when the conductor lifted him by the ears as they evacuated the burning rail car.

For all his accomplishments, I’ve always wondered where the great inventor stood regarding religion. Research proves enlightening.

According to historian Paul Israel, Edison was a “freethinker.” Edison didn’t join a church denomination, rather took his spiritual education from Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason.”  He was especially attracted to the idea of “scientific deism.”

Edison and Paine were not atheists. According to Israel, both believed in a guiding power in the universe.

“I do not believe in the God of the theologians, but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt,” Edison said in a 1910 interview in the New York Times Magazine.

He also said, “Nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.”

Still, Edison said that statement did not mean he was an atheist. “… What you call God I call Nature, the Supreme Intelligence that rules matter.”

None of this really should surprise us. As an inventor, scientist and inquirer, Edison believed what he could absorb with his five senses. He spent much more time in his laboratory tinkering with nature’s elements than he did contemplating what he considered esoteric concepts.

Edison did, however, cultivate the notion of nonviolence. During a stint as a naval consultant during World War I, he said he would work only on defensive weapons. He took pride in not inventing any new ways to kill humans.

Edison also was a vegetarian because he abhorred the way animals were raised for slaughter. “Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages,” Israel quotes him as saying.

Yet an incident at the end of Edison’s life raised questions about his spirituality. As he lay dying, some sources reported the inventor turned his head toward a window and said, “It’s lovely over there.” Then he died.

Where precisely was “over there?" No one ever figured it out.

Contact Jim Ketchum at jeketchum1@att.net.