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Deism

March 08, 2023

For other uses, see Deism (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with theism.

Deism (/ˈdiːɪzəm/ DEE-iz-əm [1][2] or /ˈdeɪ.ɪzəm/ DAY-iz-əm; derived from the Latin deus, meaning "god")[3][4] is the philosophical position and rationalistic theology[5] that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge, and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator of the universe.[3][5][6][7][8][9] More simply stated, Deism is the belief in the existence of God solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authority.[3][5][6][7][8] Deism emphasizes the concept of natural theology (that is, God's existence is revealed through nature).[3][5][6][7][9]

Since the 17th century and during the Age of Enlightenment (especially in 18th-century England, France, and North America),[10] various Western philosophers and theologians formulated a critical rejection of the several religious texts belonging to the many organized religions, and began to appeal only to truths that they felt could be established by reason as the exclusive source of divine knowledge.[5][6][7][8][11] Such philosophers and theologians were called "Deists", and the philosophical/theological position they advocated is called "Deism".[5][6][7][8][11]

Deism as a distinct philosophical and intellectual movement declined toward the end of the 18th century[5] but had its own revival in the early 19th century.[12] Some of its tenets continued as part of other intellectual and spiritual movements, like Unitarianism,[4] and Deism continues to have advocates today,[3] including with modern variants such as Christian deism and pandeism.

Enlightenment Deism

Origins

Deistical thinking has existed since ancient times, but it did not develop as a movement until after the scientific revolution, which began in the mid-sixteenth century.[13] Deism's origins can be traced to the philosophy of ancient Greece.[14]

Origin of the word deism

The words deism and theism are both derived from words meaning "god": Latin deus and Greek theos (θεός).[3] The word déiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre Viret,[15] but Deism was generally unknown in France until the 1690s when Pierre Bayle published his famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, which contained an article on Viret.[16]

In English, the words deist and theist were originally synonymous, but by the 17th century the terms started to diverge in meaning.[17] The term deist with its current meaning first appears in English in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

Herbert of Cherbury and early English Deism

 
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, portrayed by Isaac Oliver (1560–1617)

The first major statement of Deism in English is Lord Herbert of Cherbury's book De Veritate (1624).[18] Lord Herbert, like his contemporary Descartes, searched for the foundations of knowledge. The first two-thirds of his book De Veritate (On Truth, as It Is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False) are devoted to an exposition of Herbert's theory of knowledge. Herbert distinguished truths from experience and reasoning about experience from innate and revealed truths. Innate truths are imprinted on our minds, as evidenced by their universal acceptance. Herbert referred to universally accepted truths as notitiae communes—Common Notions. Herbert believed there were five Common Notions that unify all religious beliefs.

  1. There is one Supreme God.
  2. God ought to be worshipped.
  3. Virtue and piety are the main parts of divine worship.
  4. We ought to be remorseful for our sins and repent.
  5. Divine goodness dispenses rewards and punishments, both in this life and after it.

Herbert himself had relatively few followers, and it was not until the 1680s that Herbert found a true successor in Charles Blount (1654 – 1693).[19]

The peak of Deism (1696–1801)

See also: Deism in England and France in the 18th century

The appearance of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) marks an important turning-point and new phase in the history of English Deism. Lord Herbert's epistemology was based on the idea of "common notions" (or innate ideas). Locke's Essay was an attack on the foundation of innate ideas. After Locke, deists could no longer appeal to innate ideas as Herbert had done. Instead, deists were forced to turn to arguments based on experience and nature. Under the influence of Newton, they turned to the argument from design as the principal argument for the existence of God.[20]

Peter Gay identifies John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), and the "vehement response" it provoked, as the beginning of post-Lockian Deism. Among the notable figures, Gay describes Toland and Matthew Tindal as the best known; however, Gay considered them to be talented publicists rather than philosophers or scholars. He regards Conyers Middleton and Anthony Collins as contributing more to the substance of debate, in contrast with fringe writers such as Thomas Chubb and Thomas Woolston.[21]

Other English Deists prominent during the period include William Wollaston, Charles Blount, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke,[7] and, in the latter part, Peter Annet, Thomas Chubb, and Thomas Morgan. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury was also influential; though not presenting himself as a Deist, he shared many of the deists' key attitudes and is now usually regarded as a Deist.[22]

Especially noteworthy is Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), which became, very soon after its publication, the focal center of the Deist controversy. Because almost every argument, quotation, and issue raised for decades can be found here, the work is often termed "the Deist's Bible".[23] Following Locke's successful attack on innate ideas, Tindal's "Bible" redefined the foundation of Deist epistemology as knowledge based on experience or human reason. This effectively widened the gap between traditional Christians and what he called "Christian Deists", since this new foundation required that "revealed" truth be validated through human reason.

Aspects of Deism in Enlightenment philosophy

Enlightenment Deism consisted of two philosophical assertions: (1) reason, along with features of the natural world, is a valid source of religious knowledge, and (2) revelation is not a valid source of religious knowledge. Different Deist philosophers expanded on these two assertions to create what Leslie Stephen later termed the "constructive" and "critical" aspects of Deism.[24][25] "Constructive" assertions—assertions that deist writers felt were justified by appeals to reason and features of the natural world (or perhaps were intuitively obvious or common notions)—included:[26][27]

  • God exists and created the universe.
  • God gave humans the ability to reason.

"Critical" assertions—assertions that followed from the denial of revelation as a valid source of religious knowledge—were much more numerous, and included:

  • Rejection of all books (including the Bible) that claimed to contain divine revelation.[28]
  • Rejection of the incomprehensible notion of the Trinity and other religious "mysteries".
  • Rejection of reports of miracles, prophecies, etc.

The origins of religion

A central premise of Deism was that the religions of their day were corruptions of an original religion that was pure, natural, simple, and rational. Humanity lost this original religion when it was subsequently corrupted by priests who manipulated it for personal gain and for the class interests of the priesthood,[29] and encrusted it with superstitions and "mysteries"—irrational theological doctrines. Deists referred to this manipulation of religious doctrine as "priestcraft", a derogatory term.[30] For deists, this corruption of natural religion was designed to keep laypeople baffled by "mysteries" and dependent on the priesthood for information about the requirements for salvation. This gave the priesthood a great deal of power, which the Deists believed the priesthood worked to maintain and increase. Deists saw it as their mission to strip away "priestcraft" and "mysteries". Tindal, perhaps the most prominent deist writer, claimed that this was the proper, original role of the Christian Church.[31]

One implication of this premise was that current-day primitive societies, or societies that existed in the distant past, should have religious beliefs less infused with superstitions and closer to those of natural theology. This position became less and less plausible as thinkers such as David Hume began studying the natural history of religion and suggested that the origins of religion was not in reason but in emotions, such as the fear of the unknown.

Immortality of the soul

Different Deists had different beliefs about the immortality of the soul, about the existence of Hell and damnation to punish the wicked, and the existence of Heaven to reward the virtuous. Anthony Collins,[32] Bolingbroke, Thomas Chubb, and Peter Annet were materialists and either denied or doubted the immortality of the soul.[33] Benjamin Franklin believed in reincarnation or resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and William Wollaston[34] held that souls exist, survive death, and in the afterlife are rewarded or punished by God for their behavior in life. Thomas Paine believed in the "probability" of the immortality of the soul.[35]

Miracles and divine providence

The most natural position for Deists was to reject all forms of supernaturalism, including the miracle stories in the Bible. The problem was that the rejection of miracles also seemed to entail the rejection of divine providence (that is, God taking a hand in human affairs), something that many Deists were inclined to accept.[36] Those who believed in a watch-maker God rejected the possibility of miracles and divine providence. They believed that God, after establishing natural laws and setting the cosmos in motion, stepped away. He didn't need to keep tinkering with his creation, and the suggestion that he did was insulting.[37] Others, however, firmly believed in divine providence, and so, were reluctantly forced to accept at least the possibility of miracles. God was, after all, all-powerful and could do whatever he wanted including temporarily suspending his own natural laws.

Freedom and necessity

Enlightenment philosophers under the influence of Newtonian science tended to view the universe as a vast machine, created and set in motion by a creator being that continues to operate according to natural law without any divine intervention. This view naturally led to what was then called "necessitarianism"[38] (the modern term is "determinism"): the view that everything in the universe—including human behavior—is completely, causally determined by antecedent circumstances and natural law. (See, for example, La Mettrie's L'Homme machine.) As a consequence, debates about freedom versus "necessity" were a regular feature of Enlightenment religious and philosophical discussions. Reflecting the intellectual climate of the time, there were differences among Deists about freedom and determinism. Some, such as Anthony Collins, were actually necessitarians.[39]

David Hume

Views differ on whether David Hume was a Deist, an atheist, or something else.[40] Like the Deists, Hume rejected revelation, and his famous essay On Miracles provided a powerful argument against belief in miracles. On the other hand, he did not believe that an appeal to Reason could provide any justification for religion. In the essay Natural History of Religion (1757), he contended that polytheism, not monotheism, was "the first and most ancient religion of mankind" and that the psychological basis of religion is not reason, but fear of the unknown.[41] Hume's account of ignorance and fear as the motivations for primitive religious belief was a severe blow to the deist's rosy picture of prelapsarian humanity basking in priestcraft-free innocence. In Waring's words:

The clear reasonableness of natural religion disappeared before a semi-historical look at what can be known about uncivilized man— "a barbarous, necessitous animal," as Hume termed him. Natural religion, if by that term one means the actual religious beliefs and practices of uncivilized peoples, was seen to be a fabric of superstitions. Primitive man was no unspoiled philosopher, clearly seeing the truth of one God. And the history of religion was not, as the deists had implied, retrograde; the widespread phenomenon of superstition was caused less by priestly malice than by man's unreason as he confronted his experience.[42]

Deism in the United States

The Thirteen Colonies of North America, which became the United States of America after the American Revolution in 1776, were under the rule of the British Empire, and Americans, as British subjects, were influenced by and participated in the intellectual life of the Kingdom of Great Britain. English Deism was an important influence on the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and the principles of religious freedom asserted in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Other Founding Fathers who were influenced to various degrees by Deism were Ethan Allen,[43] Benjamin Franklin, Cornelius Harnett, Gouverneur Morris, Hugh Williamson, James Madison, and possibly Alexander Hamilton.

In the United States, there is a great deal of controversy over whether the Founding Fathers were Christians, Deists, or something in between.[44][45] Particularly heated is the debate over the beliefs of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.[46][47][48]

In his Autobiography, Franklin wrote that as a young man "Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist."[49][50] Like some other Deists, Franklin believed that, "The Deity sometimes interferes by his particular Providence, and sets aside the Events which would otherwise have been produc'd in the Course of Nature, or by the Free Agency of Man,"[51] and at the Constitutional Convention stated that "the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men."[52]

Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the Founding Father who most clearly exhibits Deistic tendencies, although he generally referred to himself as a Unitarian rather than a Deist. His excerpts of the canonical gospels (now commonly known as the Jefferson Bible) strip all supernatural and dogmatic references from the narrative on Jesus' life. Like Franklin, Jefferson believed in God's continuing activity in human affairs.[53]

Thomas Paine is especially noteworthy both for his contributions to the cause of the American Revolution and for his writings in defense of Deism, alongside the criticism of Abrahamic religions.[12][54][55][56] In The Age of Reason (1793 – 1794) and other writings, he advocated Deism, promoted reason and freethought, and argued against institutionalized religions in general and the Christian doctrine in particular.[12][54][55][56] The Age of Reason was short, readable, and probably the only Deistic treatise that continues to be read and influential today.[57]

The last contributor to American Deism was Elihu Palmer (1764 – 1806), who wrote the "Bible of American Deism," Principles of Nature, in 1801. Palmer is noteworthy for attempting to bring some organization to Deism by founding the "Deistical Society of New York" and other Deistic societies from Maine to Georgia.[58]

Deism in France and continental Europe

 
Voltaire at age 24, portrayed by Nicolas de Largillière

France had its own tradition of religious skepticism and natural theology in the works of Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, and Montesquieu. The most famous of the French Deists was Voltaire, who was exposed to Newtonian science and English Deism during his two-year period of exile in England (1726 –1728). When he returned to France, he brought both back with him, and exposed the French reading public (i.e., the aristocracy) to them in a number of books.

French Deists also included Maximilien Robespierre and Rousseau. During the French Revolution (1789 –1799), the Deistic Cult of the Supreme Being—a direct expression of Robespierre's theological views—was established briefly (just under three months) as the new state religion of France, replacing the deposed Catholic Church and the rival atheistic Cult of Reason.

There were over five hundred French Revolutionaries who were deists. These deists do not fit the stereotype of deists because they believed in miracles and often prayed to God. In fact, over seventy of them thought that God miraculously helped the French Revolution win victories over their enemies. Furthermore, over a hundred French Revolutionary deists also wrote prayers and hymns to God. Citizen Devillere was one of the many French Revolutionary deists who believed God did miracles. Devillere said, “God, who conducts our destiny, deigned to concern himself with our dangers. He commanded the spirit of victory to direct the hand of the faithful French, and in a few hours the aristocrats received the attack which we prepared, the wicked ones were destroyed and liberty was avenged.”[59]

Deism in Germany is not well documented. We know from correspondence with Voltaire that Frederick the Great was a Deist. Immanuel Kant's identification with Deism is controversial.[60]

Decline of Enlightenment Deism

Peter Gay describes Enlightenment Deism as entering slow decline as a recognizable movement in the 1730s.[61] A number of reasons have been suggested for this decline, including:[62]

  • The increasing influence of naturalism and materialism.
  • The writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant raising questions about the ability of reason to address metaphysical questions.
  • The violence of the French Revolution.
  • Christian revivalist movements, such as Pietism and Methodism (which emphasized a personal relationship with God), along with the rise of anti-rationalist and counter-Enlightenment philosophies such as that of Johann Georg Hamann.[62]

Although Deism has declined in popularity over time, scholars believe that these ideas still have a lingering influence on modern society.[63] One of the major activities of the Deists, biblical criticism, evolved into its own highly technical discipline. Deist rejection of revealed religion evolved into, and contributed to, 19th-century liberal British theology and the rise of Unitarianism.[62]

Contemporary Deism

Contemporary Deism attempts to integrate classical Deism with modern philosophy and the current state of scientific knowledge. This attempt has produced a wide variety of personal beliefs under the broad classification of belief of "deism."

There are a number of subcategories of modern Deism, including monodeism (the default, standard concept of deism), pandeism, panendeism, spiritual deism, process deism, Christian deism, polydeism, scientific deism, and humanistic deism.[64][65][66] Some deists see design in nature and purpose in the universe and in their lives. Others see God and the universe in a co-creative process. Some deists view God in classical terms as observing humanity but not directly intervening in our lives, while others see God as a subtle and persuasive spirit who created the world, and then stepped back to observe.

Recent philosophical discussions of Deism

In the 1960s, theologian Charles Hartshorne scrupulously examined and rejected both deism and pandeism (as well as pantheism) in favor of a conception of God whose characteristics included "absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others" or "AR," writing that this theory "is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism," concluding that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations."[67]

Charles Taylor, in his 2007 book A Secular Age, showed the historical role of Deism, leading to what he calls an "exclusive humanism". This humanism invokes a moral order whose ontic commitment is wholly intra-human with no reference to transcendence.[68] One of the special achievements of such deism-based humanism is that it discloses new, anthropocentric moral sources by which human beings are motivated and empowered to accomplish acts of mutual benefit.[69] This is the province of a buffered, disengaged self, which is the locus of dignity, freedom, and discipline, and is endowed with a sense of human capability.[70] According to Taylor, by the early 19th century this Deism-mediated exclusive humanism developed as an alternative to Christian faith in a personal God and an order of miracles and mystery. Some critics of Deism have accused adherents of facilitating the rise of nihilism.[71]

Deism in Nazi Germany

Main articles: Ideology of the Nazi Party and Religion in Nazi Germany
Further information: Kirchenkampf, Reichskonkordat, and Religious aspects of Nazism
 
On positive German God-belief (1939)

In Nazi Germany, Gottgläubig (literally: "believing in God")[72][73] was a Nazi religious term for a form of non-denominationalism practised by those Germans who had officially left Christian churches but professed faith in some higher power or divine creator.[72] Such people were called Gottgläubige ("believers in God"), and the term for the overall movement was Gottgläubigkeit ("belief in God"); the term denotes someone who still believes in a God, although without having any institutional religious affiliation.[72] These National Socialists were not favourable towards religious institutions of their time, nor did they tolerate atheism of any type within their ranks.[73][74] The 1943 Philosophical Dictionary defined gottgläubig as: "official designation for those who profess a specific kind of piety and morality, without being bound to a church denomination, whilst however also rejecting irreligion and godlessness."[75] In the 1939 census, 3.5% of the German population identified as gottgläubig.[73]

In the 1920 National Socialist Programme of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), Adolf Hitler first mentioned the phrase "Positive Christianity". The Nazi Party did not wish to tie itself to a particular Christian denomination, but with Christianity in general, and sought freedom of religion for all denominations "so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race." (point 24). When Hitler and the NSDAP got into power in 1933, they sought to assert state control over the churches, on the one hand through the Reichskonkordat with the Roman Catholic Church, and the forced merger of the German Evangelical Church Confederation into the Protestant Reich Church on the other. This policy seems to have gone relatively well until late 1936, when a "gradual worsening of relations" between the Nazi Party and the churches saw the rise of Kirchenaustritt ("leaving the church").[72] Although there was no top-down official directive to revoke church membership, some Nazi Party members started doing so voluntarily and put other members under pressure to follow their example.[72] Those who left the churches were designated as Gottgläubige ("believers in God"), a term officially recognised by the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick on 26 November 1936. He stressed that the term signified political disassociation from the churches, not an act of religious apostasy.[72] The term "dissident", which some church leavers had used up until then, was associated with being "without belief" (glaubenslos), whilst most of them emphasized that they still believed in a God, and thus required a different word.[72]

The Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was the first to leave his church[76] on 15 November 1933, but for the next three years he would be the only prominent Nazi leader to do so.[72] In early 1936, SS leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich terminated their membership of the Roman Catholic Church, followed by a number of Gauleiter including Martin Mutschmann (Saxony), Carl Röver (Weser-Ems), and Robert Heinrich Wagner (Baden).[72] In late 1936, especially Roman Catholic party members left the church, followed in 1937 by a flood of primarily Protestant party members.[72] Hitler himself never repudiated his membership of the Roman Catholic Church;[77] in 1941, he told his General Gerhard Engel: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always be so." However, the shifting actual religious views of Adolf Hitler remain unclear due to conflicting accounts from Hitler's associates such as Otto Strasser, Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, and others.[78]

Deism in Turkey

 
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938. He undertook sweeping progressive reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrializing nation.[79][80][81]
Main article: Irreligion in Turkey
Further information: Secularism in Turkey

An early April 2018 report of the Turkish Ministry of Education, titled The Youth is Sliding towards Deism, observed that an increasing number of pupils in İmam Hatip schools was repudiating Islam in favour of Deism (irreligious belief in a creator God).[82][83][84][85][86][87][88] The report's publication generated large-scale controversy in the Turkish press and society at large, as well as amongst conservative Islamic sects, Muslim clerics, and Islamist parties in Turkey.[82][83][84][85][86][87][88] The progressive Muslim theologian Mustafa Öztürk noted the Deistic trend among Turkish people a year earlier, arguing that the "very archaic, dogmatic notion of religion" held by the majority of those claiming to represent Islam was causing "the new generations [to get] indifferent, even distant, to the Islamic worldview." Despite lacking reliable statistical data, numerous anecdotes and independent surveys appear to point in this direction.[82][83][84][85][86][87][88] Although some commentators claim that the secularization of Turkey is merely a result of Western influence or even a "conspiracy," other commentators, even some pro-government ones, have come to the conclusion that "the real reason for the loss of faith in Islam is not the West but Turkey itself."[89]

Deism in the United States

Main article: Irreligion in the United States

The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) report estimated that between 1990 and 2001 the number of self-identifying Deists grew from 6,000 to 49,000, representing about 0.02% of the U.S. population at the time.[90] The 2008 ARIS survey found, based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification, that 70% of Americans believe in a personal God:[i] roughly 12% are atheists or agnostics, and 12% believe in "a deist or paganistic concept of the Divine as a higher power" rather than a personal God.[91]

The term "ceremonial deism" was coined in 1962 and has been used since 1984 by the Supreme Court of the United States to assess exemptions from the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, thought to be expressions of cultural tradition and not earnest invocations of a deity. It has been noted that the term does not describe any school of thought within Deism itself.[92]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) report notes that while "[n]o definition was offered of the terms, [they] are usually associated with a 'personal relationship' with Jesus Christ together with a certain view of salvation, scripture, and missionary work" (p. 11).

Citations

  1. ^ R. E. Allen, ed. (1990). The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press.
  2. ^ "Deist – Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary". Merriam-webster.com. 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-10.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Leland Royce (2020). "Attributes of a Deistic God". Multiverse Deism: Shifting Perspectives of God and the World. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 47–68. ISBN 978-1-7936-1475-9. LCCN 2020935396.
  4. ^ a b Peters, Ted (2013). "Models of God: Deism". In Diller, Jeanine; Kasher, Asa (eds.). Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Dordrecht and Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. pp. 51–52. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_5. ISBN 978-94-007-5219-1. LCCN 2012954282.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g Smith, Merril D., ed. (2015). "Deism". The World of the American Revolution: A Daily Life Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood Publishing Group, imprint of ABC-Clio. pp. 661–664. ISBN 978-1-4408-3027-3. LCCN 2015009496.
  6. ^ a b c d e Bristow, William (Fall 2017). "Religion and the Enlightenment: Deism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. ISSN 1095-5054. OCLC 643092515. from the original on 11 December 2017. Retrieved 3 August 2021. Deism is the form of religion most associated with the Enlightenment. According to deism, we can know by the natural light of reason that the universe is created and governed by a supreme intelligence; however, although this supreme being has a plan for creation from the beginning, the being does not interfere with creation; the deist typically rejects miracles and reliance on special revelation as a source of religious doctrine and belief, in favor of the natural light of reason. Thus, a deist typically rejects the divinity of Christ, as repugnant to reason; the deist typically demotes the figure of Jesus from agent of miraculous redemption to extraordinary moral teacher. Deism is the form of religion fitted to the new discoveries in natural science, according to which the cosmos displays an intricate machine-like order; the deists suppose that the supposition of a God is necessary as the source or author of this order. Though not a deist himself, Isaac Newton provides fuel for deism with his argument in his Opticks (1704) that we must infer from the order and beauty in the world to the existence of an intelligent supreme being as the cause of this order and beauty. Samuel Clarke, perhaps the most important proponent and popularizer of Newtonian philosophy in the early eighteenth century, supplies some of the more developed arguments for the position that the correct exercise of unaided human reason leads inevitably to the well-grounded belief in a God. He argues that the Newtonian physical system implies the existence of a transcendent cause, the creator a God. In his first set of Boyle lectures, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), Clarke presents the metaphysical or "argument a priori" for God's existence. This argument concludes from the rationalist principle that whatever exists must have a sufficient reason or cause of its existence to the existence of a transcendent, necessary being who stands as the cause of the chain of natural causes and effects.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Manuel, Frank Edward; Pailin, David A.; Mapson, K.; Stefon, Matt (13 March 2020) [26 July 1999]. "Deism". Encyclopædia Britannica. Edinburgh: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. from the original on 9 June 2021. Retrieved 3 August 2021. Deism, an unorthodox religious attitude that found expression among a group of English writers beginning with Edward Herbert (later 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury) in the first half of the 17th century and ending with Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in the middle of the 18th century. These writers subsequently inspired a similar religious attitude in Europe during the second half of the 18th century and in the colonial United States of America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In general, Deism refers to what can be called natural religion, the acceptance of a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every person or that can be acquired by the use of reason and the rejection of religious knowledge when it is acquired through either revelation or the teaching of any church.
  8. ^ a b c d Kohler, Kaufmann; Hirsch, Emil G. (1906). "Deism". Jewish Encyclopedia. Kopelman Foundation. from the original on 15 January 2013. Retrieved 3 August 2021. A system of belief which posits a God's existence as the cause of all things, and admits His perfection, but rejects Divine revelation and government, proclaiming the all-sufficiency of natural laws. The Socinians, as opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity, were designated as deists [...]. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deism became synonymous with "natural religion," and deist with "freethinker." England and France have been successively the strongholds of deism. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the "father of deism" in England, assumes certain "innate ideas," which establish five religious truths: (1) that God is; (2) that it is man's duty to worship Him; (3) that worship consists in virtue and piety; (4) that man must repent of sin and abandon his evil ways; (5) that divine retribution either in this or in the next life is certain. He holds that all positive religions are either allegorical and poetic interpretations of nature or deliberately organized impositions of priests.
  9. ^ a b Gomes, Alan W. (2012) [2011]. "Deism". The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470670606.wbecc0408. ISBN 9781405157629. Deism is a rationalistic, critical approach to theism with an emphasis on natural theology. The deists attempted to reduce religion to what they regarded as its most foundational, rationally justifiable elements. Deism is not, strictly speaking, the teaching that God wound up the world like a watch and let it run on its own, though that teaching was embraced by some within the movement.
  10. ^ Rowe, William L. (2022) [2017]. "Deism". In Craig, Edward (ed.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-K013-1. ISBN 9780415250696. In the popular sense, a deist is someone who believes that God created the world but thereafter has exercised no providential control over what goes on in it. In the proper sense, a deist is someone who affirms a divine creator but denies any divine revelation, holding that human reason alone can give us everything we need to know to live a correct moral and religious life. In this sense of 'deism' some deists held that God exercises providential control over the world and provides for a future state of rewards and punishments, while other deists denied this. However, they all agreed that human reason alone was the basis on which religious questions had to be settled, rejecting the orthodox claim to a special divine revelation of truths that go beyond human reason. Deism flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, principally in England, France, and America.
  11. ^ a b Herrick, James A. (1997). "Characteristics of British Deism". The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. pp. 23–49. ISBN 978-1-57003-166-3.
  12. ^ a b c Claeys, Gregory (1989). "Revolution in heaven: The Age of Reason (1794-95)". Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (1st ed.). New York and London: Routledge. pp. 177–195. ISBN 9780044450900.
  13. ^ Piland 2011, p. 5.
  14. ^ Piland 2011, p. 4.
  15. ^ Viret described deism as a heretical development of Italian Renaissance naturalism, resulting from misuse of the liberty conferred by the Reformation to criticise idolatry and superstition.Viret, Pierre (1564). Instruction Chrétienne en la doctrine de la foi et de l'Évangile (Christian teaching on the doctrine of faith and the Gospel). Viret wrote that a group of people believed, like the Jews and Turks, in a God of some kind - but regarded the doctrine of the evangelists and the apostles as a mere myth. Contrary to their own claim, he regarded them as atheists.
  16. ^ Bayle, Pierre (1820). "Viret". Dictionnaire historique et critique (in French). Vol. 14 (Nouvelle ed.). Paris: Desoer. Retrieved 2017-11-23. (1697/1820) Bayle quotes Viret (see below) as follows: “J'ai entendu qu'il y en a de ceste bande, qui s'appellent déistes, d'un mot tout nouveau, lequel ils veulent opposer à l'athéiste,” remarking on the term as a neologism (un mot tout nouveau). (p.418)
  17. ^ Orr, John (1934). English Deism: Its Roots and Its Fruits. Eerdmans. The words deism and theism are both derived words meaning "god" - "THE": Latin ZEUS-deus /"deist" and Greek theos/ "theist" (θεός). The word deus/déiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre Viret, but was generally unknown in France until the 1690s when Pierre Bayle published his famous Dictionary, which contained an article on Viret.“Prior to the 17th Century the terms ["deism" and "deist"] were used interchangeably with the terms "theism" and "theist", respectively. .. Theologians and philosophers of the 17th Century began to give a different signification to the words. .. Both [theists and deists] asserted belief in one supreme God, the Creator. .. But the theist taught that God remained actively interested in and operative in the world which he had made, whereas the Deist maintained that God endowed the world at creation with self-sustaining and self-acting powers and then surrendered it wholly to the operation of these powers acting as second causes.” (p.13)
  18. ^ Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion, 1934, p.59ff.
  19. ^ Gay. (see above). "By utilizing his wide classical learning, Blount demonstrated how to use pagan writers, and pagan ideas, against Christianity. ... Other Deists were to follow his lead." (pp.47-48)
  20. ^ Note that Locke himself was not a deist. He believed in both miracles and revelation. See Orr, pp.96-99.
  21. ^ Gay. (see above). “Among the Deists, only Anthony Collins (1676–1729) could claim much philosophical competence; only Conyers Middleton (1683–1750) was a really serious scholar. The best known Deists, notably John Toland (1670–1722) and Matthew Tindal (1656–1733), were talented publicists, clear without being deep, forceful but not subtle. ... Others, like Thomas Chubb (1679–1747), were self-educated freethinkers; a few, like Thomas Woolston (1669–1731), were close to madness.” (pp.9-10)
  22. ^ Gay. (see above). Gay describes him (pp.78-79) as "a Deist in fact, if not in name".
  23. ^ Waring. (see above). p.107.
  24. ^ Stephen, Leslie (1881). History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century 3rd Edition 2 vols (reprinted 1949). London: Smith, Elder & Co. ISBN 978-0844614212. Stephen’s book, despite its “perhaps too ambitious” title (preface, Vol.I p.vii), was conceived as an “account of the deist controversy” (p.vi). Stephen notes the difficulty of interpreting the primary sources, as religious toleration was yet far from complete in law, and entirely not a settled fact in practice (Ch.II s.12): deist authors “were forced to .. cover [their opinions] with a veil of decent ambiguity.” He writes of Deist books being burned by the hangman, mentions the Aikenhead blasphemy case (1697) [1], and names five deists who were banished, imprisoned etc.
  25. ^ Gay (Fröhlich), Peter Joachim, ed. (1968). Deism: An Anthology. Princeton etc: Van Nostrand. ISBN 978-0686474012.
    • "All Deists were in fact both critical and constructive Deists. All sought to destroy in order to build, and reasoned either from the absurdity of Christianity to the need for a new philosophy or from their desire for a new philosophy to the absurdity of Christianity. Each deist, to be sure, had his special competence. While one specialized in abusing priests, another specialized in rhapsodies to nature, and a third specialized in the skeptical reading of sacred documents. Yet whatever strength the movement had—and it was at times formidable—it derived that strength from a peculiar combination of critical and constructive elements." (p.13)
  26. ^ Tindal: "By natural religion, I understand the belief of the existence of a God, and the sense and practice of those duties which result from the knowledge we, by our reason, have of him and his perfections; and of ourselves, and our own imperfections, and of the relationship we stand in to him, and to our fellow-creatures; so that the religion of nature takes in everything that is founded on the reason and nature of things." Christianity as Old as the Creation (II), quoted in Waring (see above), p.113.
  27. ^ Toland: “I hope to make it appear that the use of reason is not so dangerous in religion as it is commonly represented .. There is nothing that men make a greater noise about than the "mysteries of the Christian religion". The divines gravely tell us "we must adore what we cannot comprehend" .. [Some] contend [that] some mysteries may be, or at least seem to be, contrary to reason, and yet received by faith. [Others contend] that no mystery is contrary to reason, but that all are "above" it. On the contrary, we hold that reason is the only foundation of all certitude .. Wherefore, we likewise maintain, according to the title of this discourse, that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it; and that no Christian doctrine can be properly called a mystery." Christianity Not Mysterious: or, a Treatise Shewing That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor above It (1696), quoted in Waring (see above), pp. 1–12
  28. ^ Stephens, William. An Account of the Growth of Deism in England. Retrieved 2019-01-04. (1696 / 1990). Introduction (James E. Force, 1990): "[W]hat sets the Deists apart from even their most latitudinarian Christian contemporaries is their desire to lay aside scriptural revelation as rationally incomprehensible, and thus useless, or even detrimental, to human society and to religion. While there may possibly be exceptions, .. most Deists, especially as the eighteenth century wears on, agree that revealed Scripture is nothing but a joke or "well-invented flam." About mid-century, John Leland, in his historical and analytical account of the movement [View of the Principal Deistical Writers [2] (1754–1755)], squarely states that the rejection of revealed Scripture is the characteristic element of deism, a view further codified by such authorities as Ephraim Chambers and Samuel Johnson. .. "DEISM," writes Stephens bluntly, "is a denial of all reveal'd Religion."”
  29. ^ Champion, J.A.I. (2014). The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History). Champion maintains that historical argument was a central component of the Deists' defences of what they considered true religion.
  30. ^ Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. "As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge, because priestcraft supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance, it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin." (Part 2, p.129)
  31. ^ “It can't be imputed to any defect in the light of nature that the pagan world ran into idolatry, but to their being entirely governed by priests, who pretended communication with their gods, and to have thence their revelations, which they imposed on the credulous as divine oracles. Whereas the business of the Christian dispensation was to destroy all those traditional revelations, and restore, free from all idolatry, the true primitive and natural religion implanted in mankind from the creation.” Christianity as Old as the Creation (XIV), quoted in Waring (see above), p.163.
  32. ^ Orr. (see above). p.134.
  33. ^ Orr. (see above). p.78.
  34. ^ Orr. (see above). p.137.
  35. ^ Age of Reason, Pt I:

    I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

    and (in the Recapitulation)

    I trouble not myself about the manner of future existence. I content myself with believing, even to positive conviction, that the power that gave me existence is able to continue it, in any form and manner he pleases, either with or without this body; and it appears more probable to me that I shall continue to exist hereafter than that I should have had existence, as I now have, before that existence began.

  36. ^ Most American Deists, for example, firmly believed in divine providence. See this article, Deism in the United States.
  37. ^ See for instance Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason., Part 1.
  38. ^ David Hartley, for example, described himself as "quite in the necessitarian scheme. See Ferg, Stephen, "Two Early Works of David Hartley", Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 2 (April 1981), pp. 173–89.
  39. ^ See for example Liberty and Necessity (1729).
  40. ^ Hume himself was uncomfortable with both terms, and Hume scholar Paul Russell has argued that the best and safest term for Hume's views is irreligion. Russell, Paul (2005). "Hume on Religion". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 2009-12-17.
  41. ^ Hume, David (1779). The Natural History of Religion. “The primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear of future events; and what ideas will naturally be entertained of invisible, unknown powers, while men lie under dismal apprehensions of any kind, may easily be conceived. Every image of vengeance, severity, cruelty, and malice must occur, and must augment the ghastliness and horror which oppresses the amazed religionist. .. And no idea of perverse wickedness can be framed, which those terrified devotees do not readily, without scruple, apply to their deity.” (Section XIII)
  42. ^ Waring. (see above).
  43. ^ . Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Archived from the original on 2008-05-02. Retrieved 2008-05-01.
  44. ^ "The Deist Minimum". First Things. 2005.
  45. ^ Holmes, David (2006). The Faiths of the Founding Fathers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 0-19-530092-0.
  46. ^ David Liss (11 June 2006). "The Founding Fathers Solving modern problems, building wealth and finding God". Washington Post.
  47. ^ Gene Garman (2001). "Was Thomas Jefferson a Deist?". Sullivan-County.com.
  48. ^ Walter Isaacson (March–April 2004). . Skeptical Inquirer. Archived from the original on 2007-10-12.
  49. ^ Franklin, Benjamin (2005). Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings. New York, NY: Library of America. p. 619. ISBN 1-883011-53-1.
  50. ^ "Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography". University of Maine, Farmington. Archived from the original on 2012-12-10.
  51. ^ Benjamin Franklin, (1730).
  52. ^ Max Farrand, ed. (1911). The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 451.
  53. ^ Frazer, following Sydney Ahlstrom, characterizes Jefferson as a "theistic rationalist" rather than a Deist, because Jefferson believed in God's continuing activity in human affairs. See Frazer, Gregg L. (2012). The Religious Beliefs of America's Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution. University Press of Kansas. p. 11 and 128. ISBN 9780700618453. See Ahlstrom, Sydney E. (2004). A Religious History of the American People. p. 359. See Gary Scott Smith (2006). Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush. Oxford U.P. p. 69. ISBN 9780198041153.
  54. ^ a b Gelpi, Donald L. (2007) [2000]. "Part 1: Enlightenment Religion – Chapter 3: Militant Deism". Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock. pp. 47–48. ISBN 9781725220294.
  55. ^ a b Fischer, Kirsten (2010). Manning, Nicholas; Stefani, Anne (eds.). ""Religion Governed by Terror": A Deist Critique of Fearful Christianity in the Early American Republic". Revue Française d'Études Américaines. Paris: Belin. 125 (3): 13–26. doi:10.3917/rfea.125.0013. eISSN 1776-3061. ISSN 0397-7870. LCCN 80640131 – via Cairn.info.
  56. ^ a b Paine, Thomas (2014). "Of the Religion of Deism Compared with the Christian Religion, and the Superiority of the Former over the Latter (1804)". In Calvert, Jane E.; Shapiro, Ian (eds.). Selected Writings of Thomas Paine. Rethinking the Western Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 568–574. doi:10.12987/9780300210699-018. ISBN 9780300167450. S2CID 246141428. from the original on 27 August 2016. Retrieved 7 August 2021.
  57. ^ In its own time it earned Paine widespread vilification. How widespread deism was among ordinary people in the United States is a matter of continued debate.. Common-place. Archived from the original on 2014-03-02.
  58. ^ Walters, Kerry S. (1992). Rational Infidels: The American Deists. Durango, CO: Longwood Academic. ISBN 0-89341-641-X.
  59. ^ Devillere, Citizen (1987). Archives parlementaires de la révolution français. Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. pp. 361–362.
  60. ^ Allen Wood argues that Kant was Deist. See "Kant's Deism" in P. Rossi and M. Wreen (eds.), Kant's Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). An argument against Kant as deist is Stephen Palmquist's "Kant's Theistic Solution". http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/srp/arts/KTS.html
  61. ^ Gay. (see above). “After the writings of Woolston and Tindal, English deism went into slow decline. ... By the 1730s, nearly all the arguments in behalf of Deism ... had been offered and refined; the intellectual caliber of leading Deists was none too impressive; and the opponents of deism finally mustered some formidable spokesmen. The Deists of these decades, Peter Annet (1693–1769), Thomas Chubb (1679–1747), and Thomas Morgan (?–1743), are of significance to the specialist alone. ... It had all been said before, and better. .” (p.140)
  62. ^ a b c Mossner, Ernest Campbell (1967). "Deism". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 2. Collier-MacMillan. pp. 326–336.
  63. ^ Van den Berg, Jan (October 2019). "The Development of Modern Deism". Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte: Journal of Religious and Cultural Studies. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. 71 (4): 335–356. doi:10.1163/15700739-07104002. eISSN 1570-0739. ISSN 0044-3441. S2CID 211652706.
  64. ^ José M. Lozano-Gotor, "Deism", Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions (Springer: 2013). "[Deism] takes different forms, for example, humanistic, scientific, Christian, spiritual deism, pandeism, and panendeism."
  65. ^ Mikhail Epstein, Postatheism and the phenomenon of minimal religion in Russia, in Justin Beaumont, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity (2018), p. 83, n. 3: "I refer here to monodeism as the default standard concept of deism, distinct from polydeism, pandeism, and spiritual deism."
  66. ^ What Is Deism?, Douglas MacGowan, Mother Nature Network, May 21, 2015: "Over time there have been other schools of thought formed under the umbrella of deism including Christian deism, belief in deistic principles coupled with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and Pandeism, a belief that God became the entire universe and no longer exists as a separate being."
  67. ^ Hartshorne, Charles (1964). Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism. p. 348. ISBN 0-208-00498-X.
  68. ^ Taylor, C (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p.256.
  69. ^ Taylor. (see above). p.257.
  70. ^ Taylor. (see above). p.262.
  71. ^ Essien, Anthonia M. "The sociological implications of the worldview of the Annang people: an advocacy for paradigm shift." Journal of Emerging Trends in Educational Research and Policy Studies 1.1 (2010): 29-35.
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  73. ^ a b c Ziegler, Herbert F. (2014). Nazi Germany's New Aristocracy: The SS Leadership, 1925-1939. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 85–87. ISBN 978-14-00-86036-4. from the original on 10 May 2018. Retrieved 9 March 2022.
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Bibliography

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Deism.

Histories

  • Betts, C. J. Early Deism in France: From the so-called 'deistes' of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire's 'Lettres philosophiques' (1734) (Martinus Nijhoff, 1984)
  • Craig, William Lane. The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus During the Deist Controversy (Edwin Mellen, 1985)
  • Hazard, Paul. European thought in the eighteenth century from Montesquieu to Lessing (1954). pp 393–434.
  • Herrick, James A. (1997). The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750. U of South Carolina Press.
  • Hudson, Wayne. Enlightenment and modernity: The English deists and reform (Routledge, 2015).
  • Israel, Jonathan I. Enlightenment contested: philosophy, modernity, and the emancipation of man 1670-1752 (Oxford UP, 2006).
  • Lemay, J. A. Leo, ed.Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment. Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge. (U of Delaware Press, 1987).
  • Lucci, Diego. Scripture and deism: The biblical criticism of the eighteenth-century British deists (Peter Lang, 2008).
  • McKee, David Rice. Simon Tyssot de Patot and the Seventeenth-Century Background of Critical Deism (Johns Hopkins Press, 1941)
  • Orr, John. English Deism: Its Roots and Its Fruits (1934)
  • Schlereth, Eric R. An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (U of Pennsylvania Press; 2013) 295 pages; on conflicts between deists and their opponents.
  • Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (1940)
  • Yoder, Timothy S. Hume on God: Irony, deism and genuine theism (Bloomsbury, 2008).

Primary sources

  • Paine, Thomas (1795). . Archived from the original on 2019-08-16. Retrieved 2009-04-13.
  • Palmer, Elihu. . Archived from the original on 2019-08-05. Retrieved 2009-04-13.
  • Deism: An Anthology by Peter Gay (Van Nostrand, 1968)
  • Deism and Natural Religion: A Source Book by E. Graham Waring (Frederick Ungar, 1967)
  • The American Deists: Voices of Reason & Dissent in the Early Republic by Kerry S. Walters (University of Kansas Press, 1992), which includes an extensive bibliographic essay
  • . Archived from the original on 2009-04-19. Retrieved 2009-04-13. by Bob Johnson, founder of the World Union of Deists
  • . Archived from the original on 2019-07-29. Retrieved 2015-11-19. by Bob Johnson
  • . Archived from the original on 2019-09-09. Retrieved 2015-11-19. by Bob Johnson

Secondary sources

Further reading

External links

 
Look up deism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
  • "World Union of Deists". www.deism.com. 1997–2021. from the original on 19 August 2021. Retrieved 28 August 2021.
  • "Church of The Modern Deist". moderndeist.org. 2012–2021. from the original on 14 April 2021. Retrieved 28 August 2021.

March 08, 2023
deism, other, uses, disambiguation, confused, with, theism, derived, from, latin, deus, meaning, philosophical, position, rationalistic, theology, that, generally, rejects, revelation, source, divine, knowledge, asserts, that, empirical, reason, observation, n. For other uses see Deism disambiguation Not to be confused with theism Deism ˈ d iː ɪ z em DEE iz em 1 2 or ˈ d eɪ ɪ z em DAY iz em derived from the Latin deus meaning god 3 4 is the philosophical position and rationalistic theology 5 that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical reliable and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator of the universe 3 5 6 7 8 9 More simply stated Deism is the belief in the existence of God solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authority 3 5 6 7 8 Deism emphasizes the concept of natural theology that is God s existence is revealed through nature 3 5 6 7 9 Since the 17th century and during the Age of Enlightenment especially in 18th century England France and North America 10 various Western philosophers and theologians formulated a critical rejection of the several religious texts belonging to the many organized religions and began to appeal only to truths that they felt could be established by reason as the exclusive source of divine knowledge 5 6 7 8 11 Such philosophers and theologians were called Deists and the philosophical theological position they advocated is called Deism 5 6 7 8 11 Deism as a distinct philosophical and intellectual movement declined toward the end of the 18th century 5 but had its own revival in the early 19th century 12 Some of its tenets continued as part of other intellectual and spiritual movements like Unitarianism 4 and Deism continues to have advocates today 3 including with modern variants such as Christian deism and pandeism Contents 1 Enlightenment Deism 1 1 Origins 1 2 Origin of the word deism 1 3 Herbert of Cherbury and early English Deism 1 4 The peak of Deism 1696 1801 1 5 Aspects of Deism in Enlightenment philosophy 1 5 1 The origins of religion 1 5 2 Immortality of the soul 1 5 3 Miracles and divine providence 1 5 4 Freedom and necessity 1 6 David Hume 1 7 Deism in the United States 1 8 Deism in France and continental Europe 1 9 Decline of Enlightenment Deism 2 Contemporary Deism 2 1 Recent philosophical discussions of Deism 2 2 Deism in Nazi Germany 2 3 Deism in Turkey 2 4 Deism in the United States 3 See also 4 References 4 1 Notes 4 2 Citations 5 Bibliography 5 1 Histories 5 2 Primary sources 5 3 Secondary sources 6 Further reading 7 External linksEnlightenment Deism EditOrigins Edit Deistical thinking has existed since ancient times but it did not develop as a movement until after the scientific revolution which began in the mid sixteenth century 13 Deism s origins can be traced to the philosophy of ancient Greece 14 Origin of the word deism Edit The words deism and theism are both derived from words meaning god Latin deus and Greek theos 8eos 3 The word deiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre Viret 15 but Deism was generally unknown in France until the 1690s when Pierre Bayle published his famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique which contained an article on Viret 16 In English the words deist and theist were originally synonymous but by the 17th century the terms started to diverge in meaning 17 The term deist with its current meaning first appears in English in Robert Burton s The Anatomy of Melancholy 1621 Herbert of Cherbury and early English Deism Edit Lord Herbert of Cherbury portrayed by Isaac Oliver 1560 1617 The first major statement of Deism in English is Lord Herbert of Cherbury s book De Veritate 1624 18 Lord Herbert like his contemporary Descartes searched for the foundations of knowledge The first two thirds of his book De Veritate On Truth as It Is Distinguished from Revelation the Probable the Possible and the False are devoted to an exposition of Herbert s theory of knowledge Herbert distinguished truths from experience and reasoning about experience from innate and revealed truths Innate truths are imprinted on our minds as evidenced by their universal acceptance Herbert referred to universally accepted truths as notitiae communes Common Notions Herbert believed there were five Common Notions that unify all religious beliefs There is one Supreme God God ought to be worshipped Virtue and piety are the main parts of divine worship We ought to be remorseful for our sins and repent Divine goodness dispenses rewards and punishments both in this life and after it Herbert himself had relatively few followers and it was not until the 1680s that Herbert found a true successor in Charles Blount 1654 1693 19 The peak of Deism 1696 1801 Edit See also Deism in England and France in the 18th century The appearance of John Locke s Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1690 marks an important turning point and new phase in the history of English Deism Lord Herbert s epistemology was based on the idea of common notions or innate ideas Locke s Essay was an attack on the foundation of innate ideas After Locke deists could no longer appeal to innate ideas as Herbert had done Instead deists were forced to turn to arguments based on experience and nature Under the influence of Newton they turned to the argument from design as the principal argument for the existence of God 20 Peter Gay identifies John Toland s Christianity Not Mysterious 1696 and the vehement response it provoked as the beginning of post Lockian Deism Among the notable figures Gay describes Toland and Matthew Tindal as the best known however Gay considered them to be talented publicists rather than philosophers or scholars He regards Conyers Middleton and Anthony Collins as contributing more to the substance of debate in contrast with fringe writers such as Thomas Chubb and Thomas Woolston 21 Other English Deists prominent during the period include William Wollaston Charles Blount Henry St John 1st Viscount Bolingbroke 7 and in the latter part Peter Annet Thomas Chubb and Thomas Morgan Anthony Ashley Cooper 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury was also influential though not presenting himself as a Deist he shared many of the deists key attitudes and is now usually regarded as a Deist 22 Especially noteworthy is Matthew Tindal s Christianity as Old as the Creation 1730 which became very soon after its publication the focal center of the Deist controversy Because almost every argument quotation and issue raised for decades can be found here the work is often termed the Deist s Bible 23 Following Locke s successful attack on innate ideas Tindal s Bible redefined the foundation of Deist epistemology as knowledge based on experience or human reason This effectively widened the gap between traditional Christians and what he called Christian Deists since this new foundation required that revealed truth be validated through human reason Aspects of Deism in Enlightenment philosophy Edit Enlightenment Deism consisted of two philosophical assertions 1 reason along with features of the natural world is a valid source of religious knowledge and 2 revelation is not a valid source of religious knowledge Different Deist philosophers expanded on these two assertions to create what Leslie Stephen later termed the constructive and critical aspects of Deism 24 25 Constructive assertions assertions that deist writers felt were justified by appeals to reason and features of the natural world or perhaps were intuitively obvious or common notions included 26 27 God exists and created the universe God gave humans the ability to reason Critical assertions assertions that followed from the denial of revelation as a valid source of religious knowledge were much more numerous and included Rejection of all books including the Bible that claimed to contain divine revelation 28 Rejection of the incomprehensible notion of the Trinity and other religious mysteries Rejection of reports of miracles prophecies etc The origins of religion Edit A central premise of Deism was that the religions of their day were corruptions of an original religion that was pure natural simple and rational Humanity lost this original religion when it was subsequently corrupted by priests who manipulated it for personal gain and for the class interests of the priesthood 29 and encrusted it with superstitions and mysteries irrational theological doctrines Deists referred to this manipulation of religious doctrine as priestcraft a derogatory term 30 For deists this corruption of natural religion was designed to keep laypeople baffled by mysteries and dependent on the priesthood for information about the requirements for salvation This gave the priesthood a great deal of power which the Deists believed the priesthood worked to maintain and increase Deists saw it as their mission to strip away priestcraft and mysteries Tindal perhaps the most prominent deist writer claimed that this was the proper original role of the Christian Church 31 One implication of this premise was that current day primitive societies or societies that existed in the distant past should have religious beliefs less infused with superstitions and closer to those of natural theology This position became less and less plausible as thinkers such as David Hume began studying the natural history of religion and suggested that the origins of religion was not in reason but in emotions such as the fear of the unknown Immortality of the soul Edit Different Deists had different beliefs about the immortality of the soul about the existence of Hell and damnation to punish the wicked and the existence of Heaven to reward the virtuous Anthony Collins 32 Bolingbroke Thomas Chubb and Peter Annet were materialists and either denied or doubted the immortality of the soul 33 Benjamin Franklin believed in reincarnation or resurrection Lord Herbert of Cherbury and William Wollaston 34 held that souls exist survive death and in the afterlife are rewarded or punished by God for their behavior in life Thomas Paine believed in the probability of the immortality of the soul 35 Miracles and divine providence Edit The most natural position for Deists was to reject all forms of supernaturalism including the miracle stories in the Bible The problem was that the rejection of miracles also seemed to entail the rejection of divine providence that is God taking a hand in human affairs something that many Deists were inclined to accept 36 Those who believed in a watch maker God rejected the possibility of miracles and divine providence They believed that God after establishing natural laws and setting the cosmos in motion stepped away He didn t need to keep tinkering with his creation and the suggestion that he did was insulting 37 Others however firmly believed in divine providence and so were reluctantly forced to accept at least the possibility of miracles God was after all all powerful and could do whatever he wanted including temporarily suspending his own natural laws Freedom and necessity Edit Enlightenment philosophers under the influence of Newtonian science tended to view the universe as a vast machine created and set in motion by a creator being that continues to operate according to natural law without any divine intervention This view naturally led to what was then called necessitarianism 38 the modern term is determinism the view that everything in the universe including human behavior is completely causally determined by antecedent circumstances and natural law See for example La Mettrie s L Homme machine As a consequence debates about freedom versus necessity were a regular feature of Enlightenment religious and philosophical discussions Reflecting the intellectual climate of the time there were differences among Deists about freedom and determinism Some such as Anthony Collins were actually necessitarians 39 David Hume Edit David HumeViews differ on whether David Hume was a Deist an atheist or something else 40 Like the Deists Hume rejected revelation and his famous essay On Miracles provided a powerful argument against belief in miracles On the other hand he did not believe that an appeal to Reason could provide any justification for religion In the essay Natural History of Religion 1757 he contended that polytheism not monotheism was the first and most ancient religion of mankind and that the psychological basis of religion is not reason but fear of the unknown 41 Hume s account of ignorance and fear as the motivations for primitive religious belief was a severe blow to the deist s rosy picture of prelapsarian humanity basking in priestcraft free innocence In Waring s words The clear reasonableness of natural religion disappeared before a semi historical look at what can be known about uncivilized man a barbarous necessitous animal as Hume termed him Natural religion if by that term one means the actual religious beliefs and practices of uncivilized peoples was seen to be a fabric of superstitions Primitive man was no unspoiled philosopher clearly seeing the truth of one God And the history of religion was not as the deists had implied retrograde the widespread phenomenon of superstition was caused less by priestly malice than by man s unreason as he confronted his experience 42 Deism in the United States Edit Thomas Paine The Thirteen Colonies of North America which became the United States of America after the American Revolution in 1776 were under the rule of the British Empire and Americans as British subjects were influenced by and participated in the intellectual life of the Kingdom of Great Britain English Deism was an important influence on the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and the principles of religious freedom asserted in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution Other Founding Fathers who were influenced to various degrees by Deism were Ethan Allen 43 Benjamin Franklin Cornelius Harnett Gouverneur Morris Hugh Williamson James Madison and possibly Alexander Hamilton In the United States there is a great deal of controversy over whether the Founding Fathers were Christians Deists or something in between 44 45 Particularly heated is the debate over the beliefs of Benjamin Franklin Thomas Jefferson and George Washington 46 47 48 In his Autobiography Franklin wrote that as a young man Some books against Deism fell into my hands they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle s lectures It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them for the arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted appeared to me much stronger than the refutations in short I soon became a thorough Deist 49 50 Like some other Deists Franklin believed that The Deity sometimes interferes by his particular Providence and sets aside the Events which would otherwise have been produc d in the Course of Nature or by the Free Agency of Man 51 and at the Constitutional Convention stated that the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth that God governs in the affairs of men 52 Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the Founding Father who most clearly exhibits Deistic tendencies although he generally referred to himself as a Unitarian rather than a Deist His excerpts of the canonical gospels now commonly known as the Jefferson Bible strip all supernatural and dogmatic references from the narrative on Jesus life Like Franklin Jefferson believed in God s continuing activity in human affairs 53 Thomas Paine is especially noteworthy both for his contributions to the cause of the American Revolution and for his writings in defense of Deism alongside the criticism of Abrahamic religions 12 54 55 56 In The Age of Reason 1793 1794 and other writings he advocated Deism promoted reason and freethought and argued against institutionalized religions in general and the Christian doctrine in particular 12 54 55 56 The Age of Reason was short readable and probably the only Deistic treatise that continues to be read and influential today 57 The last contributor to American Deism was Elihu Palmer 1764 1806 who wrote the Bible of American Deism Principles of Nature in 1801 Palmer is noteworthy for attempting to bring some organization to Deism by founding the Deistical Society of New York and other Deistic societies from Maine to Georgia 58 Deism in France and continental Europe Edit Voltaire at age 24 portrayed by Nicolas de Largilliere France had its own tradition of religious skepticism and natural theology in the works of Montaigne Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu The most famous of the French Deists was Voltaire who was exposed to Newtonian science and English Deism during his two year period of exile in England 1726 1728 When he returned to France he brought both back with him and exposed the French reading public i e the aristocracy to them in a number of books French Deists also included Maximilien Robespierre and Rousseau During the French Revolution 1789 1799 the Deistic Cult of the Supreme Being a direct expression of Robespierre s theological views was established briefly just under three months as the new state religion of France replacing the deposed Catholic Church and the rival atheistic Cult of Reason There were over five hundred French Revolutionaries who were deists These deists do not fit the stereotype of deists because they believed in miracles and often prayed to God In fact over seventy of them thought that God miraculously helped the French Revolution win victories over their enemies Furthermore over a hundred French Revolutionary deists also wrote prayers and hymns to God Citizen Devillere was one of the many French Revolutionary deists who believed God did miracles Devillere said God who conducts our destiny deigned to concern himself with our dangers He commanded the spirit of victory to direct the hand of the faithful French and in a few hours the aristocrats received the attack which we prepared the wicked ones were destroyed and liberty was avenged 59 Deism in Germany is not well documented We know from correspondence with Voltaire that Frederick the Great was a Deist Immanuel Kant s identification with Deism is controversial 60 Decline of Enlightenment Deism Edit Peter Gay describes Enlightenment Deism as entering slow decline as a recognizable movement in the 1730s 61 A number of reasons have been suggested for this decline including 62 The increasing influence of naturalism and materialism The writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant raising questions about the ability of reason to address metaphysical questions The violence of the French Revolution Christian revivalist movements such as Pietism and Methodism which emphasized a personal relationship with God along with the rise of anti rationalist and counter Enlightenment philosophies such as that of Johann Georg Hamann 62 Although Deism has declined in popularity over time scholars believe that these ideas still have a lingering influence on modern society 63 One of the major activities of the Deists biblical criticism evolved into its own highly technical discipline Deist rejection of revealed religion evolved into and contributed to 19th century liberal British theology and the rise of Unitarianism 62 Contemporary Deism EditThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed October 2012 Learn how and when to remove this template message Contemporary Deism attempts to integrate classical Deism with modern philosophy and the current state of scientific knowledge This attempt has produced a wide variety of personal beliefs under the broad classification of belief of deism There are a number of subcategories of modern Deism including monodeism the default standard concept of deism pandeism panendeism spiritual deism process deism Christian deism polydeism scientific deism and humanistic deism 64 65 66 Some deists see design in nature and purpose in the universe and in their lives Others see God and the universe in a co creative process Some deists view God in classical terms as observing humanity but not directly intervening in our lives while others see God as a subtle and persuasive spirit who created the world and then stepped back to observe Recent philosophical discussions of Deism Edit In the 1960s theologian Charles Hartshorne scrupulously examined and rejected both deism and pandeism as well as pantheism in favor of a conception of God whose characteristics included absolute perfection in some respects relative perfection in all others or AR writing that this theory is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism concluding that panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations 67 Charles Taylor in his 2007 book A Secular Age showed the historical role of Deism leading to what he calls an exclusive humanism This humanism invokes a moral order whose ontic commitment is wholly intra human with no reference to transcendence 68 One of the special achievements of such deism based humanism is that it discloses new anthropocentric moral sources by which human beings are motivated and empowered to accomplish acts of mutual benefit 69 This is the province of a buffered disengaged self which is the locus of dignity freedom and discipline and is endowed with a sense of human capability 70 According to Taylor by the early 19th century this Deism mediated exclusive humanism developed as an alternative to Christian faith in a personal God and an order of miracles and mystery Some critics of Deism have accused adherents of facilitating the rise of nihilism 71 Deism in Nazi Germany Edit Main articles Ideology of the Nazi Party and Religion in Nazi Germany Further information Kirchenkampf Reichskonkordat and Religious aspects of Nazism On positive German God belief 1939 In Nazi Germany Gottglaubig literally believing in God 72 73 was a Nazi religious term for a form of non denominationalism practised by those Germans who had officially left Christian churches but professed faith in some higher power or divine creator 72 Such people were called Gottglaubige believers in God and the term for the overall movement was Gottglaubigkeit belief in God the term denotes someone who still believes in a God although without having any institutional religious affiliation 72 These National Socialists were not favourable towards religious institutions of their time nor did they tolerate atheism of any type within their ranks 73 74 The 1943 Philosophical Dictionary defined gottglaubig as official designation for those who profess a specific kind of piety and morality without being bound to a church denomination whilst however also rejecting irreligion and godlessness 75 In the 1939 census 3 5 of the German population identified as gottglaubig 73 In the 1920 National Socialist Programme of the National Socialist German Workers Party NSDAP Adolf Hitler first mentioned the phrase Positive Christianity The Nazi Party did not wish to tie itself to a particular Christian denomination but with Christianity in general and sought freedom of religion for all denominations so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race point 24 When Hitler and the NSDAP got into power in 1933 they sought to assert state control over the churches on the one hand through the Reichskonkordat with the Roman Catholic Church and the forced merger of the German Evangelical Church Confederation into the Protestant Reich Church on the other This policy seems to have gone relatively well until late 1936 when a gradual worsening of relations between the Nazi Party and the churches saw the rise of Kirchenaustritt leaving the church 72 Although there was no top down official directive to revoke church membership some Nazi Party members started doing so voluntarily and put other members under pressure to follow their example 72 Those who left the churches were designated as Gottglaubige believers in God a term officially recognised by the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick on 26 November 1936 He stressed that the term signified political disassociation from the churches not an act of religious apostasy 72 The term dissident which some church leavers had used up until then was associated with being without belief glaubenslos whilst most of them emphasized that they still believed in a God and thus required a different word 72 The Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was the first to leave his church 76 on 15 November 1933 but for the next three years he would be the only prominent Nazi leader to do so 72 In early 1936 SS leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich terminated their membership of the Roman Catholic Church followed by a number of Gauleiter including Martin Mutschmann Saxony Carl Rover Weser Ems and Robert Heinrich Wagner Baden 72 In late 1936 especially Roman Catholic party members left the church followed in 1937 by a flood of primarily Protestant party members 72 Hitler himself never repudiated his membership of the Roman Catholic Church 77 in 1941 he told his General Gerhard Engel I am now as before a Catholic and will always be so However the shifting actual religious views of Adolf Hitler remain unclear due to conflicting accounts from Hitler s associates such as Otto Strasser Martin Bormann Joseph Goebbels and others 78 Deism in Turkey Edit Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the founding father of the Republic of Turkey serving as its first president from 1923 until his death in 1938 He undertook sweeping progressive reforms which modernized Turkey into a secular industrializing nation 79 80 81 Main article Irreligion in Turkey Further information Secularism in Turkey An early April 2018 report of the Turkish Ministry of Education titled The Youth is Sliding towards Deism observed that an increasing number of pupils in Imam Hatip schools was repudiating Islam in favour of Deism irreligious belief in a creator God 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 The report s publication generated large scale controversy in the Turkish press and society at large as well as amongst conservative Islamic sects Muslim clerics and Islamist parties in Turkey 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 The progressive Muslim theologian Mustafa Ozturk noted the Deistic trend among Turkish people a year earlier arguing that the very archaic dogmatic notion of religion held by the majority of those claiming to represent Islam was causing the new generations to get indifferent even distant to the Islamic worldview Despite lacking reliable statistical data numerous anecdotes and independent surveys appear to point in this direction 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 Although some commentators claim that the secularization of Turkey is merely a result of Western influence or even a conspiracy other commentators even some pro government ones have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the loss of faith in Islam is not the West but Turkey itself 89 Deism in the United States Edit Main article Irreligion in the United States The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey ARIS report estimated that between 1990 and 2001 the number of self identifying Deists grew from 6 000 to 49 000 representing about 0 02 of the U S population at the time 90 The 2008 ARIS survey found based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification that 70 of Americans believe in a personal God i roughly 12 are atheists or agnostics and 12 believe in a deist or paganistic concept of the Divine as a higher power rather than a personal God 91 The term ceremonial deism was coined in 1962 and has been used since 1984 by the Supreme Court of the United States to assess exemptions from the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U S Constitution thought to be expressions of cultural tradition and not earnest invocations of a deity It has been noted that the term does not describe any school of thought within Deism itself 92 See also EditAmerican Enlightenment Atheism during the Age of Enlightenment Ceremonial deism Deism in England and France in the 18th century Deistic evolution Great Architect of the Universe Ietsism Infinitism List of deists Moralistic therapeutic deism Nicodemite Non physical entity Nontheism Philosophical theism Religious affiliations of presidents of the United States Religious interpretations of the Big Bang theory Spiritual but not religious Theistic rationalism Transcendentalism Unitarian UniversalismReferences EditNotes Edit The American Religious Identification Survey ARIS report notes that while n o definition was offered of the terms they are usually associated with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ together with a certain view of salvation scripture and missionary work p 11 Citations Edit R E Allen ed 1990 The Concise Oxford Dictionary Oxford University Press Deist Definition and More from the Free Merriam Webster Dictionary Merriam webster com 2012 Retrieved 2012 10 10 a b c d e f Harper Leland Royce 2020 Attributes of a Deistic God Multiverse Deism Shifting Perspectives of God and the World Lanham Maryland Rowman amp Littlefield pp 47 68 ISBN 978 1 7936 1475 9 LCCN 2020935396 a b Peters Ted 2013 Models of God Deism In Diller Jeanine Kasher Asa eds Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities Dordrecht and Heidelberg Springer Verlag pp 51 52 doi 10 1007 978 94 007 5219 1 5 ISBN 978 94 007 5219 1 LCCN 2012954282 a b c d e f g Smith Merril D ed 2015 Deism The World of the American Revolution A Daily Life Encyclopedia Vol 1 Santa Barbara California Greenwood Publishing Group imprint of ABC Clio pp 661 664 ISBN 978 1 4408 3027 3 LCCN 2015009496 a b c d e Bristow William Fall 2017 Religion and the Enlightenment Deism In Zalta Edward N ed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University ISSN 1095 5054 OCLC 643092515 Archived from the original on 11 December 2017 Retrieved 3 August 2021 Deism is the form of religion most associated with the Enlightenment According to deism we can know by the natural light of reason that the universe is created and governed by a supreme intelligence however although this supreme being has a plan for creation from the beginning the being does not interfere with creation the deist typically rejects miracles and reliance on special revelation as a source of religious doctrine and belief in favor of the natural light of reason Thus a deist typically rejects the divinity of Christ as repugnant to reason the deist typically demotes the figure of Jesus from agent of miraculous redemption to extraordinary moral teacher Deism is the form of religion fitted to the new discoveries in natural science according to which the cosmos displays an intricate machine like order the deists suppose that the supposition of a God is necessary as the source or author of this order Though not a deist himself Isaac Newton provides fuel for deism with his argument in his Opticks 1704 that we must infer from the order and beauty in the world to the existence of an intelligent supreme being as the cause of this order and beauty Samuel Clarke perhaps the most important proponent and popularizer of Newtonian philosophy in the early eighteenth century supplies some of the more developed arguments for the position that the correct exercise of unaided human reason leads inevitably to the well grounded belief in a God He argues that the Newtonian physical system implies the existence of a transcendent cause the creator a God In his first set of Boyle lectures A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God 1705 Clarke presents the metaphysical or argument a priori for God s existence This argument concludes from the rationalist principle that whatever exists must have a sufficient reason or cause of its existence to the existence of a transcendent necessary being who stands as the cause of the chain of natural causes and effects a b c d e f Manuel Frank Edward Pailin David A Mapson K Stefon Matt 13 March 2020 26 July 1999 Deism Encyclopaedia Britannica Edinburgh Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc Archived from the original on 9 June 2021 Retrieved 3 August 2021 Deism an unorthodox religious attitude that found expression among a group of English writers beginning with Edward Herbert later 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury in the first half of the 17th century and ending with Henry St John 1st Viscount Bolingbroke in the middle of the 18th century These writers subsequently inspired a similar religious attitude in Europe during the second half of the 18th century and in the colonial United States of America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries In general Deism refers to what can be called natural religion the acceptance of a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every person or that can be acquired by the use of reason and the rejection of religious knowledge when it is acquired through either revelation or the teaching of any church a b c d Kohler Kaufmann Hirsch Emil G 1906 Deism Jewish Encyclopedia Kopelman Foundation Archived from the original on 15 January 2013 Retrieved 3 August 2021 A system of belief which posits a God s existence as the cause of all things and admits His perfection but rejects Divine revelation and government proclaiming the all sufficiency of natural laws The Socinians as opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity were designated as deists In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deism became synonymous with natural religion and deist with freethinker England and France have been successively the strongholds of deism Lord Herbert of Cherbury the father of deism in England assumes certain innate ideas which establish five religious truths 1 that God is 2 that it is man s duty to worship Him 3 that worship consists in virtue and piety 4 that man must repent of sin and abandon his evil ways 5 that divine retribution either in this or in the next life is certain He holds that all positive religions are either allegorical and poetic interpretations of nature or deliberately organized impositions of priests a b Gomes Alan W 2012 2011 Deism The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization Chichester West Sussex Wiley Blackwell doi 10 1002 9780470670606 wbecc0408 ISBN 9781405157629 Deism is a rationalistic critical approach to theism with an emphasis on natural theology The deists attempted to reduce religion to what they regarded as its most foundational rationally justifiable elements Deism is not strictly speaking the teaching that God wound up the world like a watch and let it run on its own though that teaching was embraced by some within the movement Rowe William L 2022 2017 Deism In Craig Edward ed Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy London and New York Routledge doi 10 4324 9780415249126 K013 1 ISBN 9780415250696 In the popular sense a deist is someone who believes that God created the world but thereafter has exercised no providential control over what goes on in it In the proper sense a deist is someone who affirms a divine creator but denies any divine revelation holding that human reason alone can give us everything we need to know to live a correct moral and religious life In this sense of deism some deists held that God exercises providential control over the world and provides for a future state of rewards and punishments while other deists denied this However they all agreed that human reason alone was the basis on which religious questions had to be settled rejecting the orthodox claim to a special divine revelation of truths that go beyond human reason Deism flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries principally in England France and America a b Herrick James A 1997 Characteristics of British Deism The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists The Discourse of Skepticism 1680 1750 Studies in Rhetoric Communication Columbia South Carolina University of South Carolina Press pp 23 49 ISBN 978 1 57003 166 3 a b c Claeys Gregory 1989 Revolution in heaven The Age of Reason 1794 95 Thomas Paine Social and Political Thought 1st ed New York and London Routledge pp 177 195 ISBN 9780044450900 Piland 2011 p 5 Piland 2011 p 4 Viret described deism as a heretical development of Italian Renaissance naturalism resulting from misuse of the liberty conferred by the Reformation to criticise idolatry and superstition Viret Pierre 1564 Instruction Chretienne en la doctrine de la foi et de l Evangile Christian teaching on the doctrine of faith and the Gospel Viret wrote that a group of people believed like the Jews and Turks in a God of some kind but regarded the doctrine of the evangelists and the apostles as a mere myth Contrary to their own claim he regarded them as atheists Bayle Pierre 1820 Viret Dictionnaire historique et critique in French Vol 14 Nouvelle ed Paris Desoer Retrieved 2017 11 23 1697 1820 Bayle quotes Viret see below as follows J ai entendu qu il y en a de ceste bande qui s appellent deistes d un mot tout nouveau lequel ils veulent opposer a l atheiste remarking on the term as a neologism un mot tout nouveau p 418 Orr John 1934 English Deism Its Roots and Its Fruits Eerdmans The words deism and theism are both derived words meaning god THE Latin ZEUS deus deist and Greek theos theist 8eos The word deus deiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre Viret but was generally unknown in France until the 1690s when Pierre Bayle published his famous Dictionary which contained an article on Viret Prior to the 17th Century the terms deism and deist were used interchangeably with the terms theism and theist respectively Theologians and philosophers of the 17th Century began to give a different signification to the words Both theists and deists asserted belief in one supreme God the Creator But the theist taught that God remained actively interested in and operative in the world which he had made whereas the Deist maintained that God endowed the world at creation with self sustaining and self acting powers and then surrendered it wholly to the operation of these powers acting as second causes p 13 Basil Willey The Seventeenth Century Background Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion 1934 p 59ff Gay see above By utilizing his wide classical learning Blount demonstrated how to use pagan writers and pagan ideas against Christianity Other Deists were to follow his lead pp 47 48 Note that Locke himself was not a deist He believed in both miracles and revelation See Orr pp 96 99 Gay see above Among the Deists only Anthony Collins 1676 1729 could claim much philosophical competence only Conyers Middleton 1683 1750 was a really serious scholar The best known Deists notably John Toland 1670 1722 and Matthew Tindal 1656 1733 were talented publicists clear without being deep forceful but not subtle Others like Thomas Chubb 1679 1747 were self educated freethinkers a few like Thomas Woolston 1669 1731 were close to madness pp 9 10 Gay see above Gay describes him pp 78 79 as a Deist in fact if not in name Waring see above p 107 Stephen Leslie 1881 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century 3rd Edition 2 vols reprinted 1949 London Smith Elder amp Co ISBN 978 0844614212 Stephen s book despite its perhaps too ambitious title preface Vol I p vii was conceived as an account of the deist controversy p vi Stephen notes the difficulty of interpreting the primary sources as religious toleration was yet far from complete in law and entirely not a settled fact in practice Ch II s 12 deist authors were forced to cover their opinions with a veil of decent ambiguity He writes of Deist books being burned by the hangman mentions the Aikenhead blasphemy case 1697 1 and names five deists who were banished imprisoned etc Gay Frohlich Peter Joachim ed 1968 Deism An Anthology Princeton etc Van Nostrand ISBN 978 0686474012 All Deists were in fact both critical and constructive Deists All sought to destroy in order to build and reasoned either from the absurdity of Christianity to the need for a new philosophy or from their desire for a new philosophy to the absurdity of Christianity Each deist to be sure had his special competence While one specialized in abusing priests another specialized in rhapsodies to nature and a third specialized in the skeptical reading of sacred documents Yet whatever strength the movement had and it was at times formidable it derived that strength from a peculiar combination of critical and constructive elements p 13 Tindal By natural religion I understand the belief of the existence of a God and the sense and practice of those duties which result from the knowledge we by our reason have of him and his perfections and of ourselves and our own imperfections and of the relationship we stand in to him and to our fellow creatures so that the religion of nature takes in everything that is founded on the reason and nature of things Christianity as Old as the Creation II quoted in Waring see above p 113 Toland I hope to make it appear that the use of reason is not so dangerous in religion as it is commonly represented There is nothing that men make a greater noise about than the mysteries of the Christian religion The divines gravely tell us we must adore what we cannot comprehend Some contend that some mysteries may be or at least seem to be contrary to reason and yet received by faith Others contend that no mystery is contrary to reason but that all are above it On the contrary we hold that reason is the only foundation of all certitude Wherefore we likewise maintain according to the title of this discourse that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason nor above it and that no Christian doctrine can be properly called a mystery Christianity Not Mysterious or a Treatise Shewing That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason Nor above It 1696 quoted in Waring see above pp 1 12 Stephens William An Account of the Growth of Deism in England Retrieved 2019 01 04 1696 1990 Introduction James E Force 1990 W hat sets the Deists apart from even their most latitudinarian Christian contemporaries is their desire to lay aside scriptural revelation as rationally incomprehensible and thus useless or even detrimental to human society and to religion While there may possibly be exceptions most Deists especially as the eighteenth century wears on agree that revealed Scripture is nothing but a joke or well invented flam About mid century John Leland in his historical and analytical account of the movement View of the Principal Deistical Writers 2 1754 1755 squarely states that the rejection of revealed Scripture is the characteristic element of deism a view further codified by such authorities as Ephraim Chambers and Samuel Johnson DEISM writes Stephens bluntly is a denial of all reveal d Religion Champion J A I 2014 The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken The Church of England and its Enemies 1660 1730 Cambridge University Press Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History Champion maintains that historical argument was a central component of the Deists defences of what they considered true religion Paine Thomas The Age of Reason As priestcraft was always the enemy of knowledge because priestcraft supports itself by keeping people in delusion and ignorance it was consistent with its policy to make the acquisition of knowledge a real sin Part 2 p 129 It can t be imputed to any defect in the light of nature that the pagan world ran into idolatry but to their being entirely governed by priests who pretended communication with their gods and to have thence their revelations which they imposed on the credulous as divine oracles Whereas the business of the Christian dispensation was to destroy all those traditional revelations and restore free from all idolatry the true primitive and natural religion implanted in mankind from the creation Christianity as Old as the Creation XIV quoted in Waring see above p 163 Orr see above p 134 Orr see above p 78 Orr see above p 137 Age of Reason Pt I I believe in one God and no more and I hope for happiness beyond this life and in the Recapitulation I trouble not myself about the manner of future existence I content myself with believing even to positive conviction that the power that gave me existence is able to continue it in any form and manner he pleases either with or without this body and it appears more probable to me that I shall continue to exist hereafter than that I should have had existence as I now have before that existence began Most American Deists for example firmly believed in divine providence See this article Deism in the United States See for instance Paine Thomas The Age of Reason Part 1 David Hartley for example described himself as quite in the necessitarian scheme See Ferg Stephen Two Early Works of David Hartley Journal of the History of Philosophy vol 19 no 2 April 1981 pp 173 89 See for example Liberty and Necessity 1729 Hume himself was uncomfortable with both terms and Hume scholar Paul Russell has argued that the best and safest term for Hume s views is irreligion Russell Paul 2005 Hume on Religion Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved 2009 12 17 Hume David 1779 The Natural History of Religion The primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear of future events and what ideas will naturally be entertained of invisible unknown powers while men lie under dismal apprehensions of any kind may easily be conceived Every image of vengeance severity cruelty and malice must occur and must augment the ghastliness and horror which oppresses the amazed religionist And no idea of perverse wickedness can be framed which those terrified devotees do not readily without scruple apply to their deity Section XIII Waring see above Excerpts from Allen s Reason The Only Oracle Of Man Ethan Allen Homestead Museum Archived from the original on 2008 05 02 Retrieved 2008 05 01 The Deist Minimum First Things 2005 Holmes David 2006 The Faiths of the Founding Fathers New York NY Oxford University Press USA ISBN 0 19 530092 0 David Liss 11 June 2006 The Founding Fathers Solving modern problems building wealth and finding God Washington Post Gene Garman 2001 Was Thomas Jefferson a Deist Sullivan County com Walter Isaacson March April 2004 Benjamin Franklin An American Life Skeptical Inquirer Archived from the original on 2007 10 12 Franklin Benjamin 2005 Benjamin Franklin Autobiography Poor Richard and Later Writings New York NY Library of America p 619 ISBN 1 883011 53 1 Benjamin Franklin Autobiography University of Maine Farmington Archived from the original on 2012 12 10 Benjamin Franklin On the Providence of God in the Government of the World 1730 Max Farrand ed 1911 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 Vol 1 New Haven Yale University Press p 451 Frazer following Sydney Ahlstrom characterizes Jefferson as a theistic rationalist rather than a Deist because Jefferson believed in God s continuing activity in human affairs See Frazer Gregg L 2012 The Religious Beliefs of America s Founders Reason Revelation Revolution University Press of Kansas p 11 and 128 ISBN 9780700618453 See Ahlstrom Sydney E 2004 A Religious History of the American People p 359 See Gary Scott Smith 2006 Faith and the Presidency From George Washington to George W Bush Oxford U P p 69 ISBN 9780198041153 a b Gelpi Donald L 2007 2000 Part 1 Enlightenment Religion Chapter 3 Militant Deism Varieties of Transcendental Experience A Study in Constructive Postmodernism Eugene Oregon Wipf and Stock pp 47 48 ISBN 9781725220294 a b Fischer Kirsten 2010 Manning Nicholas Stefani Anne eds Religion Governed by Terror A Deist Critique of Fearful Christianity in the Early American Republic Revue Francaise d Etudes Americaines Paris Belin 125 3 13 26 doi 10 3917 rfea 125 0013 eISSN 1776 3061 ISSN 0397 7870 LCCN 80640131 via Cairn info a b Paine Thomas 2014 Of the Religion of Deism Compared with the Christian Religion and the Superiority of the Former over the Latter 1804 In Calvert Jane E Shapiro Ian eds Selected Writings of Thomas Paine Rethinking the Western Tradition New Haven Yale University Press pp 568 574 doi 10 12987 9780300210699 018 ISBN 9780300167450 S2CID 246141428 Archived from the original on 27 August 2016 Retrieved 7 August 2021 In its own time it earned Paine widespread vilification How widespread deism was among ordinary people in the United States is a matter of continued debate Culture Wars in the Early Republic Common place Archived from the original on 2014 03 02 Walters Kerry S 1992 Rational Infidels The American Deists Durango CO Longwood Academic ISBN 0 89341 641 X Devillere Citizen 1987 Archives parlementaires de la revolution francais Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique pp 361 362 Allen Wood argues that Kant was Deist See Kant s Deism in P Rossi and M Wreen eds Kant s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered Bloomington Indiana University Press 1991 An argument against Kant as deist is Stephen Palmquist s Kant s Theistic Solution http www hkbu edu hk ppp srp arts KTS html Gay see above After the writings of Woolston and Tindal English deism went into slow decline By the 1730s nearly all the arguments in behalf of Deism had been offered and refined the intellectual caliber of leading Deists was none too impressive and the opponents of deism finally mustered some formidable spokesmen The Deists of these decades Peter Annet 1693 1769 Thomas Chubb 1679 1747 and Thomas Morgan 1743 are of significance to the specialist alone It had all been said before and better p 140 a b c Mossner Ernest Campbell 1967 Deism Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol 2 Collier MacMillan pp 326 336 Van den Berg Jan October 2019 The Development of Modern Deism Zeitschrift fur Religions und Geistesgeschichte Journal of Religious and Cultural Studies Leiden and Boston Brill Publishers 71 4 335 356 doi 10 1163 15700739 07104002 eISSN 1570 0739 ISSN 0044 3441 S2CID 211652706 Jose M Lozano Gotor Deism Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions Springer 2013 Deism takes different forms for example humanistic scientific Christian spiritual deism pandeism and panendeism Mikhail Epstein Postatheism and the phenomenon of minimal religion in Russia in Justin Beaumont ed The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity 2018 p 83 n 3 I refer here to monodeism as the default standard concept of deism distinct from polydeism pandeism and spiritual deism What Is Deism Douglas MacGowan Mother Nature Network May 21 2015 Over time there have been other schools of thought formed under the umbrella of deism including Christian deism belief in deistic principles coupled with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and Pandeism a belief that God became the entire universe and no longer exists as a separate being Hartshorne Charles 1964 Man s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism p 348 ISBN 0 208 00498 X Taylor C 2007 A Secular Age Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press p 256 Taylor see above p 257 Taylor see above p 262 Essien Anthonia M The sociological implications of the worldview of the Annang people an advocacy for paradigm shift Journal of Emerging Trends in Educational Research and Policy Studies 1 1 2010 29 35 a b c d e f g h i j Steigmann Gall Richard 2003 Gottglaubig Assent of the Anti Christians PDF The Holy Reich Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919 1945 Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 218 260 doi 10 1017 CBO9780511818103 009 ISBN 9780511818103 Archived PDF from the original on 28 April 2021 Retrieved 9 March 2022 a b c Ziegler Herbert F 2014 Nazi Germany s New Aristocracy The SS Leadership 1925 1939 Princeton New Jersey Princeton University Press pp 85 87 ISBN 978 14 00 86036 4 Archived from the original on 10 May 2018 Retrieved 9 March 2022 Burleigh Michael The Third Reich A New History 2012 pp 196 197 Archived 27 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine amtliche Bezeichnung fur diejenigen die sich zu einer artgemassen Frommigkeit und Sittlichkeit bekennen ohne konfessionell kirchlich gebunden zu sein andererseits aber Religions und Gottlosigkeit verwerfen Philosophisches Worterbuch Kroners Taschenausgabe Volume 12 1943 p 206 Cited in Cornelia Schmitz Berning 2007 p 281 ff Rosenberg was baptised in the Lutheran St Nicholas Church Tallinn shortly after his birth Christopher Hitchens 22 December 2007 Hitchens on Hitler Archived from the original on 8 October 2017 Retrieved 24 January 2018 via YouTube Toland John 1992 Adolf Hitler The Definitive Biography New York Anchor Publishing p 507 ISBN 978 0385420532 Cuthell David Cameron Jr 2009 Ataturk Kemal Mustafa Kemal In Agoston Gabor Masters Bruce eds Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire New York Facts On File pp 56 60 ISBN 978 0 8160 6259 1 LCCN 2008020716 Retrieved 23 January 2021 Ataturk Kemal World Encyclopedia Philip s 2014 doi 10 1093 acref 9780199546091 001 0001 ISBN 9780199546091 retrieved 9 June 2019 Books Market House Books Market House 2003 Books Market House ed Ataturk Kemal Who s Who in the Twentieth Century Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 acref 9780192800916 001 0001 ISBN 9780192800916 retrieved 9 June 2019 a b c McKernan Bethan 29 April 2020 Turkish students increasingly resisting religion study suggests The Guardian London ISSN 1756 3224 OCLC 60623878 Archived from the original on 22 November 2021 Retrieved 17 January 2022 a b c Sarfati Yusuf 15 April 2019 State Monopolization of Religion and Declining Piety in Turkey Berkley Forum Washington D C Berkley Center for Religion Peace and World Affairs Georgetown University Archived from the original on 16 May 2021 Retrieved 17 January 2022 a b c Bekdil Burak 20 May 2021 Turks May Be Rediscovering the Merits of the Secular Paradigm BESA Center Perspectives Tel Aviv Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies Bar Ilan University Archived from the original on 18 July 2021 Retrieved 17 January 2022 a b c Akyol Mustafa 12 June 2020 How Islamists are Ruining Islam Current Trends in Islamist Ideology Washington D C Hudson Institute Archived from the original on 25 December 2021 Retrieved 17 January 2022 a b c Bilici Mucahit Fall 2018 The Crisis of Religiosity in Turkish Islamism Middle East Report No 288 Tacoma Washington MERIP pp 43 45 ISSN 0899 2851 JSTOR 45198325 OCLC 615545050 Archived from the original on 13 October 2021 Retrieved 17 January 2022 a b c Girit Selin 10 May 2018 Losing their religion The young Turks rejecting Islam BBC News London Archived from the original on 6 December 2021 Retrieved 17 January 2022 a b c Kulsoy Ahmet 6 May 2018 What is pushing half of Turkey towards Deism Ahval News Cyprus Archived from the original on 9 November 2020 Retrieved 17 January 2022 Akyol Mustafa 16 April 2018 Why so many Turks are losing faith in Islam Al Monitor Washington D C Archived from the original on 15 August 2021 Retrieved 17 January 2022 American Religious Identification Survey 2001 PDF 2001 Archived PDF from the original on 2015 11 23 Retrieved 2019 09 18 ARIS Summary Report March 2009 PDF 2009 Archived PDF from the original on 2012 01 05 Retrieved 2017 03 18 Martha Nussbaum Under God The Pledge Present and FutureBibliography Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Deism Histories Edit Betts C J Early Deism in France From the so called deistes of Lyon 1564 to Voltaire s Lettres philosophiques 1734 Martinus Nijhoff 1984 Craig William Lane The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus During the Deist Controversy Edwin Mellen 1985 Hazard Paul European thought in the eighteenth century from Montesquieu to Lessing 1954 pp 393 434 Herrick James A 1997 The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists The Discourse of Skepticism 1680 1750 U of South Carolina Press Hudson Wayne Enlightenment and modernity The English deists and reform Routledge 2015 Israel Jonathan I Enlightenment contested philosophy modernity and the emancipation of man 1670 1752 Oxford UP 2006 Lemay J A Leo ed Deism Masonry and the Enlightenment Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge U of Delaware Press 1987 Lucci Diego Scripture and deism The biblical criticism of the eighteenth century British deists Peter Lang 2008 McKee David Rice Simon Tyssot de Patot and the Seventeenth Century Background of Critical Deism Johns Hopkins Press 1941 Orr John English Deism Its Roots and Its Fruits 1934 Schlereth Eric R An Age of Infidels The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States U of Pennsylvania Press 2013 295 pages on conflicts between deists and their opponents Willey Basil The Eighteenth Century Background Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period 1940 Yoder Timothy S Hume on God Irony deism and genuine theism Bloomsbury 2008 Primary sources Edit Paine Thomas 1795 The Age of Reason Archived from the original on 2019 08 16 Retrieved 2009 04 13 Palmer Elihu The Principles of Nature Archived from the original on 2019 08 05 Retrieved 2009 04 13 Deism An Anthology by Peter Gay Van Nostrand 1968 Deism and Natural Religion A Source Book by E Graham Waring Frederick Ungar 1967 The American Deists Voices of Reason amp Dissent in the Early Republic by Kerry S Walters University of Kansas Press 1992 which includes an extensive bibliographic essay Deism A Revolution in Religion A Revolution in You Archived from the original on 2009 04 19 Retrieved 2009 04 13 by Bob Johnson founder of the World Union of Deists God Gave Us Reason Not Religion Archived from the original on 2019 07 29 Retrieved 2015 11 19 by Bob Johnson An Answer to C S Lewis Mere Christianity Archived from the original on 2019 09 09 Retrieved 2015 11 19 by Bob JohnsonSecondary sources Edit Addante Luca 2019 Part II Europe and The Iberian Connection Unbelief Deism and Libertinism in Sixteenth Century Italy In Garcia Arenal Mercedes Pastore Stefania eds From Doubt to Unbelief Forms of Scepticism in the Iberian World Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures Vol 42 Cambridge Modern Humanities Research Association pp 107 122 doi 10 2307 j ctv16km0hq 11 ISBN 978 1 781888 69 8 S2CID 242496485 Aldridge A Owen October 1997 Natural Religion and Deism in America before Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine The William and Mary Quarterly Williamsburg Virginia Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture 54 4 Religion in Early America 835 848 doi 10 2307 2953885 ISSN 1933 7698 JSTOR 2953885 Bonoan Raoul J 1992 The Enlightenment Deism and Rizal Philippine Studies Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints Quezon City Ateneo de Manila University 40 1 53 67 ISSN 2244 1638 JSTOR 42633293 Champion Justin A I 1999 DEISM In Popkin Richard H ed The Columbia History of Western Philosophy New York Columbia University Press pp 437 445 ISBN 9780231500340 JSTOR 10 7312 popk10128 70 Hussaini Sayed Hassan 2016 Islamic Philosophy between Theism and Deism Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia Braga Aletheia Associacao Cientifica e Cultural 72 1 Teismos Aportacoes Filosoficas do Leste e Oeste Theisms Philosophical Contributions from the East to the West 65 83 doi 10 17990 RPF 2016 72 1 0065 ISSN 0870 5283 JSTOR 43816275 Lynch John 2012 Religion in the Age of Enlightenment New Worlds A Religious History of Latin America New Haven and London Yale University Press pp 64 105 ISBN 9780300166804 JSTOR j ctt1npmbn 8 LCCN 2011041757 Lyttle Charles March 1933 Deistic Piety in the Cults of the French Revolution Church History Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History 2 1 22 40 doi 10 1017 S0009640700120049 ISSN 1755 2613 JSTOR 3691955 S2CID 154689430 Perry Seth April 2021 Paine Detected in Mississippi Slavery Print Culture and the Threat of Deism in the Early Republic The William and Mary Quarterly Williamsburg Virginia Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture 78 2 313 338 doi 10 5309 willmaryquar 78 2 0313 ISSN 1933 7698 S2CID 234772508 Phillips III Russell E Pargament Kenneth I Lynn Quinten K Crossley Craig D August 2004 Self Directing Religious Coping A Deistic God Abandoning God or No God at All Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Chichester West Sussex Wiley Blackwell on behalf of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 3 409 418 doi 10 1111 j 1468 5906 2004 00243 x ISSN 1468 5906 JSTOR 1387634 S2CID 144102287 Piland Tiffany 2011 The Influence and Legacy of Deism in Eighteenth Century America MLS thesis Rollins College Prince Michael B 2020 Defoe s Deist Masterpiece The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 1719 The Shortest Way with Defoe Robinson Crusoe Deism and the Novel Charlottesville Virginia University of Virginia Press pp 134 207 doi 10 2307 j ctvzgb6pp 7 ISBN 9780813943664 S2CID 241840122 Taussig Harold E July 1970 Deism in Philadelphia During the Age of Franklin Pennsylvania History A Journal of Mid Atlantic Studies University Park Pennsylvania Penn State University Press 37 3 217 236 ISSN 2153 2109 JSTOR 27771874 Further reading EditDiller Jeanine Winter 2021 God and Other Ultimates 2 2 Models of God In Zalta Edward N ed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University ISSN 1095 5054 OCLC 643092515 Archived from the original on 15 March 2022 Retrieved 23 March 2022 Draper Paul ed 2008 God or Blind Nature Philosophers Debate the Evidence infidels org Colorado Springs Colorado The Secular Web Archived from the original on 17 March 2022 Retrieved 23 March 2022 Staloff Darren January 2008 Deism and the Founding of the United States nationalhumanitiescenter org Research Triangle Park North Carolina National Humanities Center Archived from the original on 15 October 2008 Retrieved 28 August 2021 External links Edit Look up deism in Wiktionary the free dictionary World Union of Deists www deism com 1997 2021 Archived from the original on 19 August 2021 Retrieved 28 August 2021 Church of The Modern Deist moderndeist org 2012 2021 Archived from the original on 14 April 2021 Retrieved 28 August 2021 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Deism amp oldid 1142859155, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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