Unlike classical theism, many Deists believe in the existence of a creator God who simply does not intervene anymore after creating the universe, again solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authorities. Fundamentally, Deism emphasizes the concept of natural theology—that is, God's existence is revealed through nature itself.
Since the 17th century and during the Age of Enlightenment, especially in 18th-century England, France, and North America, 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. Such philosophers and theologians were called "Deists", and the philosophical/theological position they advocated is called "Deism".
Deism, as a distinct philosophical and intellectual movement, saw a revival in early-19th century Great Britain and North America. Several tenets of Deism continued as part of other intellectual and spiritual movements, like Unitarianism, and Deistic philosophy continues to have some advocates in the contemporary era.
Early developments
History of rationalistic theologies
Deistic thinking has existed since ancient times; the roots of Deism can be traced back to the philosophical tradition of Ancient Greece. The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes (6th century BC) has been described by scholars as having a one-God theology that projects pandeistic ideals. The ancient Greek philosopher Chrysippus (3rd century BC) affirmed that "the universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul".
The Hellenistic philosophical school of Stoicism, which advocated in favor of epistemology and logic, was founded by Zeno of Citium in the 4th century BC. In the 3rd century BC, Chrysippus shaped much of Stoic theology and cosmology. For the Stoics, logic was the part of philosophy to achieve a happy life aligned with nature and the universe. The Stoics held that an understanding of ethics was impossible without the use of logic.
In the 3rd century AD, the schematic Christian theologian and philosopher Clement of Alexandria explicitly mentioned persons who believed that God was not involved in human affairs, and therefore led what he considered a licentious life.
In the early 8th century AD, the Indian scholar, mystic, and theologian Ādi Śaṅkara promoted the Advaita Vedānta school of Hindu philosophy, founded by Śaṅkara himself, which incorporated the metaphysical speculation of the Upaniṣads. He stressed that the individual soul or ultimate self (ātman) is identical to the eternal, unchanging, and formless Brahman, the Vedic conception of the creator God, who is understood as the real observer and cognizer of the universe.
Advaita Vedānta also espouses monism, and holds the impersonal Brahman to be unchanging and undifferentiated from the individual self, ātman.
In the mid-8th century AD, the Muʿtazila school emerged as one of the early systematic schools of Islamic theology. Its proponents, the Muʿtazilites, emphasized the use of reason and rational thought, positing that the injunctions of Allāh, the Islamic God, are accessible through rational thought and inquiry, and affirmed that the Qurʾān was created (makhlūq) rather than co-eternal with God, an affirmation that would develop into one of the most contentious questions in the history of Islamic theology.
In the 9th–10th century AD, the Ashʿarī school, founded by the 10th-century Muslim scholar and theologian Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, developed as a response to the Muʿtazilites. Ashʿarītes still taught the use of reason in understanding the Qurʾān, but denied the possibility to deduce moral truths by reasoning.
This position was opposed by the Māturīdī school; according to its founder, the 10th-century Muslim scholar and theologian Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī, human reason is supposed to acknowledge the existence of a creator (bāriʾ) solely based on rational thought and independently from divine revelation. He shared this conviction with his teacher and predecessor Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān (8th century AD), whereas al-Ashʿarī never held such a view.
According to the Afghan-American philosopher Sayed Hassan Hussaini, the early schools of Islamic theology and theological beliefs among classical Muslim philosophers are characterized by "a rich color of Deism with a slight disposition toward theism".
In 1250, the Italian Catholic priest, theologian, and philosopher Thomas Aquinas wrote about "an intellectual assent" and reason. He was a proponent of natural theology, while arguing that the Christian God is the source of the light of natural reason and the light of faith. He embraced several rational ideas on God put forward by the ancient Greek philosopher and logician Aristotle (4th century BC) and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Western Christian theology.
Contemporary scholars highlight Aquinas's indebtedness to Aristotle's doctrines, concepts, and method in the formulation of his Trinitarian theology.
Before the rise of Deism in the Age of Enlightenment, a small minority of Christians holding nontrinitarian conceptions of God, largely coming under the headings of Socinianism and Unitarianism, already existed during the early modern period in continental Europe, Great Britain, and the revolutionary United States. These Radical Protestants in continental Europe and English Dissenters in Great Britain and North America affirmed the unitary nature of the Christian God as the singular and unique creator of the universe, believed that Jesus Christ was divinely inspired in his moral teachings and that he is the savior of mankind, but he is not equal to God himself.
These nontrinitarian theological movements emerged through a critique of the traditional Christian theology of the Trinity and rejection of non-rational events in the Bible, such as miracles.
Definitions
The terms deism and theism are both derived from words meaning "god": the Latin term deus and the Ancient Greek term theós (θεός), respectively. The word déiste first appeared in French in 1563 in a theological treatise written by the Swiss Calvinist theologian named Pierre Viret, but Deism was generally unknown in the Kingdom of France until the 1690s, when Pierre Bayle published his famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, which contained an article on Viret.
In English, the words deist and theist were originally synonymous, but by the 17th century the terms started to diverge in meaning. The term deist with its current meaning first appears in English in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). However, Deism did not develop into a religio-philosophical movement until after the Scientific Revolution, which began in the mid-16th century in early modern Europe.
Herbert of Cherbury and early English Deism
The first major statement of Deism in English literature is Lord Herbert of Cherbury's book De Veritate (1624). 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 distinguished 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).
Peak (1696–1801)
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.
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.
Other English Deists prominent during the period include William Wollaston, Charles Blount, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, 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.
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". Following Locke's successful attack on innate ideas, Tindal's "Bible" redefined the foundation of Deistic 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.
Enlightenment Deism
Aspects 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. "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:
- 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 Quran and the Bible) that claimed to contain divine revelation.
- 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 organized 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, and encrusted it with superstitions and "mysteries"—irrational theological doctrines.
Deists referred to this manipulation of religious doctrine as "priestcraft", a derogatory term. 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". Matthew Tindal, perhaps the most prominent Deist writer in early modern Europe, claimed that this was the proper, original role of the Christian Church.
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 Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume began studying the natural history of religion and suggested that the origin 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, Bolingbroke, Thomas Chubb, and Peter Annet were materialists and either denied or doubted the immortality of the soul.
Benjamin Franklin believed in reincarnation or resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and William Wollaston 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.
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.
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 did not need to keep tinkering with his creation, and the suggestion that he did was insulting. 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" (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.
David Hume
Views differ on whether David Hume was a Deist, an atheist, or something else. 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. 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.
In the United States
The Thirteen Colonies of North America – which became the United States of America after the American Revolution in 1776 – were part 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.
Thomas Jefferson exhibits Deistic principles, though 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.