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Deism

Deism is the belief in the being of a God, with the denial of the existence or even necessity of divine revelation, believing that the light of nature and reason are sufficient guides in doctrine and practice; a believer in natural religion only. Deism (Lat. deus, God), a philosophical system which, as opposed to Atheism (Gr. a, not, and Theos, God), recognizes a great First Cause: as opposed to Pantheism (Gr. pan, all. Theos), a Supreme Being distinct from nature or the universe; while as opposed to Theism, it looks upon God as wholly apart from the concerns of this world. It thus implies a disbelief in revelation, such as set forth in the Old and New Testaments, scepticism as regards the value of miraculous evidence, and an assumption that the existence of Deity can be proved by natural reason alone, unaided by spiritual or religious intuition.

Etymologically the words deist and theist are the same in meaning, only deist is from Latin and theist from Greek. Conventionally, however, they are widely different in import; the term theist being applied to any believer in God, and revealed religion, whether that believer be a Christian, a Jew, a Mohammedan, etc., or a deist properly so called. A deist is, as the definition states, one who believes in God, but disbelieves in Christianity, or more generally in revelation.

The impulses that promoted a vein of thought cognate to deism were active both before and after the time of its greatest notoriety. But there are many reasons to show why, in the 17th century, men should have set themselves with a new zeal, in politics, law and theology, to follow the light of nature alone, and to cast aside the fetters of tradition and prescriptive right, of positive codes, and scholastic systems, and why in England especially there should, amongst numerous free-thinkers, have been not a few free writers. The significance of the Copernican system, as the total overthrow of the traditional conception of the universe, dawned on all educated men. In physics, Descartes had prepared the way for the final triumph of the mechanical explanation of the world in Newton's system.

In England the new philosophy had broken with time-honoured beliefs more completely than it had done even in France; Hobbes was more startling than Bacon. Locke's philosophy, as well as his theology, served as a school for the deists. Men had become weary of Protestant scholasticism; religious wars had made peaceful thinkers seek to take the edge off dogmatical rancour; and the multiplicity of religious sects, coupled with the complete failure of various attempts at any substantial reconciliation, provoked distrust of the common basis on which all were founded.

While Deism cannot be attributed to any one country or epoch, it seemed to have its fountain-head in England during the end of the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries. There was a school of distinctively latitudinarian thought in the Church of England. Arminianism had revived the rational side of theological method. Semi-Arians and Unitarians, though sufficiently distinguished from the free-thinkers by reverence for the letter of Scripture, might be held to encourage departure from the ancient landmarks.

The term Deists, or Freethinkers, is usually employed to designate a series of writers who appeared in England in the 17th and 18th centuries and sought to establish Natural Religion upon the basis of reason and free inquiry, in opposition to all positive religions and without reference to supernatural revelation. They were critical, if not hostile, in their attitude toward Scripture. The first, in point of time, of the celebrated English deists was Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the publication of whose work, 'De Veritate,' which appeared in Paris in 1624, began the controversy. There followed, on the same side, Hobbes, Tindal, Morgan, Toland, Bolingbroke, Paine and others. The standard work on the subject is the Rev. Dr. John Leland's 'Deistical Writers,' first published in 1754.

Collins indicates the possible extent to which the Jews may have been indebted to Chaldeans and Egyptians for their theological views, especially as great part of the Old Testament would appear to have been remodelled by Ezra; and, after dwelling on the points in which the prophecies attributed to Daniel differ from all other Old Testament predictions, he states the greater number of the arguments, still used to show that the book of Daniel deals with events past and contemporaneous,and is from the pen of a writer of thcMaccabeafi period, a view now generally accepted.

Woolston, at first to all appearance working earnestly in behalf of an allegorical but believing interpretation of the New Testament miracles, ended by assaulting, with a yet unknown violence of speech, the absurdity of accepting them as actual historical events, and did his best to overthrow the credibility of Christ's principal miracles. The bitterness of his outspoken invective against the clergy, against all priestcraft and priesthood, was a new feature in deist ic literature, and injured the author more than it furthered his cause.

The deists, differing widely in important matters of belief, were yet agreed in seeking above all to establish the certainty and sufficiency of natural religion in opposition to the positive religions, and in tacitly or expressly denying the unique significance of the supernatural revelation in the Old and New Testaments. They either ignored the Scriptures, or directly impugned their divine character, their infallibility, and the validity of their evidences as a complete manifestation of the will of God. The term "deism" not only is used to signify the main body of the deists' teaching, or the tendency they represent, but has come into use as a technical term for one specific metaphysical doctrine as to the relation of God to the universe, assumed to have been characteristic of the deists, and to have distinguished them from atheists^ pantheists and theists, — the belief, namely, that the first cause of the universe is a personal God, who is, however, not only distinct from the world but apart from it and its concerns.

Against superstition, fanaticism and priestcraft they protested unceasingly. They all recognized the soul of man—not regarded as intellectual alone— as the ultimate court of appeal. But they varied much in their attitude towards the Bible. Some were content to argue their own ideas into Scripture, and those they disliked out of it; to one or two it seemed a satisfaction to discover difficulties in Scripture, to point to historical inaccuracies and moral defects.

In the substance of what they received as natural religion, the deists were for the most part agreed. Religion, though not identified with morality, had its most important outcome in a faithful following of tie eternal laws of morality, regarded as the will of God. With the virtuous life was further to be conjoined a humble disposition to adore the Creator, avoiding all factitious forms of worship as worse than useless. The small value they attributed to all outward and special forms of service, and the want of any sympathetic craving for the communion of saints, saved the deists from attempting to found a free-thinking church. They seem generally to have inclined to a quictistic accommodation to established forms of faith, till better times came.

More certain, and also more striking, is the fact that the leading statesmen in the American War of Independence were emphatically deists; Benjamin Franklin (who attributes his position to the study of Shaftesbury and Collins), Thomas Paine, Washington and Jefferson, although they all had the greatest admiration for the New Testament story, denied that it was based on any supernatural revelation. For various reasons the movement in America did not appear on the surface to any great extent, and after the comparative failure of Elihu Palmer's Principles of Nature it expressed itself chiefly in the spread of Unitarianism.

Even now many undoubtedly cling to a theology nearly allied to deism. Rejecting miracles and denying the infallibility of Scripture, protesting against Cal vinistic views of sovereign grace and having no interest in evangelical Arminianism, the faith of such inquirers seems fairly to coincide with that of the deists. Even some cultured theologians, the historical representatives of latitudinarianism, seem to accept the great body of what was contended for by the deists. Moreover, the influence of the deistic writers had an incalculable influence in the gradual progress towards tolerance, and in the spread of a broader attitude towards intellectual problems, and this too, though the original deists devoted themselves mainly to a crusade against the doctrine of revelation.