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The belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation.
[French déisme, from Latin deus, god.]
deist de'ist n.For more information on Deism, visit Britannica.com.
A term derived from Latin deus, meaning belief in a Supreme Being and used to describe the system of natural religion first developed in the late 17th cent. The classical exposition of deism was John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which argued against the supernatural. Deists asserted the supremacy of reason and denied the validity of miracles, prophecy, and a literal, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The term deism was little used after the 18th cent., when the term free thinkers came in.
An 18th-c. movement in religious belief for the educated laity, especially the philosophes; not confined to France. The word originated in the 16th c. as a pejorative term for antitrinitarian and similar ideas among sects such as the Socinians, and was taken over to denote analogous views in secular writings: the deist is essentially one who, on the positive or constructive side, limits his religion to the belief in God, and on the negative or critical side remains independent of Christianity, and often hostile. ‘Natural religion’, often taken as synonymous, is in principle compatible with Christianity, or can even be its basis.
As a form of free thought, critical deism in the Enlightenment is the historical successor to libertinage. Its positive aspect seems to have stemmed chiefly from 17th-c. French rationalism; Descartes and Malebranche were the inspiration of several of the first French deists, such as Gilbert and the Militaire philosophe. Fully developed by about 1730, notably in the clandestine manuscripts, deism was already popularized (for instance in the huge epistolary works of; d' Argens) well before the movement reached its apogee in the 1760s. It is clearly perceptible in the Encyclopédie (even the articles by clerics are strongly influenced by deistic rationalism) and given perhaps its fullest expression in Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique and Rousseau's Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. They contrast strongly: Voltaire prefers implication, reduces the positive side to a minimum, and is mockingly aggressive towards Catholicism; Rousseau argues directly and in detail, in treatise fashion, is influenced by the moralizing tendency of Calvinism, and is more conciliatory. Of the other major philosophes, Montesquieu is comparatively mild on the critical side; utilitarian and indifferentist, he argues that religion should serve the secular needs of society (he attacks monasticism, for instance). Diderot, typically for a later generation, moves to atheism after a problematical deist phase. By the 1770s atheism was already outflanking deism as a radical form of religious thought; enemies said that deism was merely a step on the way. With its ‘Supreme Being’ but lacking a church, deism can appear somewhat unreal and literary, despite the patent sincerity of many adherents. It is often found in Utopias and as the belief of fictional foreign visitors or inhabitants of exotic surroundings. In a cosmopolitan but still religious age, its appeal was partly that under its remote, rational deity the danger of religious conflict seemed to recede. It was never an organized movement, unlike some of its 19th-c. successors, secular religions such as Comte's, though during the Revolution the Supreme Being was briefly the object of official worship [see also Théophilanthropie].
— Christopher Betts
Historically, a term referring to the doctrine of ‘natural religion’ emerging in England and France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, according to which while reason (particularly the argument to design) assures us that there is a God, additional revelation, dogma, or supernatural commerce with the deity are all excluded. Supplication and prayer in particular are fruitless: God may only be thought of as an ‘absentee landlord’. Leading deists included Herbert, John Toland (1670-1722), whose Christianity not Mysterious (1696) was an influence on Berkeley, and Anthony Collins (1676-1729), as well as Shaftesbury and, arguably, Locke. The belief that remains is abstract to vanishing point, as witnessed in Diderot's remark that a deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist.
Deism, a philosophy often termed "Enlightenment religion," was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, France, Germany, and America. Unlike atheism, which denies the existence of God; polytheism, which recognizes the existence of many gods; and pantheism, which sees God in everything; deism recognizes the existence of a supreme being or God as revealed in Nature and perceived by human reason. While deism can be traced to the Stoics of ancient Greece, modern deism is generally traced to the writings of Faustus Socinus and other sixteenth-century Unitarian thinkers.
Deism, derived from the Latin "deus," or "God," differs from conventional Christianity, Judaism, and Eastern religions in that deism denies the necessity of any special revelation of the existence of God; likewise, it denies the sacred nature of any given text. Instead, deism requires only that the human mind apply logic and reason to come to a recognition and understanding of God, because God is innately logical and reasonable. Consequently, deism also denies the importance of sacred ritual and church tradition and the possibility of miracles, all of which it deems beyond the scope of reason and empirical possibility. Faith, according to deism, is the suspension or abandonment of reason and is therefore incompatible with a God who has created man to be a thinking, reasonable creature. Furthermore, while many deists acknowledge the wisdom and goodness of various traditional religious figures such as Jesus and the Buddha, deism denies the sacred or divine nature of these figures; for such persons to somehow share in God's divine nature would imply a favoritism or special dispensation on the part of God which deists deny as a possibility for a just and logical Creator. Man can exercise his free and rational will, according to deism; sin, defined as the failure to love others and to do good toward the furtherance of the human condition, is therefore possible. Perhaps the most pervasive image of the God of deism is that of God as "the cosmic watchmaker," one who created the universe and peopled it with thinking human beings, and then dissociated himself from his creation.
Early deism grew from the increased interest in natural science exhibited in the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Sir Francis Bacon, and others. Early deist thinkers sought to apply the same principles of the rational study of nature to the study of religion. In his De Veritate (1624; "On Truth"), Lord Herbert of Cherbury set forth Five Articles of English Deists:
Anthony Collins (1676–1729) and Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) were prominent English deists; in France the philosophy was taken up and expanded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Voltaire (1694–1778). By the late 1700s, deist philosophy came to include the belief that religious authority could only be derived by the application of reason to Scripture, not by an unquestioning reliance on the inerrancy of that Scripture; the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity; the belief that the teachings of Jesus, not the writings of St. Paul, were foundational; the idea that the importance of the resurrection was in its demonstration of the possibility of immortality, not as Christ's atonement for mankind's sins; the argument against the doctrines of Calvin (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints); a faith in the innate goodness and reasonableness of humans; and the belief that all religious thought should be free rather than coerced either by fear of threats or by the promise of rewards.
Deism in America
The influence of French and English deists on America's founders was immense. The vast majority of American leaders at the time of the Revolutionary War had read the works of Tindal, Rousseau, and Voltaire, and most of these founders considered themselves deists. John Quincy Adams, Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were among this group, as was Thomas Paine, who wrote extensively on the topic. Paine's Age of Reason (1794, 1796) has often been singled out as one of the most eloquent statements of advanced deist philosophy, although his blunt attacks on the orthodoxy caused him to be considered a heretic by many of his own day.
In addition to the principles they inherited from the Greeks and their European forebears, American deists re-fined and added to the list of beliefs they shared. One of the Americans' major refinements included a practical disavowal of any group being God's "chosen" people: they espoused a direct denial of American Puritans' notion of the new nation as the setting for a jeremiadic mission. Americans held a strong yet somewhat modified denial of the occurrence of miracles, although many did recognize and appreciate what they felt were occasional but inexplicable interventions of "Providence." The founders of the United States demonstrated a strengthened and identifiably democratic insistence on the need for practical morality and an increased belief in the obligation to prayerfully adore and offer thanks for the goodness shown by the beneficent Creator. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine were especially critical of the emphasis traditionally accorded the writings of Saint Paul of Tarsus. They also strongly disavowed the subsequent traditional Trinitarian theology concerning the substitutionary theory of atonement which states that Christ as part of the Godhead was required to die in payment of the death penalty of sin borne by all mankind as a direct result of their kinship to Adam. While Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine all recognized the necessity of doing good works, none saw this as a way to purchase salvation; however, neither did they accept the idea of original sin or the proxy of Jesus's death as substitution for man's own individual sins. Rather, they believed that each man must exercise his own thought and will to act appropriately toward others and that salvation could be gained by simply seeking God's forgiveness and forgiving others in turn. Such a concept of self-responsibility and independence rang true to many of the early American inhabitants.
In a similar fashion, American deists devoutly denied the necessity of any intercessory priesthood to mediate between God and man, not only in terms of receiving salvation, but also in terms of coming to an intellectual understanding of God and the universe he created. Rather than relying on church tradition, polity, or pronouncements, deists instead averred that God's true nature was obscured by what they saw as the pretensions of a traditional clergy or canonical hierarchy. By employing the gift of reason and examining the wonders of nature in the new land in which they had settled, American deists precluded their own dependence on traditional faith, preferring instead to question the workings of the world around them. They often referred to traditional constructions of faith as "superstition" or "magic" or as a reliance on "divine revelation" and saw this as being directly in opposition to the notion of all they believed about God. According to deism, it made no sense to posit a Creator who would have given man a mind with which to think and reason but who later would have arbitrarily punished man simply for not suspending that reason in the name of faith. By extension, not only the individual deist should exercise his own will and reason in making decisions, but every man should also do likewise. Each person, then, should depend on his own reason and free will, and should also take into consideration the fact that his fellow man was doing the same. As a result, the democratic ideals of the young nation were espoused in common with deist philosophy. That is, deists expressed virtually no preference for or prejudice against any organized religion, preferring instead to live in tolerance of all faiths and to give full play to each individual's decisions and actions.
America's founders had been raised in a Christian society, generally in orthodox Christian or Calvinist families; as a result, they came to deism with a strong knowledge of Christian ideology and of the practical workings of church polity. While deism does not advocate wholesale rejection of tradition, often these men's primary departure from Christian teaching was based in their studious consideration and subsequent rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity and of traditional Calvinist dogma. The deist commitments to social justice and individual responsibility were also attractive to the leaders of the young nation, as was the concept of religious tolerance. These ideals are most clearly illustrated in the First Amendment's insistence on the free exercise of religion, but the overarching concern of deism with man's exercise of reason as a free and thinking being is foundational to most of American legal, social, and cultural experience.
Deism's major attraction was to the well-read American intellectual of the late eighteenth century. While deism certainly never replaced orthodox Christianity as Americans' majority religion, it is telling that many of the nation's founders did indeed subscribe to this philosophy and incorporated it into the framework of the young republic. By the early-to mid-nineteenth century, deism in Europe and in America had become colored by skepticism, perhaps most notably as a result of the rapid spread of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. It has also been argued that Romanticism was a reaction to deism and was a possible cause for its decline by the 1830s. In the late twentieth century, deism appeared to undergo something of a revival, although the lack of an organized polity or structure renders precise measurements of the number of practitioners impossible. Many contemporary deists label themselves "practitioners of no religion" or align themselves with liberal Unitarian or Universalist congregations.
Bibliography
Davidson, Edward H., and William J. Scheick. Paine, Scripture, and Authority: The Age of Reason As Religious and Political Idea. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1994.
Koch, G. Adolf. Religion of the American Enlightenment. New York: Crowell, 1968.
May, Henry Farnham. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
McDermott, Gerald R. Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. Design Philip Sheldon Foner. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1989 [rprt. 1792 ed].
Rinaldo, Peter M. Atheists, Agnostics, and Deists in America: A Brief History. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Dor Pete Press, 2000.
Walters, Kerry S. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.
———. Rational Infidels: The American Deists. Durango, Colo.: Longwood Academic, 1992.
—Barbara Schwarz Wachal
A form of religious nonconformity upholding the view that human beings can know the truths of theology by rational methods, deism excludes any appeal to supernatural or revealed experience. Although some scholars have found anticipations of deism in various Greek and Roman schools of philosophy, deist ideas strictly speaking originated in early modern Europe. Coined as a term of derision in a Calvinist tract published in 1564, deist lost its pejorative sense over the course of the seventeenth century and was embraced by a wide range of thinkers before and during the Enlightenment. At the same time, deism encountered severe criticism both from defenders of conventional faith and from more skeptical and rigorously rational schools of thought.
The prehistory of deism is perhaps best encapsulated in the writings of the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C.E.–43 B.C.E.). In various philosophical dialogues, including De natura deorum and De legibus, Cicero emphasized that divinity and its works can be known through the application of reason and, indeed, that reason itself constitutes the true divine spark or seed within humanity. Drawing heavily on an eclectic Romanized stoicism, Cicero articulated a coherent account of a rational religion, leading at least some scholars to proclaim him the "father of deism." Moreover, because Cicero's writings (including De natura deorum) enjoyed a large audience in later antiquity as well as medieval and Renaissance Europe, they may have inspired some thinkers associated with a more self-consciously constructed school of deist thought during early modern times.
The origins of deism properly speaking, especially in England, cannot be separated from a range of other nonconformist movements during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Unitarianism, anticlericalism, Erastianism, Arminianism, and Socinianism. Generally speaking, the early thinkers associated with deism were engaged in a broad revolt against authority. Among the leading figures—who did not, however, consistently identify themselves as deists—were Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), Charles Blount (1654–1693), and John Toland (1670–1722), all of whom were at the forefront of European religious nonconformity and freethinking. In their wake came a number of lesser deists whose commitments to the doctrine varied widely. The deists shared in the British trend toward nonconformism by challenging central premises of enforced unity of belief, by doubting the rational demonstrability of major tenets of Christian theology, by asserting the distortion and perversion of religious faith by clerics and ecclesiastical institutions, and by establishing the complicity between church authorities and secular rulers in maintaining religious conformity in the interests of the powerful.
Deists starting with Lord Herbert had argued for a set of natural and universal principles common to all religions; to the extent that any system of belief embodied these tenets, it had a presumptive claim to validity. They praised expressions of religiosity that reflected those elements consonant with natural human worship of divinity. The common principles (laid down in Lord Herbert's 1624 treatise De Veritate) embraced acceptance of a single supreme God; insistence upon the worship of that God, achieved in particular by virtuous and pious deeds; expectation of remorse and contrition for one's sins; and acknowledgment of both temporal and extra-temporal divine dispensation of rewards and penalties. Such precepts are universally accessible by human reason, rendering revelation of secondary or derivative significance. Consequently, deists also subscribed to the principle that human nature was the same and inalterable throughout the world.
One of the favorite themes of the seventeenth-century deists was the postulation of a sort of urreligion, a primitive piety that had been erased by the introduction of formal religious worship. In his De Religione Gentilium (1663; Religion of the Gentiles), Herbert declared that before religious rites, ceremonies, scripture, and so on were created, the worship of God occurred in an entirely rational manner. For Herbert and his successors, religion as practiced by contemporary human beings, burdened with unnecessary accretions, departed greatly from original, natural belief. Superstition and idolatry, complex systems of guilt and its expiation, and the creation of a professional priesthood all marked religion's distance from true reverence for the divine.
Thus, deism did not merely defend the authority of human reason in religious matters, but it also proposed a brief against the system of power that conventionally supported institutionalized religion. Two important claims made by the deist case against religion should be highlighted: that priests manipulate superstition and ritual to implant a fear of God in human beings, and that the authority of churches rests upon a spurious claim that priests are uniquely competent to interpose themselves between human beings and divinity and to dictate to people (against their natural inclination and reason) how they shall live. Deists thereby equate religion with the creation of human misery, conflict, and immorality.
The British deists explained the course of institutional religion (modern as well as ancient) in terms of "priestcraft," that is, the erection and dissemination of false ideas, practices, and superstitions in order to enhance the interests of priests themselves. Blount asserted that theological doctrines were propagated in the most mysterious and obscure manner not because truths about divinity were complex, but in order to confuse and therefore control the laity. Toland went so far as to say that the distinction between religions resulted from the machinations of priests, designed to serve their baser worldly ambitions. Much of the substance of deistic anticlericalism was directed toward debunking the trappings of priestly superiority that cloaked less esteemed motives.
In the place of organized and ritualized religious practices, the deists recommended natural worship, best performed by sound moral action. Herbert and Toland both maintained that the means of salvation might be sought in the rational practice of virtue, piety, and faithfulness. Subsequent deists regarded this position as a defense of the purity of "heathen vertue" as distinct from the idolatry of more recent times. In the deist view, heathens were perhaps less encumbered by the cheats of religion than latter-day Christians—and certainly no more so. Hence, the practice of natural worship might be guided more by "heathen vertue" than by the more recent teachings of Christian (or Islamic or Judaic) religion.
Scholars have commonly ascribed a connection between religious nonconformity in England and republican political conviction. To what extent the bond between the two is judged necessary or inextricable remains an open question. Some authors with openly deist sympathies also subscribed to Toryism and royalism. Hence, it may be the case that the connection between deism and republicanism was in fact looser than scholarship often claims.
Although England may perhaps be regarded as the cradle of deism, the writings and ideas of the early deists spread to the Continent and infected some of the leading figures of the early Enlightenment. While France, for instance, had its share of nonconforming thinkers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Pierre Charron, Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and Pierre Bayle among them—deism received perhaps its most visible and influential statement there from Voltaire (1694–1778). Both in France and during an exile to England, Voltaire encountered deist thinkers and began to propound their views. Voltaire himself used the term theist, but the nomenclature is inconsequential. He advocated a notion of natural religion based on reason, defending the existence of a single God but assailing priestcraft and ecclesiastical corruption.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who was profoundly influenced by Voltaire's important statement of deism, the Lettres philosophiques (1734; Philosophical letters), seems to have adapted deist views in his own Émile (1762). But Rousseau's version of deism was less rationalistic, and less politically charged, than Voltaire's. Rousseau postulated a divine goodness that degenerated in human hands when artificially represented through rites and ceremonies. He called on his readers to adopt a natural religion by finding God in their own hearts and imitating the pure justice that the deity instills in every member of humankind. Conscience, according to Rousseau, was the greatest teacher of religious truths and the most faithful way of honoring God.
During the reign of Frederick II the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), the work of the British deists was imported into Germany through more widely circulated translations and editions. Several thinkers identified themselves with the deist cause, perhaps most prominently Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). His defense of deism, composed in 1754, was directed with equal force against the materialist and atheistic claims of the most extreme proponents of Enlightenment and against narrow interpretations of Christianity. Indeed, Reimarus's work embodied the intellectual problem of deism throughout Europe: the orthodox suspected that deists were secretly atheists, while the more extreme critics of deism regarded it to be insufficiently critical of religious superstition. Other German thinkers grazed on the edges of deism. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) did not fit the mold of a typical deist, but he and his friend Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) maintained views that echoed important deist themes. More significantly, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) advocated a vision of Christian deism, most notably in his work Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793; Religion within the limits of reason alone), that cannot be understood apart from the deist doctrines of earlier times. Kant's overriding project for the liberation of the human mind from "tutelage" through the exercise of reason coincides neatly with the deist cause.
The deists also enjoyed a substantial following in North America among some of the leading intellectual lights of the colonial and Revolutionary eras. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the cosmopolitan Thomas Paine all identified in writings or public pronouncements with key deistic doctrines. When he was just twentytwo years old, Franklin (1706–1790) composed a statement of "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion" (1728), which formed a virtual manifesto of deism and to which he apparently subscribed for the rest of his life. Likewise, Jefferson (1743–1826) created his own carefully expurgated version of the Bible out of snippets of the New Testament Gospels, his selections overtly informed by deistic beliefs. The quality of American deism was, however, far different from its European counterpart. The virulent attacks on priestcraft and clerical corruption so common among British and continental deists were largely absent from the American scene. Indeed, figures such as Washington and Jefferson were in public conventionally pious churchgoers even as they maintained unorthodox beliefs in private. Thus, American deism lacked overtones of anticlericalism. On the other hand, the imputed connection between republican political convictions and deist doctrines was sustained by the American wing of deism.
Ironically, evenasdeismwasspreading throughout continental Europe and North America in the later half of the eighteenth century, it was coming under serious scrutiny in its cradle, the British Isles. On one side, the form of religious enthusiasm preached by John Wesley (1703–1791) was directed explicitly against the rationalism of deistic thought. Wesley emphasized the personal, inward-dwelling, and supernatural aspects of religious experience that deism had consciously sought to expel. On the other side, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) ridiculed deistic teachings for their intellectual bankruptcy. Hume produced a series of tracts, culminating in the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), which demonstrated how skepticism was the inescapable consequence of subscribing to deism, given the fundamental unsoundness of its logical, epistemological, and metaphysical assumptions. In England, Hume's basic stance was seconded by authors such as George Berkeley and Joseph Butler.
Deism also received a challenge in France from the even more extreme camp of atheistic materialists who constituted a large share of the philosophes and their Enlightenment fellow travelers. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot, É tienne Bonnot de Condillac and Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, and most others in the leading circles of the French Enlightenment found deism to be intellectually disreputable or simply disingenuous—a faint-hearted attempt to preserve the hope of salvation while dispensing with the more overtly superstitious or corrupt features of organized religion. Yet nowhere did deism completely die out. Edmund Burke's declaration of the passing of deism in 1790 was premature, as the school of thought enjoyed both intellectual support and a popular following (especially in America) well into the nineteenth century.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Gay, Peter. Deism: An Anthology. Princeton, 1968.
Herbert of Cherbury. De Veritate. Translated by Meyrick H. Carré. Bristol, 1937.
Waring, E. Graham, ed. Deism and Natural Religion: A Source Book. New York, 1967.
Secondary Sources
Bedford, R. D. The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century. Manchester, U.K., 1979.
Betts, C. J. Early Deism in France: The So-Called "Déistes" of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques (1734). The Hague and Boston, 1984.
Champion, J. A. I. The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Herrick, James A. The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750. Columbia, S.C., 1997.
Sullivan, Robert E. John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study of Adaptation. Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
Walters, Kerry S. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence, Kans., 1992.
—CARY J. NEDERMAN
Deism is a religious philosophy and movement that derives the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience, in contrast to theism (with religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which relies on revelation in sacred scriptures or the testimony of other people. Deism became prominent in Great Britain, France, and the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries and continues to this day in the form of Classical Deism and Modern Deism.
Deists typically reject supernatural events (prophecy, miracles) and tend to assert that God does not interfere with human life and the laws of the universe. What organized religions see as divine revelation and holy books, most Deists see as interpretations made by other humans, rather than as authoritative sources.
The concept of Deism covers a wide variety of positions on a wide variety of religious issues. See the section Features of Deism, below. Deism can also refer to a personal set of beliefs having to do with the role of nature in spirituality.
The words Deism and theism are both derived from the word god:
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 seventeenth century began to give a different signification to the words.... Both [theists and Deists] asserted belief in one supreme God, the Creator.... and agreed that God is personal and distinct from the world. 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 abandoned it to the operation of these powers acting as second causes.[1]
A helpful discussion of Deism, theism, and other positions on divine beings can be found in the theism article.
Perhaps the first use of the term Deist is in Pierre Viret's Instruction Chrestienne (1564), reprinted in Bayle's Dictionnaire entry Viret. Viret, a Calvinist, regarded Deism as a new form of Italian heresy.[2] Viret wrote:
There are many who confess that while they believe like the Turks and the Jews that there is some sort of God and some sort of deity, yet with regard to Jesus Christ and to all that to which the doctrine of the Evangelists and the Apostles testify, they take all that to be fables and dreams.... I have heard that there are of this band those who call themselves Deists, an entirely new word, which they want to oppose to Atheist. For in that atheist signifies a person who is without God, they want to make it understood that they are not at all without God, since they certainly believe there is some sort of God, whom they even recognize as creator of heaven and earth, as do the Turks; but as for Jesus Christ, they only know that he is and hold nothing concerning him nor his doctrine.
In England, the term Deist first appeared in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).[3]
Lord Herbert of Cherbury (d. 1648) is generally considered the "father of English Deism", and his book De Veritate (1624) the first major statement of Deism. Deism flourished in England between 1690 and 1740, at which time Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), or 'the Deist's Bible', gained much attention. Later Deism spread to France, notably via the work of Voltaire, to Germany, and to America.
Deistic thinking has existed since ancient times (e.g., in philosophers such as Heraclitus and most especially Plato, who envisaged God as the Demiurge or 'craftsman') and in many cultures. The word Deism is generally used to refer to the movement toward natural theology or freethinking that occurred in 17th-century Europe, and specifically in Britain.
Natural theology is a facet of the revolution in world view that occurred in Europe in the 17th century. To understand the background to that revolution is also to understand the background of Deism. Several cultural movements of the time contributed to the movement.[4]
The humanist tradition of the Renaissance included a revival of interest in Europe's classical past in Greece and Rome. With study of the past came a growing awareness that the world in which the classical authors lived was quite different from the present.
In addition, study of classical documents led to the realization that some historical documents are less reliable than others, which led to the beginnings of biblical criticism. In particular, as scholars worked on biblical manuscripts, they began developing the principles of textual criticism and a view of the New Testament as the product of a particular historical period different from their own.
In addition to discovering diversity in the past, Europeans discovered diversity in the present. The voyages of discovery of the 16th and 17th centuries acquainted Europeans with new and different cultures in the Americas, in Asia, and in the Pacific. They discovered a greater amount of cultural diversity than they had ever imagined, and the question arose of how this vast amount of human cultural diversity could be compatible with the biblical account of Noah's descendants. In particular, the ideas of Confucius, translated into European languages by the Jesuits stationed in China, are thought to have had considerable influence on the Deists and other philosophical groups of the Enlightenment who were interested by the integration of the system of morality of Confucius into Christianity.[5][6].
In particular, cultural diversity with respect to religious beliefs could no longer be ignored. As Herbert wrote in De Religione Laici (1645),
Many faiths or religions, clearly, exist or once existed in various countries and ages, and certainly there is not one of them that the lawgivers have not pronounced to be as it were divinely ordained, so that the Wayfarer finds one in Europe, another in Africa, and in Asia, still another in the very Indies.
This new awareness of diversity led to a feeling that Christianity was just one religion among many, with no better claim than any other to correctness.
Europe had been plagued by vicious sectarian conflicts and religious wars since the beginning of the Reformation. In 1642, when Lord Herbert of Cherbury's De Veritate was published, the Thirty Years War had been raging on continental Europe for nearly 25 years. It was an enormously destructive religious war that (it is estimated) destroyed 15–20% of the population of Germany. Closer to home, the English Civil War pitting King against Parliament was just beginning.
Such massive sectarian violence inspired a visceral rejection of the sectarianism that had led to the violence. It also led to a search for natural religious truths — truths that could be universally accepted, because they had been either "written in the book of Nature" or "engraved on the human mind" by God.
Deism also had a great connection to religious toleration.
The 17th century saw a remarkable advance in scientific knowledge: the scientific
revolution. The work of Copernicus, Kepler, and
Isaac Newton's discovery of universal gravitation explained the behavior both of objects here on earth and of objects in the heavens. It promoted a world view in which the natural universe is controlled by laws of nature. This, in turn, suggested a theology in which God created the universe, set it in motion controlled by natural law, and retired from the scene. (See the Watchmaker analogy.)
The new awareness of the explanatory power of universal natural law also produced a growing skepticism about such religious staples as miracles (i.e., violations of natural law) and about books, such as the Bible, that reported them.
Whereas the Age of Faith found its truths in religious tradition, the Age of Reason found its truths in observable natural phenomena and individual human reason.
The concept of Deism covers a wide variety of positions on a wide variety of religious issues. Following Sir Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, most commentators agree that two features constituted the core of Deism:
Deist authors advocated a combination of both critical and constructive elements in proportions and emphases that varied from author to author.
Critical elements of Deist thought included:
Constructive elements of Deist thought included:
Individual Deists varied in the set of critical and constructive elements for which they argued. Some Deists rejected miracles and prophecies but still considered themselves Christians because they believed in what they felt to be the pure, original form of Christianity — that is, Christianity as it existed before it was corrupted by additions of such superstitions as miracles, prophecies, and the doctrine of the Trinity. Some Deists rejected the claim of Jesus' divinity but continued to hold him in high regard as a moral teacher (see, e.g., Thomas Jefferson's famous Jefferson Bible). Other, more radical Deists rejected Christianity altogether and expressed hostility toward Christianity, which they regarded as pure superstition. In return, Christian writers often charged radical Deists with atheism.
Note that the terms constructive and critical are used to refer to aspects of Deistic thought, not sects or subtypes of Deism — it would be incorrect to classify any particular Deist author as "a constructive Deist" or "a critical Deist". As Peter Gay notes:
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.
– Peter Gay, Deism: An Anthology, p. 13
It should be noted, however, that the constructive element of Deism was not unique to Deism. It was the same as the natural theology that was so prevalent in all English theology in the 17th and 18th centuries. What set Deists apart from their more orthodox contemporaries was their critical concerns.
Defining the essence of English Deism is a formidable task. Like priestcraft, atheism, and freethinking, Deism was one of the dirty words of the age. Deists were stigmatized — often as atheists — by their Christian opponents. Yet some Deists claimed to be Christian, and as Leslie Stephen argued in retrospect, the Deists shared so many fundamental rational suppositions with their orthodox opponents... that it is practically impossible to distinguish between them. But the term Deism is nevertheless a meaningful one.... Too many men of letters of the time agree about the essential nature of English Deism for modern scholars to ignore the simple fact that what 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], 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."
– James E. Force, Introduction (1990) to An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (1696) by William Stephens
One of the remarkable features of Deism is that the critical elements did not overpower the constructive elements. As E. Graham Waring observed,[7] "A strange feature of the [Deist] controversy is the apparent acceptance of all parties of the conviction of the existence of God." And Basil Willey observed[8]
M. Paul Hazard has recently described the Deists of this time 'as rationalists with nostalgia for religion': men, that is, who had allowed the spirit of the age to separate them from orthodoxy, but who liked to believe that the slope they had started upon was not slippery enough to lead them to atheism.
"Reason" was the ultimate court of appeal for Deists. Tindal's Lockean definitions of reason, self-evident truth, and the light of nature are especially lucid.
By the rational faculties, then, we mean the natural ability a man has to apprehend, judge, and infer: The immediate objects of which faculties are not the things themselves, but the ideas the mind conceives of them.... Knowledge [is]... nothing but the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas. And any two of these, when joined together so as to be affirmed or denied of each other, make what we call a proposition... Knowledge accrues either immediately on the bare intuition of these two ideas or terms so joined, and is therefore styled intuitive knowledge or self-evident truth, or by the intervention of some other idea or ideas .... this is called demonstrative knowledge...
If there were not some propositions which need not to be proved, it would be in vain for men to argue with one another [because there would be no basis for demonstrative reasoning] ... Those propositions which need no proof, we call self-evident; because by comparing the ideas signified by the terms of such propositions, we immediately discern their agreement, or disagreement: This is, as I said before, what we call intuitive knowledge.... [Intuitive knowledge] may, I think, be called divine inspiration as being immediately from God, and not acquired by any human deduction or drawing of consequences: This, certainly, is that divine, that uniform light, which shines in the minds of all men...– Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (II)[9]
Deists did appeal to "the light of nature" to support the self-evident nature of their positive religious claims.
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.
I suppose you will allow that it is evident by the light of nature that there is a God, or in other words, a being absolutely perfect, and infinitely happy in himself, who is the source of all other beings....– Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (II)[10]
Once a proposition is asserted to be a self-evident truth, there is not much more to say about it. Consequently, Deist authors expended most of their ink using reason as a critical tool for exposing and rejecting what they saw as nonsense. Here are two typical examples. The first is from John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious.[11]
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 of them say the "mysteries of the Gospel" are to be understood only in the sense of the "ancient fathers." ... [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.[12]
On the contrary, we hold that reason is the only foundation of all certitude, and that nothing revealed, whether as to its manner or existence, is more exempted from its disquisitions than the ordinary phenomena of nature. 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. ...
Now, as we are extremely subject to deception, we may without some infallible rule, often take a questionable proposition for an axiom, old wives' fables for moral certitude, and human impostures for divine revelation....
I take it to be very intelligible from the precedent section that what is evidently repugnant to clear and distinct ideas,[13] or to our common notions,[14] is contrary to reason. ... No Christian that I know of expressly says reason and the Gospel are contrary to one another. But very many affirm that ... according to our conceptions of them [i.e. reason and the Gospel] they seem directly to clash. And that though we cannot reconcile them by reason of our corrupt and limited understandings, yet that from the authority of divine revelation we are bound to believe and acquiesce in them; or, as the fathers taught them to speak, to "adore what we cannot comprehend." This famous and admirable doctrine is the undoubted source of all the absurdities that ever were seriously vented among Christians. Without the pretense of it, we should never hear of transubstantiation, and other ridiculous fables of the Church of Rome. Nor should we be ever bantered with the Lutheran impanation....
The first thing I shall insist upon is that if any doctrine of the New Testament be contrary to reason, we have no manner of idea of it. To say, for instance, that a ball is white and black at once is to say just nothing, for these colors are so incompatible in the same subject as to exclude all possibility of a real positive idea or conception. So to say as the papists that children dying before baptism are damned without pain signifies nothing at all.– John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious: or, a Treatise Shewing That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor above It (1696)
I have known some, who have alleged as a reason why they have forsaken the Christian faith, the impossibility of believing. Many doctrines (say these) are made necessary to salvation, which 'tis impossible to believe, because they are in their nature absurdities. I replied, that these things were mysteries, and so above our understanding. But he asked me to what end could an unintelligible doctrine be revealed? not to instruct, but to puzzle and amuse. What can be the effect of an unintelligible mystery upon our minds, but only an amusement? That which is only above reason must be above a rational belief, and must I be saved by an irrational belief? ... You all agree that the belief of your Trinity is absolutely necessary to salvation, and yet widely differ in what we must believe concerning it; whether three Minds or Modes, or Properties, or internal Relations, or Oeconomies, or Manifestations, or external Denominations; or else no more than a Holy Three, or Three Somewhats... If I should be persuaded that an explanation of the Trinity were necessary to save my soul, and see the Learned so widely differing and hotly disputing what it is I must believe concerning it, I should certainly run mad through despair of finding out the Truth...
– William Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (1696), pp. 19-20
Thomas Hobbes— an early Deist and important influence on subsequent Deists— used the cosmological argument for the existence of God at several places in his writings.
The effects we acknowledge naturally, do include a power of their producing, before they were produced; and that power presupposeth something existent that hath such power; and the thing so existing with power to produce, if it were not eternal, must needs have been produced by somewhat before it, and that again by something else before that, till we come to an eternal, that is to say, the first power of all powers and first cause of all causes; and this is it which all men conceive by the name of God, implying eternity, incomprehensibility, and omnipotence.
– Thomas Hobbes, Works, vol. 4, pp. 59-60; quoted in John Orr, English Deism, p. 76
Most Deists saw the religions of their day as corruptions of an original, pure religion that was simple and rational. They felt that this original pure religion had become corrupted by "priests" who had manipulated it for the priests' personal gain and for the class interests of the priesthood in general.
According to this world view, over time "priests" had succeeded in encrusting the original simple, rational religion with all kinds of superstitions and "mysteries" — irrational theological doctrines. Laymen were told by the priests that only the priests really knew what was necessary for salvation and that laymen must accept the "mysteries" on faith and on the priests' authority. This kept the laity baffled by the nonsensical "mysteries", confused, and dependent on the priests for information about the requirements for salvation. The priests consequently enjoyed a position of considerable power over the laity, which they strove to maintain and increase. Deists referred to this kind of manipulation of religious doctrine as "priestcraft", a highly derogatory term.
Deists saw their mission as the stripping away of "priestcraft" and "mysteries" from religion, thereby restoring religion to its original, true condition — simple and rational. In many cases, they considered true, original Christianity to be the same as this original natural religion. As Matthew Tindal put it:
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.
– Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (XIV)[15]
One implication of this Deist origin myth was that primitive societies, or societies that existed in the distant past, should have religious beliefs that are less encrusted with superstitions and closer to those of natural theology. This became a point of attack for thinkers such as David Hume as they studied the "natural history of religion".
Enlightenment thinkers, 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 usually called necessitarianism: the view that everything in the universe — including human behavior — is completely causally determined by antecedent circumstances and natural law. (See, e.g., La Mettrie's L'Homme machine.) As a consequence, debates about freedom versus determinism were a regular feature of Enlightenment religious and philosophical discussions.
Because of their high regard for natural law and for the idea of a universe without miracles, Deists were especially susceptible to the temptations of necessitarianism. Reflecting the intellectual climate of the time, there were differences among Deists about freedom and necessity. Some, such as Anthony Collins, actually were necessitarians.
Deists held a variety of beliefs about the soul. Some, such as Lord Herbert of Cherbury and William Wollastson,[16] held that souls exist, survive death, and in the afterlife are rewarded or punished by God for their behavior in life. Others such as Thomas Paine were agnostic about the immortality of the soul:
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.
– Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I, Recapitulation
Still others such as Anthony Collins,[17] Bolingbroke, Thomas Chubb, and Peter Annet were materialists and either denied or doubted the immortality of the soul.[18]
Deist authors — and 17th- and 18th-century theologians in general — referred to God using a variety of vivid circumlocutions such as:
Early works of biblical criticism, such as Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, as well as works by lesser-known authors such as Richard Simon and Isaac La Peyrère, paved the way for the development of critical Deism.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury (d. 1648) is generally considered the "father of English Deism", and his book De Veritate (On Truth, as It Is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False) (1624) the first major statement of Deism.[19][20]
Like his contemporary Descartes, Herbert searched for the foundations of knowledge. In fact, the first two thirds of De Veritate are devoted to an exposition of Herbert's theory of knowledge. Herbert distinguished truths obtained through experience, and through reasoning about experience, from innate truths and from revealed truths. Innate truths are imprinted on our minds, and the evidence that they are so imprinted is that they are universally accepted. Herbert's term for universally accepted truths was notitiae communes — common notions.
In the realm of religion, Herbert believed that there were five common notions.
- There is one Supreme God.
- He ought to be worshipped.
- Virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship.
- We ought to be sorry fo
