DEISM AS RELIGION PART I

Webster’s Dictionary provides two very different definitions of deism:

(1). The belief that God exists and created the world but thereafter assumed no control over it or the lives of people.

(2). In philosophy, the belief that reason is sufficient to prove the existence of God, with the consequent rejection of revelation and authority.

Whenever we use one word to describe different things we end up not knowing what we are talking about. Sometimes this confusion is part of a deliberate deception, like in the case of libertarianism, detailed by me in the Contradiction section. Whatever the reason is here, I suspect that much of the confusion is, perhaps, due to an innocent misunderstanding of the term deism (confusing it with theism, perhaps, or monotheism, as Thomas Jefferson seems to be doing, see my entry Jefferson’s Bible) by those who have used it, and the resulting imprecision then being taken as a conscientious effort by some smarter-than-thou interpreters of other people’s wisdom.

No matter what we think of it or how we define it, deism is an intriguing phenomenon, or, to put it more precisely, a fascinating word hiding something quite interesting behind its vague façade, and as such most worthy of a closer look. As a result, three entries have sprouted on its fertile ground: Deism As Religion in the Religion section, Deism As Philosophy in the Philosophy section, and Deism As History in the History section. Each of them raises a particular aspect of the same subject, which is deism of course, and together they are hopefully presenting a fuller picture of my own than a single entry in any one selected section can possibly provide.

This entry discusses Deism as a religious opinion.

Prior to the seventeenth century the terms deist and deism were used interchangeably with the terms theist and theism, and this is where the majority of later uses ought to belong, whenever people were to use these terms broadly, without a deliberate emphasis on the technical definition. Theologians and philosophers of the seventeenth century began to give a different signification to these words. According to their technical distinction, both theists and deists still asserted their belief in one supreme God, the Creator, agreeing 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 ‘relinquished’ it to the operation of these powers acting as second causes.

So far, I see nothing iconoclastic in the physical substance of such a claim. On the contrary, this claim has a convincing Biblical foundation:

“And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind whose seed is in itself: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass…” (Genesis 1:11-12) It is quite clear to me that God’s command “Let the earth do this and that” explicitly delegates “self-sustaining and self-acting powers” to, from now on, second causes!

Perhaps the first use of the term deist is in Pierre Viret’s Instruction Chrestienne (1564). Being a staunch Calvinist, Viret regarded deism as a new form of Italian heresy. He 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 the Doctrine, to which the Evangelists and the Apostles testify, they take all that to be fables and dreams. I hear 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.

I find this argument utterly untrustworthy, and biased. After all, we can find much harsher accusations of heresy, diabolic possession and calls for eternal damnation thrown between some of the most pious brands of Catholicism and Protestantism, both professing their undying faith in Jesus Christ wholeheartedly, and without any qualifications.

 

End of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.