Deism, also called the Religion of Nature,
is the view that the existence of a superior
being or first cause may be demonstrated
by human reason independently of any kind
of supernatural revelation, but there are
many variations of this opinion, ranging
from Christian deism to militant anti-Christian
deism.
In a strictly literal sense, there is no
difference between theism and deism, since
both refer to belief in the existence of
a god, but whereas the theist usually assigns
absolute power to God, the deist limits the
power of God in various ways. Consequently,
theism has gradually come to represent faith
in the received religion of a particular
culture and deism to represent some degree
of doubt or even rejection of the received
religion. In this sense, Plato and Newton
are theists and Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire,
deists. Lord Shaftesbury considered both
theism and deism as representing a religious
belief exclusive of revelation and argued
that the root of Christianity is theism,
which can be opposed only by polytheism or
atheism.
According to Pierre Bayle, both atheists
and deists admit the existence of a first
cause that is eternal and universal, but
the deists maintain in addition that the
first cause controls everything in nature
with complete freedom, that it distributes
good and evil according to its pleasure,
and that it grants or rejects our petitions
as it pleases. Immanuel Kant made almost
the same distinction between deism and theism,
considering the former as the acceptance
of a first cause, but denying its providence
or control of human destiny; he viewed the
latter as admitting a personal god, providence,
and rewards and punishments in a future state.
According to Samuel Clarke the degrees of
deism ascend in the following order: belief
in a creating god without providential control;
belief in a god without moral attributes;
belief in a god exercising providence, but
without granting human immortality; and belief
in a creating god, providence, and rewards
and punishment in a future state, but denial
of revelation and supernatural occurrences.
In addition to these theological elements,
deism involves a number of ancillary notions
that are sometimes given more attention than
basic philosophy. These include the advocacy
of complete religious toleration in the state,
the teaching of humanistic as opposed to
doctrinal morality, and the dissemination
of anticlerical or anti-biblical propaganda.
Some deists have accused orthodox religions,
especially Christianity, of deriving from
a conspiracy of crafty priests to hoodwink
the ignorant and gullible masses for their
own benefit. This interpretation exists in
the works of Bayle, John Toland, Lord Bolingbroke,
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The doctrines
of Erastianism, or the supremacy of the state
or the secular authority in ecclesiastical
affairs, were advocated by Shaftesbury and
Matthew Tindal. Other deists sought to discredit
all of Christianity by denying the possibility
of miracles, a method adopted by Shaftesbury,
Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, and, most successfully,
David Hume, who was not a deist himself.
Some of the most notorious deists have not
been, philosophically, far from orthodox
Christianity, but they acquired their radical
reputation by attacking the Bible. Thomas
Paine, for example, began The Age of Reason
with a statement of faith in God and "happiness
beyond this life."
The term deism is used only in countries
with a Christian culture and has no relevance
to other religious traditions such as Judaism,
Islam, and Buddhism. In a practical sense, therefore, a deist
is a person in a Christian culture who believes
in God, but does not accept the divinity
of Christ. Benedict Spinoza and other unorthodox Jews
are rarely called deists. The term is limited,
moreover, almost entirely to the 17th and
18th centuries, and has little relevance
to the 2Oth. There is no exact equivalent
in the modern world, but freethinker and
agnostic are the closest approximations.
Leslie Stephen and others make a distinction
between constructive and critical deists,
the first presumably compromising with Christianity
by merely trying to restore it to the purity
of natural religion and the second soundly
attacking Christianity as irrational, superstitious,
and historically evil. However the distinction
does not hold up when applied to individual
deists.
No agreement whatsoever exists among deists
concerning the debate between free will and
Determinism, despite the popular but erroneous
notion that deism equates God with a watchmaker,
who manufactures a mechanism and then allows
it to run without further intervention. Most
deists do not face the problem of determinism
at all, and almost none adopt the necessitarian
system, which is more compatible with either
orthodox Christianity in the form of predestination
or with complete atheism.
Europe. Although religious skepticism had existed
in France long before the 18th century, deism
did not become an important intellectual
movement there until it began to subside
in England during the 1740s. Several strains
of deism are to be found in Montesquieu-the
concept of natural law and order, advocacy
of toleration, and the satire of greedy priests-but
his moderate observations were not delivered
in a direct or forceful manner. The most
vociferous deist in France, and perhaps in
the world, was Voltaire, who made all Europe
ring with his battle cry Ecrasez-l'infame
(demolish infamy), directed against religion
in general and Roman Catholicism in particular.
This strain exists in nearly all of Voltaire's
works, gathering intensity and emotional
force the longer he lived. One of his clearest
and most moderate statements is Defense de
milord Bolingbroke (1752). Although he confided
to one of his English friends that the latter
work was directed against priests whom he
had hated all of his life, his more famous
Candide (1759) ridiculed the easy optimism
of deism as well as the intellectual inconsistencies
of orthodox Christianity. Voltaire, nevertheless,
adopted the general pattern of the religion
of nature even though he was just as aware
as was Hume of its inconsistencies and discrepancies.
Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed more of the
positive aspect of deism in the "Profession
of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar" in his
novel Emile (1762). However, he did so without
vituperation against priests. He bases knowledge
on intuition as well as on reason and accepts
an intelligent, powerful, and benevolent
force, which he calls God; the notion of
man as the lord of the creation; and man's
being endowed with free will and a moral
conscience. Elsewhere in Emile he draws a
commonplace parallel between Christ and Socrates.
The outstanding German deist was Hermann
Samuel Reimarus, born in 1694, the same year
as Voltaire. He composed an extensive manuscript
on rational religion, and included such topics
as the supremacy of reason as the source
of religious truth, the dubiousness of miracles,
the logical impossibility of many of the
tales of the Old Testament, and the intellectual
deceptions of the clergy. Shortly after his
death in 1768, ten years before Voltaire's,
his manuscripts fell into the hands of Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, who published a series of
fragments. These, however, were soon banned
by official censorship. Lessing thereupon
wrote his play Nathan der Weise (1779), which
is not, strictly speaking, part of the deist
controversy, but a protest against censorship
and a plea for religious toleration.
America. Many of the leaders of the American Revolution
were deists-including Benjamin Franklin,
George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson,
and Gouverneur Morris. Hundreds of short
essays and satirical squibs advocating rational
religion appeared in periodicals, but the
first extensive work was by the military
hero, Ethan Allen, Reason the Only Oracle
of Man (1784). In the preface, Allen admits
that he is not a Christian, but says that
he does not know whether or not he is a deist
since he has never read the writings of the
deists. He attacks the miraculous parts of
Christianity and extols reason, as the title
indicates, but, nevertheless, maintains that
nearly every philosophical problem is beyond
man's comprehension. He also accepts the
possibility of the immortality of an immaterial
soul.
The historical importance of Allen's work
is that it preceded Paine's The Age of Reason
(1794), with which it has no other connection.
Throughout his entire life Paine affirmed
an unshaken belief in God, and he construed
his Age of Reason as a defense rather than
an attack upon religion. In the first part,
he brought together the usual arguments in
favor of reason over revelation, buttressed
by others drawn from Newtonian science. In
the second part he repudiated Christianity
because of its sordid history and the inconsistencies
in the Bible. Age of Reason became the most
widely read I book of deism, not because
of any new or original arguments, but because
of Paine's clear, crisp, and at times colloquial
style. Also, he was successful in bringing
the message of deism to the common people
as well as to the affluent, where it had
previously been largely confined. Indeed,
one of the elitist tenets of Voltaire and
many other deists was that the ranks of the
educated might be taught the deficiencies
of received religion without harm, but the
common people needed a supernatural religion
for the safeguarding of order and morality
in society.
One of Paine's disciples, Elihu Palmer, a
blind former minister, established in 1802
a deistical newspaper in New York, the Prospect,
or View of the Moral World. He also published
a book, Principles of Nature (1801), which
contains some important notions in addition
to the traditional doctrines of natural religion.
Moral science, for example, he portrayed
as progressive instead of fixed or absolute,
as earlier deists had maintained, but he
also hoped for a universal standard of morality.
In a bold stand, he denied personal immortality,
something that no major deist had ever done
before.
For all practical purposes, the deistical
movement died out at the end of the 18th
century. At least no notable writing took
place after this. Constructive or positive
deists merged with Unitarians and other offshoots
of Christianity, and the other radical, anticlerical
wing by and large disappeared.
Adapted from the Encyclopedia of Unbelief.
Stein, G., Ed. 1985. Prometheus Books, Buffalo.
