Say first, of God above or man below,
What can we reason but from what we know?
Of man what see we but his station here
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known,
’Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
IF THEISM LASTED SO LONG, what could possibly have happened to undermine it? If it satisfactorily answered all our basic questions, provided a refuge for our fears and hope for our future, why did anything else come along? Answers to these questions can be given on many levels. The fact is that many forces operated to shatter the basic intellectual unity of the West.1
Deism developed, some say, as an attempt to bring unity out of a chaos of theological and philosophical discussion which in the seventeenth century became bogged down in interminable quarrels—even religious wars—over what began to seem even to the disputants like trivial questions. Perhaps John Milton had such questions in mind when he envisioned the fallen angels making an epic game of philosophical theology:
Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d
In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixt Fate, Free will, Foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.2
After decades of wearying discussion, Lutheran, Puritan, and Anglican divines might well have wished to look again at points of agreement. Deism to some extent is a response to this, though the direction such agreement took put deism rather beyond the limits of traditional Christianity.
Another factor in the development of deism was a change in the location of the authority for knowledge about the divine; it shifted from the special revelation found in Scripture to the presence of Reason, “the candle of God,” in the human mind or to intuition, “the inner light.”3 Why should such a shift in authority take place?
One of the reasons is especially ironic. It is linked with an implication of theism which, when it was discovered, was very successfully developed. Through the Middle Ages, due in part to the rather Platonic theory of knowledge that was held, the attention of theistic scholars and intellectuals was directed toward God. The idea was that knowers in some sense become what they know. And since one should become in some sense good and holy, one should study God. Theology was thus considered the queen of the sciences (which at that time simply meant knowledge), for theology was the science of God.
If people studied animals or plants or minerals (zoology, biology, chemistry, and physics), they were lowering themselves. This hierarchical view of reality is really more Platonic than theistic or Christian, because it picks up from Plato the notion that matter is somehow, if not evil, then at least irrational and certainly not good. Matter is something to be transcended, not to be understood.
But as more biblically oriented minds began to recognize, this is God’s world—all of it. And though it is a fallen world, it has been created by God and has value. It is indeed worth knowing and understanding. Furthermore, God is a rational God, and his universe is thus rational, orderly, knowable. Operating on this basis, scientists began investigating the form of the universe. A picture of God’s world began to emerge; it was seen to be like a huge, well-ordered mechanism, a giant clockwork, whose gears and levers meshed with perfect mechanical precision. Such a picture seemed both to arise from scientific inquiry and to prompt more inquiry and stimulate more discovery about the makeup of the universe. In other words, science as we now know it was born and was amazingly successful.
At the same time, of course, there were those who distrusted the findings of the scientists. The case of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is famous and, in a quite distorted form, is often cited today as proof of the antiscientific nature of Christian theism. In fact, Galileo as well as other Renaissance scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) held fully Christian worldviews.4 Moreover, in Bacon’s words, knowledge became power, power to manipulate and bring creation more fully under human dominion. This view is echoed in modern parlance by J. Bronowski: “I define science as the organization of our knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in nature.”5 If this way of obtaining knowledge about the universe was so successful, why not apply the same method to knowledge about God?
In Christian theism, of course, such a method was already given a role to play, for God was said to reveal himself in nature. The depth of content, however, that was conveyed in such general revelation was considered limited; much more was made known about God in special revelation. But deism denies that God can be known by revelation, by special acts of God’s self- expression in, for example, Scripture or the incarnation. Having cast out Aristotle as an authority in matters of science, deism began to cast out Scripture as an authority in theology and to allow only the application of “human” reason. As Peter Medawar says, “The 17th-century doctrine of the necessity of reason was slowly giving way to a belief in the sufficiency of reason.”6 Deism thus sees God only in “Nature,” by which was meant the system of the universe. And since the system of the universe is seen as a giant clockwork, God is seen as the clockmaker.
In some ways, we can say that limiting knowledge about God to general revelation is like finding that eating eggs for breakfast makes the morning go well, and then eating only eggs for breakfast (and maybe lunch and dinner too) for the rest of one’s life (which now unwittingly becomes rather shortened!). To be sure, theism assumes that we can know something about God from nature. But it also holds that there is much more to know than can be known from nature and that there are other ways to come to know.
BASIC DEISM
As Frederick Copleston explains, deism historically is not really a “school” of thought. In the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries more than a few thinkers came to be called deists or called themselves deists. These thinkers held a number of related views, but not all held every doctrine in common. John Locke (1632–1704), for example, did not reject the idea of revelation, but he did insist that human reason was to be used to judge it.7 Some cold deists, like Voltaire (1694–1778), were hostile to Christianity; some warm deists, like Locke, were not.8 Some, like Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), believed in the immortality of the soul; some did not. Some believed God left his creation to function on its own; some believed in providence. Some believed in a mildly personal God; others did not. So deists were much less united on basic issues than were theists.9 Moreover, as we will see later on, some forms of popular deism, such as moralistic therapeutic deism, are thought of by some people as fully Christian.
Still, it is helpful to think of deism as a system and to state that system in a relatively extreme form, for in that way we will be able to grasp the implications various “reductions” of theism were beginning to have in the eighteenth century. Naturalism, as we shall see, pushes these implications even further.
1. Worldview Question 1 (prime reality): A transcendent God, as a First Cause, created the universe but then left it to run on its own. God is thus not immanent, not triune, not fully personal, not sovereign over human affairs, not providential.
Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge. . . . Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.
John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.18
As in theism, the most important proposition regards the existence and character of God. Warm deism—such as that of Franklin, who confessed, “I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence” —retains enough sense of God’s personality that Franklin thought this God “ought to be worshipped.”10 But cold deism eliminates most features of personality God is said to display. He is only a transcendent force or energy, a Prime Mover or First Cause, a beginning to the otherwise infinite regress of past causes. But he is really not a he, though the personal pronoun remains in the language used about him. He does not care for his creation; he does not love it. He has no “personal” relationship to it at all. Certainly he did not become incarnate in Jesus. He is purely monotheistic. As Thomas Paine said, “The only idea man can affix to the name of God is first cause, the cause of all things.”11
A modern deist of sorts, Buckminster Fuller, expressed his faith this way: “I have faith in the integrity of the anticipatory intellectual wisdom which we may call ‘God.’”12 But Fuller’s God is not a person to be worshiped, but merely an intellect or force to be recognized.
To the deist, then, God is distant, foreign, alien. The lonely state this leaves humanity in, however, was not seemingly felt by early deists. Almost two centuries passed before this implication was played out on the field of human emotions.
2. Worldview Question 2 (external reality): The cosmos God created is determined, because it is created as a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system; no miracle is possible.
In cold deism the system of the universe is closed in two senses. First, it is closed to God’s reordering, for he is not “interested” in it. He merely brought it to be. Therefore, no miracles or events that reveal any special interests of God are possible. Any tampering or apparent tampering with the machinery of the universe would suggest that God had made a mistake in the original plan, and that would be beneath the dignity of an all-competent deity.
Second, the universe is closed to human reordering because it is locked up in a clocklike fashion. To be able to reorder the system, any human being alone or with others would have to be able to transcend it, get out of the chain of cause and effect. But this we cannot do. We should note, however, that this second implication is not much recognized by deists. Most continue to assume, as we all do apart from reflection, that we can act to change our environment.
3. Worldview Question 3 (human beings): Human beings, though personal, are a part of the clockwork of the universe.
To be sure, deists do not deny that humans are personal. Each of us has self-consciousness and, at least on first glance, self-determination. But these have to be seen in the light of human dimensions only. That is, as human beings we have no essential relation to God—as image to original—and thus we have no way to transcend the system in which we find ourselves.
Bishop François Fénelon (1651–1715), criticizing the deists of his day, wrote, “They credit themselves with acknowledging God as the creator whose wisdom is evident in his works; but according to them, God would be neither good nor wise if he had given man free will—that is, the power to sin, to turn away from his final goal, to reverse the order and be forever lost.”13 Fénelon put his finger on a major problem within deism: human beings have lost their ability to act significantly. If we cannot “reverse the order,” then we cannot be significant. We can only be puppets. If an individual has personality, it must then be a type that does not include the element of self-determination.
Deists, of course, recognize that human beings have intelligence (to be sure, they emphasize human reason), a sense of morality (deists are very interested in ethics), a capacity for community and for creativity. But none of these, while built into us as created beings, is grounded in God’s character. None has any special relationship to God; each is on its own.
4. Worldview Question 4 (death): Human beings may or may not have a life beyond their physical existence.
Here there is a distinction between warm and cold deists. Deism is the historical result of the decay of robust Christian theism. That is, specific commitments and beliefs of traditional Christianity are gradually abandoned. The first and most significant belief to be eroded was the full personhood and trinitarian nature of God. Reducing God to a force or ultimate intelligence eventually had catastrophic results. In fact, as we shall see, not only naturalism but nihilism is the final result. Were the history of worldviews a matter of the immediate working out of rational implications of a change in the idea of the really real, a belief in an afterlife would have immediately disappeared. But it didn’t. Nor did a belief in morality; that took another century. So warm deists, those closest to Christian theists, persisted in the notion of an afterlife, and cold deists, those further away, did not.
5. Worldview Question 5 (knowledge): Through our innate and autonomous human reason and the methods of science, we cannot only know the universe, but we can infer at least something of what God is like. The cosmos, this world, is understood to be in its normal state; it is not fallen or abnormal.
In deism human reason becomes autonomous. That is, without relying on any revelation from the outside—no Scripture, no messages from God via living prophets or dreams and visions—human beings have the ability to know themselves, the universe, and even God. As John Locke put it, “Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason has nothing to do.”14
Because the universe is essentially as God created it, and because people have the intellectual capacity to understand the world around them, they can learn about God from a study of his universe. The Scriptures, as we saw above, give a basis for it, for the psalmist wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). Of course, theists too maintain that God has revealed himself in nature. But for a theist God has also revealed himself in words—in propositional, verbalized revelation to his prophets and the various biblical writers. And, Christian theists maintain, God has also revealed himself in his Son, Jesus—“the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). But for deists God does not communicate with people. No special revelation is necessary, and none has occurred.
Émile Bréhier, a historian of philosophy, sums up well the difference between deism and theism:
We see clearly that a new conception of man, wholly incompatible with the Christian faith, had been introduced: God the architect who produced and maintained a marvelous order in the universe had been discovered in nature, and there was no longer a place for the God of the Christian drama, the God who bestowed upon Adam “the power to sin and to reverse the order.” God was in nature and no longer in history; he was in the wonders analyzed by naturalists and biologists and no longer in the human conscience, with feelings of sin, disgrace, or grace that accompanied his presence; he had left man in charge of his own destiny.15
The God who was discovered by the deists was an architect, but not a lover or a judge or personal in any way. He was not one who acted in history. He simply had left the world alone. But humanity, while in one sense the maker of its own destiny, was yet locked into the closed system. Human freedom from God was not a freedom to anything; in fact, it was not a freedom at all.
One tension in deism is found at the opening of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732–1734). Pope writes,
Say first, of God above or man below,
What can we reason but from what we know?
Of man what see we but his station here
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known,
’Tis ours to trace him only in our own.16
These six lines state that we can know God only through studying the world around us. We learn from data and proceed from the specific to the general. Nothing is revealed to us outside that which we experience. Then Pope continues,
He who through vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What varied being peoples ev’ry star,
May tell why heav’n has made us as we are.
But of this frame the bearings and the ties,
The strong connections, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Looked through? or can a part contain the whole?17
Pope assumes here a knowledge of God and of nature that is not capable of being gained by experience. He even admits this as he challenges us as readers on whether we really have “looked through” the universe and seen its clockwork. But if we haven’t seen it, then presumably neither has Pope. How then does Pope know it is a vast, all-ordered clockwork?
One can’t have it both ways. Either (1) all knowledge comes from experience and we, not being infinite, cannot know the system as a whole, or (2) some knowledge comes from another source—for example, from innate ideas built into us or from revelation from the outside. But Pope, like most deists, discounts revelation. So we have a tension in Pope’s epistemology. And it was just such tensions that made eighteenth-century deism an unstable worldview.
6. Worldview Question 6 (morality): Morality is intuitive or limited to general revelation; because the universe is normal, it reveals what is right.
Deism’s ethics in general is founded on the notion that built into human nature is the capacity to sense the difference between good and evil. Human reason is not “fallen” as in Christian theism; so when it is employed by people of good will, it results in moral discernment. Of course, human beings are free not to do what they discern as good; evil then is a result of human beings not conforming to their inherent nature.18
So much for human good and evil. But what about natural evil? Natural events—floods, hurricanes, earthquakes—bring disaster, massive pain, and suffering to many. Deists do not consider either human reason or the universe itself to be “fallen.” Rather it is in its normal state. How, then, can the normal universe in which we experience so much tragedy still be good? Isn’t God, the omnipotent Creator, responsible for everything as it is? Doesn’t this world reflect either what God wants or what he is like? Is God, then, really good?
While it is probably unfair to charge deism itself with the confusion illustrated by Alexander Pope, it is instructive to see what can happen when the implications of deism are exposed. Pope writes:
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.19
This position ends in destroying ethics. If whatever is is right, then there is no evil. Good becomes indistinguishable from evil. As Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) said, “If God exists, he must be the devil.” Or, worse luck, there must not be good at all. For without the ability to distinguish, there can be neither one nor the other, neither good nor evil. Ethics disappears.
It is surely necessary to point out that not all deists saw (or now see) that their assumptions entail Pope’s conclusions. Some felt, in fact, that Jesus’ ethical teachings were really natural law expressed in words. And, of course, the Sermon on the Mount does not contain anything like the proposition “Whatever is, is right.” A deeper study of the deists would, I believe, lead to the conclusion that these early deists simply were inconsistent and did not recognize it.
Alexander Pope himself is inconsistent, for while he held that whatever is is right, he also berated humanity for pride (which, if it is, must be right!).
In pride, in reas’ning pride our error lies;
All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.
Pride still aiming at blessed abodes;
Men would be angels, angels would be gods. . . .
And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order sins against th’ Eternal Cause.20
For a person to think of himself more highly than he ought was pride. Pride was wrong, even a sin. Yet note: a sin not against a personal God but against the “Eternal Cause,” against a philosophic abstraction. Even the word sin takes on a new color in such a context. More important, however, the whole notion of sin must disappear if one holds on other grounds that whatever is, is right.
7. Worldview Question 7 (history): History is linear, for the course of the cosmos was determined at creation. Still the meaning of the events of history remains to be understood by the application of human reason to the data unearthed and made available to historians.
If deists were to be consistent to the clockmaker/clockwork metaphor, they would be little interested in history. As Bréhier has pointed out, they sought knowledge of God primarily in nature as understood in the growing content of natural science. The course of Jewish history as recorded in the Bible was largely dismissed as legend, at least partially because it insisted on God’s direct action on and among his chosen people. The accounts of both Testaments are filled with miracles. The deists say miracles can’t happen. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), for example, produced The Life and Morals of Jesus, better known as The Jefferson Bible. His popular version excluded narratives of all the miracles. By such a procedure the Bible became largely discounted as giving insight into God or human beings or, especially, the natural order. Jefferson became the judge of what could be true or worthy of belief. At best the biblical narratives were illustrations of divine law from which ethical principles could be derived. Then, too, H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768) attempted “to reconstruct the life and preaching of Jesus with the tools of critical history.”21 And John Toland (1670–1722) argued that Christianity was as old as creation; the gospel was a “republication” of the religion of nature. With views like those, even the specific acts of history are not important for true religion. The stress is on general rules. As Pope says, “The first Almighty Cause / Acts not by partial but by gen’ral laws.”22 God is quite uninterested in individual men and women or even whole peoples. Besides, the universe is closed, not open to his reordering at all.
Nonetheless intellectuals, historians, and philosophers with a basically deistic bent were, as Synnestvedt says, “fascinated by history.” He cites major works by seven major deistic scholars, including a History of England by David Hume (1711–1776), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), and Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794).23 All these “histories” are, of course, based totally on the autonomy of human reason; none of them appeal to perspectives derived from revelation. As a result they display a wide variety of interpretations of the meaning and significance of human events.
8. Worldview Question 8 (core commitments): Cold deists use their own autonomous reason to determine their goal in life; warm deists may reflect on their commitment to a somewhat personal God and determine their goal in accordance with what they believe their God would be pleased with.
Because, unlike Christian theism, there is no orthodox deism, each deist is free to use reason, intuition, tradition, or whatever squares with his or her view of ultimate reality. Deists’ core commitments will thus reflect their personal passions or, in common parlance, what turns them on—the flourishing of their individual personal life, their family life, public life. Early deists such as Franklin and Jefferson took public welfare as a key commitment. Others like Paine combined their commitment to public life with a passion for their own personal freedom (and the freedom of everyone in the commonwealth) from the dictates of religion. But the more a deist becomes divorced from allegiance to a personal God, the less religious mores and traditional goals characterize their core commitments. As a result, societies themselves become more pluralistic and less socially cohesive. Thus the tie between deism as a worldview and freedom as a personal and social goal inspired the bloody violence of the French Revolution and spurred on the development of democracy and eventually the vast cultural diversification of American society. Each year the Western World, especially America, becomes more pluralistic than the year before.
MODERN DEISM
As can be seen from the above description, deism has not been a stable compound. The reasons for this are not hard to see. Deism is dependent on Christian theism for its affirmations. It is dependent on what it omits for its particular character. The first and most important loss was its rejection of the full personal character of God. God, in the minds of many in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, kept his omnipotence, his character as creator and, for the most part, his omniscience, but he lost his omnipresence (his intimate connection with and interest in his creation). Eventually he lost even his will, becoming a mere abstract intelligent force, providing a sufficient reason for the existence of the universe whose origin otherwise could not be explained. The spectrum from full personality to sheer abstraction is represented by a variety of deistic types. We have already noticed the differences between warm and cold deism as represented by early deists. Now we will examine some modern forms and introduce new labels for them: (1) sophisticated scientific deism, (2) sophisticated philosophic deism, and (3) popular deism of which moralistic therapeutic deism is a particular illustration.
Sophisticated scientific deism. A cold deism continues to thrive in some scientists and a few humanists in academic centers across the world. Scientists like Albert Einstein, who “see” a higher power at work in or behind the universe and want to maintain reason in a created world, can be considered deists at heart, though no doubt many would not wish to claim anything sounding quite so much like a philosophy of life.24
It’s hard for me to believe that everything out there is just an accident. . . . [Yet] I don’t have any religious belief. I don’t believe that there is a God. I don’t believe in Christianity or Judaism or anything like that, okay? I’m not an atheist. . . . I’m not an agnostic. . . . I’m just in a simple state. I don’t know what there is or might be. . . . But on the other hand, what I can say is that it seems likely to me that this particular universe we have is a consequence of something which I would call intelligent.
Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods
Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking also leaves room for a deistic God. The fundamental laws of the universe “may have originally been decreed by God,” he writes, “but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.”25 His rejection of a theistic God is clear. Actress and New Age leader Shirley MacLaine once asked Hawking if there is a God who “created the universe and guides his creation.” “No,” he replied simply in his computer-generated voice.26 After all, if the universe is “self-contained, having no boundary or edge,” as Hawking suspects is true, then there is no need for a Creator; God becomes superfluous.27 Hawking therefore uses “the term God as the embodiment of the laws of physics.”28 Hawking is not alone among scientists and other intellectuals in holding such a view.29
Sophisticated philosophic deism. In 2004 Antony Flew (who died in 2010), a long-time vocal atheist and opponent of Christian theism, declared himself a deist. His change of mind came from his growing sense that a variety of arguments, from those of Aristotle to the fine-tuning of the universe, are really compelling. As he put it, “he simply had to go where the evidence led.”30 God, for Flew, has most of the “classical theological attributes.” Though he rejects the notion of special revelation from this God, he is open to its possibility. The authenticity of this move by such a formerly convinced atheist has been questioned, but the evidence for it is rock solid.31
One of the clearest exponents of a more humanistic warm deism is Václav Havel, the playwright, public intellectual, and former president of the Czech Republic. The defining characteristic of Havel’s worldview is his understanding of prime reality, his answer to the first worldview question. Havel uses several terms to label his answer: Being, mystery of being, order of existence, the hidden sphere, absolute horizon, or final horizon. All these terms suggest a cold deism. But there is nothing cold about his experience of this sheer Being. Havel, for example, ponders why, when he boards a streetcar late at night with no conductor to observe him, he always feels guilty when he thinks of not paying the fare. Then he comments about the interior dialogue that ensues:
Who, then, is in fact conversing with me? Obviously someone I hold in higher regard than the transport commission, than my best friends (this would come out when the voice would take issue with their opinions), and higher, in some regards than myself, that is, myself as subject of my existence-in-the-world and the carrier of my “existential” interests (one of which is the rather natural effort to save a crown). Someone who “knows everything” (and is therefore omniscient), is everywhere (and therefore omnipresent) and remembers everything; someone who, though infinitely understanding, is entirely incorruptible; who is for me, the highest and utterly unequivocal authority in all moral questions and who is thus Law itself; someone eternal, who through himself makes me eternal as well, so that I cannot imagine the arrival of a moment when everything will come to an end, thus terminating my dependence on him as well; someone to whom I relate entirely and for whom, ultimately, I would do everything. At the same time, this “someone” addresses me directly and personally (not merely as an anonymous public passenger, as the transport commission does).32
These reflections are close, if not identical, to a fully theistic conception of God. Surely some Being that is omniscient, omnipresent, and good, and who addresses you directly and personally, must himself (“itself” just doesn’t fit these criteria) be personal.
Havel, too, sees this. And yet he draws back from the conclusion:
But who is it? God? There are many subtle reasons why I’m reluctant to use that word; one factor here is a certain sense of shame (I don’t know exactly for what, why and before whom), but the main thing, I suppose, is a fear that with this all too specific designation (or rather assertion) that “God is,” I would be projecting an experience that is entirely personal and vague (never mind how profound and urgent it may be), too single-mindedly “outward,” onto that problem-fraught screen called “objective reality,” and thus I would go too far beyond it.33
So, while Being manifests characteristics that seem to demand a commitment to theism, Havel avoids this conclusion by shifting his attention from Being (as an objective existent) to himself (as a reflector on his conscious experience). What Havel does draw from this experience—to very good advantage, by the way—is that Being has a moral dimension. Being, then, is the “good” ontological foundation for human moral responsibility.34
Popular deism. Popular deism is popular in two senses. It is both a simple, easygoing belief in the existence of an omnipotent, impersonal, transcendent being, a force or an intelligence, and it is a vague belief held by millions of Americans and, I suspect, millions more throughout the Western world.
In its cold versions, God is simply the abstract force that brought the world into existence and has largely left it to operate on its own. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that many well-educated people, especially academics and professionals, would acknowledge the probable existence of such a being but would largely ignore his existence in their daily lives. Their moral sensitivity would be grounded in the public memory of common Christian virtues, the mores of society, the occasional use of their own mind when dealing with specific issues, such as honesty in business, attitudes to sexual orientation, and practices. They live secular lives without much thought of what God might think. Surely a good life will prepare one for life after death, if, indeed, there is such a thing.
In its warmest versions, God clearly is personal and even friendly. University of North Carolina sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in 2005 published a massive study of the religious beliefs of teenagers. Their conclusion was that most of these teenagers adhered to what they called moralistic therapeutic deism. They summed up this worldview as follows.
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.35
God, ultimate reality, in this view makes no demand on his creation to be holy, righteous, or even very good. “As one seventeen-year-old conservative Protestant girl from Florida told us [the researchers], ‘God’s all around you, all the time. He believes in forgiving people and whatnot and he’s there to guide us, for somebody to talk to and help us through our problems. Of course, he doesn’t talk back.’”36 When asked what God is like, a Bryn Mawr College student drew a big smiley face and wrote, “He’s one big smiley face. Big hands . . . big hands.”37 This form of deism is certainly not limited to youth; it is, I suspect, very much like that of their parents and adult neighbors.
AN UNSTABLE COMPOUND
Enlightenment deism did not prove to be a stable worldview. Historically it held sway over the intellectual world of France and England from the late seventeenth into the first half of the eighteenth century. Then its cultural significance declined. But few, if any, major shifts in worldview disappear completely. Deism is indeed still alive and well.
What made and continues to make deism so unstable? The primary reasons, I think, are these:38
First, autonomous human reason replaced the Bible and tradition as the authority for the way ultimate reality was understood. Everyone could decide for themselves what God was like. Once the concept of God was up for grabs, there was no stopping his being reduced from the complex Christian theistic idea of God to a minimal, simple force or abstract intelligence. The gradual slide from a full-blooded Christian theism was thus inevitable; what replaced the biblical God was a variety of gods, each with fewer and fewer features of personality.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, is the intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas throughout Europe during most of the eighteenth century. An important element of the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution. Authority, especially religious authority, was rejected in favor of what unaided reason could establish on its own terms. Romanticism in the early nineteenth century provided a counterbalancing reaction, rejecting the dominance of reason alone and stressing the place of feelings and the human spiritual response to nature. Postmodernism has offered an even greater challenge to Enlightenment reliance on reason, though the world of scientific investigation continues apace, seemingly little affected.
Second, autonomous human reason replaced the Bible and tradition as the authority for morality. At first autonomous reason and traditional morality tracked well together. The human mind exposed to the surrounding culture assumed that, for the most part, those cultural values were in fact reasonable. In the early years, deists placed confidence in the universality of human nature; people who used their reason would agree on what was right and wrong.39 This eventually turned out to be a false hope. However universal human nature may be, in practice people do not agree on matters of good and evil or what constitutes “good” behavior as much as the early deists thought.
Third, deists rejected the biblical notion of the fall and assumed that the present universe is in its normal, created state. As Pope said, “whatever is, is right.” One could derive one’s values from clues from the natural order. One clue was the universality of human nature. But if whatever is, is right, then no place is left for a distinctive content to ethics.
Fourth, since the universe is closed to reordering, human action is determined. What then happens to human significance? People become cogs in the clockwork mechanism of the universe. Human significance and mechanical determinism are impossible bedfellows.
Fifth, today we find even more aspects of deism to question. Scientists have largely abandoned thinking of the universe as a giant clock. Electrons (not to mention other even more baffling subatomic particles) do not behave like minute pieces of machinery. If the universe is a mechanism, it is far more complex than was then thought, and God must be quite different from a mere “architect” or “clockmaker.” Furthermore, the human personality is a “fact” of the universe. If God made that, must he not be personal?
So historically, deism was a transitional worldview, and yet it is not dead in either popular or sophisticated forms. On a popular level, many people today believe that God exists, but when asked what God is like, they limit their description to words like Energy, The Force, First Cause, something to get the universe running and often capitalized to give it the aura of divinity. As Étienne Gilson says, “For almost two centuries . . . the ghost of the Christian God has been attended by the ghost of Christian religion: a vague feeling of religiosity, a sort of trusting familiarity with some supreme good fellow to whom other good fellows can hopefully apply when they are in trouble.”40
In what was to follow even the ghost of the Christian God disappeared. It is to that worldview we now turn.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. How would you summarize the main differences between deism and theism?
2. What are some implications of the belief that the universe is a closed system?
3. Where have you seen expressions of the three types of modern deism described in this chapter?
4. Consider the reasons the author gives for why deism is unstable. Which are the most compelling to you? Would you add any?