Word Finder - deism

definition

A philosophical belief in the existence of a god (or goddess) knowable through human reason; especially, a belief in a creator god unaccompanied by any belief in supernatural phenomena or specific religious doctrines.

definition

Belief in a god who ceased to intervene with existence after acting as the cause of the cosmos.

In such an atmosphere, deism readily uttered its protest against mysterious revelation.

His visiting espionage, as unkind critics put it - his secret diplomatic mission, as he would have liked to have it put himself - began in the summer of 1722, and he set out for it in company with a certain Madame de Rupelmonde, to whom he as usual made love, taught deism and served as an amusing travelling companion.

The Contrat social was obviously anti-monarchic; the Nouvelle Heloise was said to be immoral; the sentimental deism of the "Profession du vicaire Savoyard" in Emile irritated equally the philosophe party and the church.

See, further, Theism; Deism; ATheism; Absolute.

But this theism is lifeless - a " pale and shallow deism, which India has often confessed with the lips, but which has never won the homage of her heart.'" The thought of India is upon the side of pantheism.

Wolff's list is of some historical importance - atheism, deism (a God without care for men) and naturalism (denial of supernatural revelation); anthropomorphism (assigning a human body to God); materialism, and idealism (non-existence of matter); paganism (polytheism); Manichaeism, Spinozism, Epicureanism.

Deism is, in fact, the Thomist natural theology (more clearly distinguished from dogmatic theology than in the middle ages, alike by Protestants and by the post-Tridentine Church of Rome) now dissolving partnership with dogmatic and starting in business for itself.

Deism now taught that reason,.

The abbe de Chateauneuf instructed him early in belleslettres and deism, and he showed when a child the unsurpassed faculty for facile verse-making which always distinguished him.

The first deals with mere party questions without sincerity and without depth; and the second, composed as an amusement in retirement without any serious preparation, in their attacks on metaphysics and theology and in their feeble deism present no originality and carry no conviction.

In 1744 we find him, in anticipation of a vacancy in the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh university, moving his friends to advance his cause with the electors; and though, as he tells us, " the accusation of heresy, deism, scepticism or theism, &c., &c., was started " against him, it had no effect, " being bore down by the contrary authority of all the good people in town."

Hume endeavours to show that polytheism was the earliest as well as the most natural form of religious belief, and that theism or deism is ' See Burton, ii.

This work, along with another against Deism, entitled The Gospel its own Witness, is regarded as the production on which his reputation as a theologian mainly rests.

The work in short - a second part, written during his ten months' imprisonment, was published after his release - represents the deism of the 18th century in the hands of a rough, ready, passionate controversialist.

As the result of these inquiries, he adopted the creed of pure deism and a ritual based upon the system of Zoroaster.

Voltaire's reply to it in the 18th (Essai sur les mceurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science.

If the word " deism " emphasizes a negative element - rejection of church Christianity - " theism " generally emphasizes the positive element - belief in God.

When the existence of God is denied (atheism), or His nature is declared unknowable (agnosticism), or He is identified with nature itself (pantheism), or He is so distinguished from the world that His free action is excluded from the course of nature (deism), miracle is necessarily denied.

The term "deism" not only is used to signify the main body of the deists' teaching, or the tendency they represent, but has come into use as a technical term for one specific metaphysical doctrine as to the relation of God to the universe, assumed to have been characteristic of the deists, and to have distinguished them from atheists, pantheists and theists, - the belief, namely, that the first cause of the universe is a personal God, who is, however, not only distinct from the world but apart from it and its concerns.

The first specific attack on deism in English was Bishop Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677).

The impulses that promoted a vein of thought cognate to deism were active both before and after the time of its greatest notoriety.

Deism was one of the results, and is an important link in the chain of thought from the Reformation to our own day.

None the less it is unquestionable that in the period preceding the Revolution the bulk of French thinkers were ultimately deists in various degrees, and that deism was a most potent factor not only in speculative but also in social and political development.

Defenders of Christianity and of deism alike atmo- appealed to the reason alone.

Its most important use is for the theological conception of God as existing in and throughout the created world, as opposed, for example, to Deism, which conceives Him as separate from and above the universe.

Carriere identified himself with the school of the younger Fichte as one who held the theistic view of the world which aimed at reconciling the contradictions between deism and pantheism.

In this work Law shows himself at least 'the equal of the ablest champion of Deism.

Of metaphysics proper Voltaire neither then nor at any other time understood anything, and the subject, like every other, merely served him as a pretext for laughing at religion with the usual reservation of a tolerably affirmative deism.

These specific differences revealed different religious tendencies,' the one type being more warmly Evangelical, the other more " rational " and congenial in temper with 18th-century Deism.

The standpoint of the Apologie is that of pure naturalistic deism.

Long before England was ripe to welcome deistic thought Lord Herbert of Cherbury earned the name "Father of Deism" by laying down the main line of that religious philosophy which in various forms continued ever after to be the backbone of deistic systems. He based his theology on a comprehensive, if insufficient, survey of the nature, foundation, limits and tests of human knowledge.

Externally Chubb is interesting as representing the deism of the people contrasted with that of Tindal the theologian.

Probably Chubb's position on this head is most fairly characteristic of deism.

But deism is not a compact system nor is it the outcome of any one line of philosophical thought.

The controversies they had provoked collapsed, and deism became a by-word even amongst those who were in no degree anxious to appear as champions of orthodoxy.

The negative side of deism came to the front, and, communicated with fatal facility, seems ultimately to have constituted the deism that was commonly professed at the clubs of the wits and the tea-tables of polite society.

Yet deism deserves to be remembered as a strenuous protest against bibliolatry in every degree and against all traditionalism in theology.

Yet English deism was in many ways characteristically English.

French deism, the direct progeny of the English movement, was equally short-lived.

Voltaire during his three years' residence in England (1726-1729) absorbed an enthusiasm for freedom of thought, and provided himself with the arguments necessary to support the deism which he had learned in his youth; he was to the end a deist of the school of Bolingbroke.

Diderot was for a time heartily in sympathy with deistic thought; and the Encyclopedie was in its earlier portion an organ of deism.

But as Locke's philosophy became in France sensationalism, and as Locke's pregnant question, reiterated by Collins, how we know that the divine power might not confer thought on matter, led the way to dogmatic materialism, so deism soon gave way to forms of thought more directly and completely subversive of the traditional theology.

Outside France, Germany and England, there were no great schools of thought distinctively deistic, though in most countries there is to be found a rationalistic anti-clerical movement which partakes of the character of deism.

For men like Hume and Gibbon the standpoint of deism was long left behind; yet Gibbon's famous two chapters might well have been written by a deist.

Even now many undoubtedly cling to a theology nearly allied to deism.

Toland is generally classed with the deists, but at the time when he wrote Christianity not Mysterious he was decidedly opposed to deism.

It disengages itself in the 17th century as Socinianism and in the 18th as Rationalism or Deism.

Before the War of Independence Arianism showed itself in individual instances, and French influences were widespread in the direction of deism, though they were not organized into any definite utterance by religious bodies.

Failure to mention deism when applying to join can lead to refusal.

It is no very difficult matter, indeed, to get up a theory of pure deism.