Deism (from Latin deus) — The position that natural reason suffices to know the existence of God, creator of the world, without recourse to revelation, miracles, or the authority of churches. In its typical form, the deist admits a creator and a moral order but rejects divine intervention in history through particular revelations, hence the frequent but simplifying image of a God who creates the world and lets it run by its laws. Many deists, however, admitted a general providence and the immortality of the soul, so the thesis of God’s total absence from the world does not describe all of them. Its founding text is usually taken to be Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate (1624), which proposes five “common notions” belonging to every true religion. In England it took shape from the late seventeenth to the first half of the eighteenth century with John Toland (Christianity Not Mysterious, 1696), Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal (Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730); Locke, though not a deist, prepared the ground by defending the reasonableness of Christianity. In France, deism was the position of Voltaire, who wrote in a verse epistle (Épître à l’auteur du livre des Trois Imposteurs, 1769) that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and of Rousseau, whose “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” (in Emile, 1762) is an exposition of natural religion. Hume critically examined the argument from design, the basis of much deist argument, in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Deism is distinguished from theism, which admits revelation and divine action in the world, from pantheism, and from atheism. See Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and Enlightenment.
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