Description
Deism came along in the enlightenment era, and was popular among political intellectuals like the U.S. founding fathers. The basic idea is that God does exist, but (for one reason or another) no religion is true. Although explicit deism is rather uncommon, many people today are functional deists, believing that there is some higher power, but not really doing anything about it.
There are two major categories of deism: observational and interactive.
Observational Deism
Observational deism is the idea that God created the universe, but has the relationship of a watchmaker to a watch. That is, the watch runs without Him, though He may do a little maintenance here and there. Observational deism is manifestly absurd, and there are multiple reasons why.
First, all the most compelling arguments for God’s existence are compelling precisely because they imply God is necessary right now. Take St. Thomas’ “second way” for example. He argues there are simultaneous causal regressions: you are caused by your organs, they are caused by cells, they are caused by molecules, they are caused by atoms, and so on. But if every step of the regression relied on another step, then nothing would have causal power at all. So something must have the power to cause without relying on a previous cause, and this must be God. Of course, if this is true, then creation was not an event which happened a few billion years ago; creation is an ongoing activity. Obviously, observational deism can’t be true under a paradigm in which creation is ongoing.
Second, as a corollary to the first, if God is not necessary right now, there’s no good cosmological reason to believe He’s there at all. If the universe self-orders and self-sustains, why do we even need God to explain it? The only cosmological argument which does not rely on God’s intimate involvement in creation is the “complexity of the universe” argument. But the “complexity” argument is the weakest theistic argument there is, defeated by simply acknowledging observer bias. Of course the universe is complex enough to support life – if it wasn’t, there’d be no life to notice it!
Deists who cannot rely on the complexity argument will often fall back on the morality argument. That is, the universe exists with a coherent, objective moral structure, and obviously that couldn’t have come from pure material. But this defeats itself as well. If God is a coherent being, then He must have made creation for a reason, as a rational act only ever proceeds from a reason. But if God made the universe for a reason, then He must be interested in that reason coming to fruition. But if God is intimately interested in creation, observational deism can’t be true. On the other hand, if God created the universe for no reason at all, then God behaves incoherently. If God is incoherent, then coherent moral structure isn’t evidence of God; it would actually exist in spite of Him.
If God is not actively and intimately involved in the universe, there’s no reason to think He exists at all.
Interactive deism
Interactive deism is the belief that God is interested and involved in the affairs of the human race, but that no organized religion is true. But this makes almost as little sense as observational deism.
First, consider the human race. Every culture in human history has had a preeminent religion or spirituality. Humans have an innate desire for purpose, social cohesion, and moral order. Worship is an integral part of the human experience. Some might argue this point, imagining candles in a church, but worship does not have to be formal to be worship. In the absence of God, men will worship ancestors, nature, millionaires, actors, athletes, politicians – anything. But they will worship.
So the interactive deist must admit that God made human nature for a reason, admit that human nature cries out for meaning and worship, but then claim that He didn’t bother to give us any organized religion. Often the deist theory is that there is some sort of generic, universal form of worship humans have lost to corrupt religious organizations. But this is, frankly, more absurd than the flat earth theory. Left to our own devices, humans invent wildly different forms of worship, and the only things they have in common historically are brutality and polytheism. Ritual rape, human sacrifice, infanticide, cannibalism; Zeus, Krishna, Helios, Ra, Huitzilopochtli. On the contrary, the thing which ended these abhorrent practices and popularized monotheism was the Catholic Church – a religious organization!
In fact, anything the deist would consider worthy to be part of this so-called universal religion – equality, acceptance, human rights, respect for the poor – were all practically nonexistent prior to institutionalized, monotheistic religion. If the evidence suggests anything, it is not that atomized humans have an innate capacity to worship God well. It’s that atomized humans need to be saved from the worship they concoct! If this is the case – and I see no way to argue it – man is in need of organized religion.
Of course, organized monotheistic religion did not exist throughout all of human history. As such, a deist might contend that we are still waiting for the true religion now. But why would we put any weight behind that conjecture? Organized religions exist right now. They have already had an enormous impact on the world. There haven’t been any new, serious contenders for true religion since the dawn of Islam 1400 years ago. So not only is there no reason to think the true religion doesn’t exist right now, we have every reason to think it does. At the very least, the interactive deist should be doggedly researching the existing religions to see if any has even the slightest shred of evidence behind it, as all indications point to the fact that one of them is true.
Conclusion
Observational deism is caught between a rock and a hard place. Either God is coherent, and the universe must exist for a reason, or God is incoherent, and then the coherence of the universe isn’t proof that He exists. The idea of a God who created the universe and then turned His back on it is unsupported and nonsensical.
Interactive deism, though it is at least a logically acceptable possibility, is historically untenable. If God made humans with a thirst for the transcendent, there must be some proper or best way to express it. But the functionally infinite evidence of history shows that atomized religious cultures’ only universal religious traits were unutterable brutality and polytheism. Furthermore, what put an end to these practices was not some general, natural enlightenment, but organized religion. As such, the evidence is very strong that some religion is actually true. An honest deist should be exhausting themselves day and night to figure out which one. Luckily, I have an entire section of this website dedicated to different belief systems and the evidence for them.
Although God did not give us innate knowledge of worship, He did give us reason. We should not expect a true religion to make perfect sense to us, as that presupposes we understand God. If anything is clear from history, it is that we do not understand God. The only thing we should expect of a true religion is that there is proof that it’s true.