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DEISM (Lat. dens, god)
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See also:DEISM (See also:Lat. See also:dens, See also:god) , strictly the belief in one supreme God. It is however the received name for a current of rationalistic theological thought which, though not confined to one See also:country, or to any well-defined See also:period, was most conspicuous in See also:England in the last years .of the 17th and the first See also:half of the 18th See also:century. The deists, differing widely in important matters of belief, were yet agreed in seeking above all to establish the certainty and sufficiency of natural See also:religion in opposition to the See also:positive religions, and in tacitly or expressly denying the unique significance of the supernatural See also:revelation in the Old and New Testaments. They either ignored the Scriptures, endeavoured to prove them in the See also:main by a helpful republication of the Evangelium aeternum, or directly impugned their divine See also:character, their See also:infallibility, and the validity of their evidences as a See also:complete manifestation of the will of God. The See also:term " deism " not only is used to signify the main See also:body of the deists' teaching, or the tendency they represent, but has come into use as a technical term for one specific metaphysical See also: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 See also:personal God, who is, however, not only distinct from the See also:world but apart from it and its concerns. The words " deism" and " deist " appear first about the See also:middle of the 16th century in See also:France (cf. See also:Bayle's Dictionnaire, s.v. " Viret," See also:note D), though the deistic standpoint had already been foreshadowed to some extent by Averroists, by See also:Italian authors like See also:Boccaccio and See also:Petrarch, in More's See also:Utopia (r 515), and by See also:French writers like See also:Montaigne, See also:Charron and See also:Bodin. The first specific attack on deism in See also:English was See also:Bishop See also:Stillingfleet's See also:Letter to a Deist (1677). By the See also:majority of those historically known as the English deists, from See also:Blount onwards, the name was owned and honoured. They were also occasionally called " rationalists." " See also:Free-thinker " (in See also:Germany, Freidenker) was generally taken to be synonymous with " deist," though obviously capable of a wider signification, and as coincident with esprit fort and with libertin in the See also:original and theological sense of the word.' " Naturalists " was a name frequently used of such as recognized no god but nature, of so-called Spinozists, atheists; but both in England and Germany, in the 18th century, this word was more commonly and aptly in use for those who founded their religion on the lumen nalurae alone. It was evidently in See also:common use in the latter half of the 16th century as it is used by De See also:Mornay in De la verite de la religion chrelienne (1581) and by Montaigne. The same men were not seldom assaulted under the name of "theists"; the later distinction between "theist" and "deist," which stamped the latter word as excluding the belief in See also:providence or in the See also:immanence of God, was apparently formulated in the end of the 18th century by those rationalists who were aggrieved at being identified with the naturalists. Additional information and CommentsThere are no comments yet for this article.
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