James Sire has a fine analysis of
deism in his work The Universe Next Door,
5th edition (Downers Grove, Ill: Intervarsity Press, 2009),
47-65. He makes a distinction
between “cold deists” and “warm deists.”
Cold deists, like Voltaire were hostile to Christianity whereas warm
deists, like Benjamin Franklin and John Locke, were friendly to
Christianity. Some warm deists
believed in some form of providence.
Sire aptly notes:
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.[1]
Later Sire concludes:
[D]eism 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.[2]
Avery Dulles has also, pointed out
some weaknesses in the deistic conception of God (at least in its 17th
and 18th century versions) in his article “The Deist Minimum.”[3]
A few of Dulles’ criticisms are as follows:
(1) “Deism also suffered from grave philosophical weaknesses… Their
epistemology was a shallow empiricism and their cosmology a universalized
physics, both of which crumbled when faced with the penetrating critiques of
David Hume and Immanuel Kant.” (2) Deism “suffered from some internal
tensions. If there is an
omnipotent God, capable of designing the entire universe and launching it into
existence, it seems strange to hold that this God cannot intervene in the world
He made or derogate from the laws He had established.” (3) “If God was infinite in being,
moreover, it was unreasonable to reject the notion of mystery. It would seem quite natural to suppose
that there are depths of the divine being surpassing all that could be inferred
from the created world. We cannot
know what is going on in the minds of our fellow human beings unless they
manifest it by word or deed. How
much less, then, could we grasp the thoughts of God unless He were to disclose
them to us by revelation? Since
God knows far more about Himself and His plans than His creatures do, it is
difficult to see why He could not reveal truths hidden from reason that would
be important for persons such as ourselves.” (4) “[T]he deist
God, who ceased to be active after launching the world into existence, seemed
to be a useless vestige of the God of biblical religion. If God never intervened in the world,
His existence could only be, from a human perspective, superfluous. It would be pointless to pray to Him or
expect any blessings from Him.... Thus deism came to be a halfway house on the
road to atheism.” (5) “Deism also fails as a religion. Its static deity was a pallid reflection of the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus Christ.
The religion of the New Testament and of orthodox Christianity offered
hope and consolation that lay far beyond the powers of deism. The gospel assures us that God never
ceases to be active in the world: He freely calls us to Himself, hears our
prayers, and enriches our lives with His grace. The doctrine that God became man in order to raise us to
share in His own divine life satisfied a deep desire of the human heart to
which deism could not respond. It
was impossible to enter into communion of life and love with the cold and
distant God of deism.
[1]
James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A
Basic Worldview Catalog—5th ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.:
Intervarsity Press, 2009), 53.
[3]
Avery Dulles, “The Deist Minimum” First
Things (January 2005)—available online: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/01/the-deist-minimum.
