Church Voices

The apex of my studies on deism reached a mountaintop experience last night as I finally compiled and added an exhaustive critique of it to the apologetics section on my blog. Let me now add a few final remarks I thought slightly inappropriate for the pseudo-scholarly tone of that in my apologetics pages.

Though not included in my critique, deism should be accredited several positive historical contributions, specifically to the development of a strategical defense of classical theism; namely, validity of the scriptures. Considering the intellectual capacity of deism’s defenders (Voltaire, particularly, not to mention deists siding with the likes of Hume and Spinoza with their arguments against miracles) in the eighteenth century and their relentless attacks on both the scriptures and special revelation such as miracles, much work has been done philosophically and historically in defense of classical theism in their wake. I’d even go as far as to say that without the barrage of Christian responses the deists were met with, both the historical value of apologetics and a strong theology of miracles would be altogether lacking. As Norman Geisler put it,

“The deistic siege called forth some of the most scholarly and stout defenses of orthodox Christianity in modern times. Bishop Berkeley, Bishop Butler, and William Paley [and much more] all contributed masterful works to this apologetic cause. Even skeptics like Lord Lytleton and Frank Morrison were converted and became ardent defenders of Christianity. Deistic criticism gave impetus to the study of archaeology which yielded not only the conversion of such notable men as Sir William Ramsay, but hundreds of thousands of archaeological confirmations of the Biblical worldview. For all of this the bitter and sustained attack of deism on Biblical Christianity is to be indirectly thanked.”

Some other positive aspects deism birthed was its stress on natural revelation, which served much to the development of the teleological argument. Moreover, deist’s stress on reason and rationale in religious belief I think really improved the bravado of those participating in the intellectual arena in years past and present. And admittedly, deism’s outspoken skeptical outlook on the supernatural really helped thwart the uprising of much cultic and or other significant religious activity at the time as well as cleaned any dust off the traditional miracles professed by Christianity that might have settled. For one must remember, for almost an entire century, it wasn’t theism versus atheism; it was Christian theism versus deism. Thus, we were brought a reform in much Biblical scholarship—to which we may now say that the presupposition against miracles survives in theology now only as a hangover from the earlier deistic age and ought now to be once for all abandoned.

So one might ask, “where is deism today?” Technically speaking, primarily in the scientific community where Newtonian-like mechanistic thinking might dominate, kind of similar to that of scientism and the empirically verifiable language constructs found in its literature. But personally, I think it can be efficiently surmised that deism has since been relegated to those who have submitted themselves to the present domineering grip theism has on cosmology but have yet to or cannot reconcile the personal convictions that would follow belief in the Judeo-Christian God. Clearly, deism has nothing to offer intellectually, for it’s shown to be both philosophically and scientifically wanting, or experientially, for what difference could this belief possibly yield in one’s personal life (if you say none, then I think you’re on the same page as the deists, which is exactly my point)? In other words, it’s far easier on one’s conscience to profess a God of no concern who resides afar off (thus leaving said individual without, say, a transcendent paradigm imposing certain sexual decorums by which to oblige) than to reckon the holiness and self-sacrifice that a real personal and loving God would demand of them.