The turn of the 18th century is marked by a generation in which a radical revolution takes place in the Western European’s mind as to how truth is to be sought and found. The achievements of Newton convincingly demonstrated that not only could the New Philosophy, as advocated by Bacon, Descartes, etc., know things which the Old Scholastic Philosophy had not, but more importantly that the authority which had been received from the past had been wrong. Thus we can see that not only did the New Philosophy emerge as a viable contender to Scholasticism, but that Scholasticism itself had suffered a serious blow to its integrity, whether the New Philosophy was ultimately “better” than it or not. Following Galileo and Newton, the educated population began to turn more and more to the book of nature and less and less to the book of scripture in search of truth. The seemingly inevitable movement which would result from such an environment was Deism.
Deistic thought had three principle characteristics which set them apart from the Christian majority. First and most obviously, although the deists believed in God, they reject the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Second, they advocated the complete naturalization of Divine Providence, in that God operated through nature’s laws rather than by any kind of supernatural intervention. Third, deists believed in the complete generalization of Divine Providence, in that any kind of particular intervention on God’s part was seen as unnecessary and unwanted, although this was seen in a rather positive light rather than the negative spin which the traditional Christian is sure to put on it. Before considering the brutal attacks which what is called “negative deism” laid against the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, let us first consider the tenets of “positive deism.”
Positive deism focuses on two main points which really do seem like positive alternatives to the religion of the Bible. The first is the idea of completely generalized and naturalistic providence. Which is more impressive, asks the deist, the clockmaker who makes a clock which works perfectly forever, or the clockmaker which continually has to intervene in order for the clock to work right? This is exactly what the deists see as their theological strength, in that they believe that their version of God is simply more powerful or wiser than the traditional God which seems to have to rely upon scattered and repeated acts of particular providence.
The second point which positive deism makes fairly well is in their account of the primacy of the “book of nature” as a source of divine truth rather than the “book of scripture.” Which book of scripture a person born into the world happens to receive will depend almost entirely upon where, when and to who they happen to be born. It is because of the wide diversity of scriptural traditions that religion was seen to be such a mess of contradictions and uncertainties. The deists, however, saw the appeal to the universal book of nature as overcoming all of the problems of contingency wrought by the appeal to scripture. Although people are born into various and diverse traditions, they are all born into the same “nature” and thus will all come to the same God as well as the same moral law by following the latter whereas the former simply leads to confusion and conflict.
Negative deism, however, is a little more hard-hitting. They criticize scripture for not agreeing with established knowledge. As knowledge of other traditions, particularly that of the Far East began to come in, it was seen that the Biblical chronology simply could not be harmonized with these other accounts (the Chinese had chronologies which extended back earlier than the Biblical account of creation itself). Historical accounts of Biblical events from other sources demonstrated that the historicity of the Bible could not be trusted. The findings of the new natural philosophy, such as those of Galileo, showed than the Bible could not be trusted in its description of the natural world either.
They criticized the Bible on the grounds that not only had its prophecies not come true except in the most contrived and allegorical of manners, but that in some cases Old Testament prophecies had been conjured up by New Testament authors in order to promote faith. (Take the example of Isaiah’s prophecy of a mortal savior being born within his lifetime to a young women being reinterpreted as being a prophecy that a divine savior would be born hundreds of years later to a virgin.) Furthermore, they pointed to apparent contradictions within the Bible itself, asserting that not only did scripture not match with reality, but that it did not even match with itself at times.
They leveled attacks against Christianity and its God on moral grounds as well. The God of the Bible is depicted as favoring the committers of the most heinous crimes (Moses, Joshua, David). They saw the God of the Bible as being vengeful and arbitrary, especially in the genocidal conquests of Moses and Joshua. They also saw this tradition of arbitrariness and violence as extending well past Old Testament times in the form of religious wars and witch hunts. As we have already seen, they took the idea of particular providence to not only be stupid, but utterly blasphemous. They criticized the Bible for making the God of this world, in the form of Christ look ignorant on occasions.
They decry the traditional appeal to as well as exaltation of mystery. Who do these mysteries serve? It is certainly not the Christian who is being kept in ignorance, nor is it God in our being kept from Him and His truth. Rather, it was seen to the sacerdotal priests who were kept in privileged power over the religious masses by claiming to be privy to the mysteries, mysteries which they themselves had conjured.
Perhaps the criticism which most motivated the deists was the fact that traditional religion as they saw it had deprived man of his most divine and natural birthrights. Traditional religion was seen to deride reason, the most precious of man’s God-given abilities. In a similar vein, the deists disapproved of the Christians distrust of their senses, relying upon their traditions over their own experience to seek truth. Christianity was also criticized for their discontent regarding man’s desires for pleasure and happiness in this life, pursuits which were highly encouraged in the deistic tradition.
Thus we can see that the deistic approach to religion was quite different and in conflict with the Christian approach. These tensions can be seen in their differing views regarding: Divine love, Creation, God’s relation to creation, Revelation, Belief, the Purpose of Life, the Problem of Evil, (original) Sin, Morality and Mortal achievements. While deism is no longer as wide spread as it once was, one can still see almost all of their beliefs echoed in our culture in one form or another.
