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WillowOne's Positions

Deism

My Positions

  1. A creator who set the universe going and has never since intervened is unfalsifiable by construction, makes no difference to anything, and is therefore an improper subject of belief.
  2. Deism is the honest terminus of the cosmological arguments. If the Kalam or the first cause argument worked, this is all they would deliver, and the apologist's leap from here to a god with opinions about diet and sex is the Motte-and-bailey fallacy with a steeple on it.
  3. I regard deism with some respect as the religion of people who had read Newton but not yet Darwin. It was the furthest an honest mind could go in 1790. We can go further now.

Notes

  1. What it was. Deism was the position of much of the Enlightenment: Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, Voltaire, Jefferson, who cut the miracles out of his New Testament with a razor. The deists accepted the argument from design, because before Darwin nothing else explained the eye, and rejected revelation, miracles and priests, because they could see what those were. Darwin removed the need for the designer; modern cosmology removed the need for the first push, or at least showed that "something must have started it" is an intuition about billiard balls applied to the origin of time (see Owens Tryptic of Ignorance).
  2. Why it cannot be assessed. A god who did one thing fourteen billion years ago and nothing since is indistinguishable, from where we stand, from no god at all. There is no observation that would differ between the two cases. By Popper's Razor the claim forbids nothing and so says nothing; by Russell's Teapot the fact that it cannot be disproved is no reason to entertain it. This is the sense in which my note on God sets deism aside: not as false, but as empty.
  3. It makes no difference. The deist god does not answer prayer, does not judge, does not reward or punish, did not write any book, and has no church. Believing in him changes nothing about how one should live. He is atheism with a backstory, and the backstory does no work.
  4. It is the apologist's retreat. In debate the arguments for God are deist arguments: contingency, first cause, fine-tuning. When these are granted for the sake of argument, the conclusion is quietly upgraded to the God of Abraham, who rose from the dead and disapproves of shellfish. The gap between "a cause of the universe" and "Jesus" is never argued across; it is stepped over. Religious Apologetics in its entirety is an attempt to make deism pay for theism.
  5. One honest advantage. Deism escapes the problem of evil, because its god never claimed to be good or to be paying attention. That is a real advantage, bought at the price of there being no reason to care whether he exists.

Sources

  • Paine, T., The Age of Reason (1794–1807)
  • Hume, D., Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), where Philo pushes the design argument to its deist conclusion and then past it
  • Jefferson, T., The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (c. 1820), the "Jefferson Bible"

Also see