The high court seems to allow this creeping ceremonial
deism based on the assumption that no one is truly harmed by it.
A pathbreaking scholar of
Deism, Waiters takes readers on an odyssey from London to small-town New England, from Monticello to a Paris dungeon, and then through the Appalachian backcountry as he explores the roots and major icons of the century-long Deist movement.
Part II, "My Discovery of the Divine," briefly summarizes the reasoning behind Flew's conversion to
deism, again in very accessible prose.
While Arminianism may have been Edwards's local nemesis, McDermott shows that Edwards was acutely aware of the advance of
deism in England during the first three decades of the eighteenth century, and that he anticipated its arrival on colonial shores.
The story of
deism and of religious toleration go hand in hand.
Deism has been called " natural religion " ; it is based on reason, as opposed to revelation.
Adding to the aforementioned problems were a confluence of circumstances that propelled Lewis to the unhappy climax: the breakdown of support structures, his
deism, physical illness, alcohol, and what Jenkinson calls "Buzz Aldrin Syndrome," which describes the difficulty hero-explorers sometimes face reintegrating into society (372).
"It's the kind of
deism, a general God, that's offensive to people who take religion seriously, and to those who take separation [of church and state] seriously," he told the newspaper.
Dietrich Klein, who makes ample use of Reimarus's unpublished notes, focuses on the famous and clandestine Apologie (1735-), a work on biblical criticism of which only a few parts were published posthumously by Lessing in 1777/78, and Reimarus's Die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der naturlichen Religion (1756), a philosophical manifesto written in defense of providential
Deism.
Stoll argues that from these to his later works, particularly Samson Agonistes Milton's concept of monotheism became more influenced by anti-trinitarianism and even floated on the edge of
Deism. In this literary and cultural exegesis, Stoll puts Milton at the center of the great debates of his day, ones that were as much political as religious.
The extremes of immanentism or pantheism and transcendence or
deism are avoided.
He reveals the influence on humanism of such philosophical streams of thought as pragmatism and critical realism; such intellectual traditions as Enlightenment
deism and nineteenth-century free-thought; the religious controversies surrounding the higher criticism and modernism; scientific developments such as Darwinism; and the cultural impact of American capitalism, technological progress, World War I, and the Great Depression.
It is also true that Franklin swung from Calvinism into a youthful
deism. But the chief product of that fling, Franklin's Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, only illustrated for Franklin the ethical dead end of eighteenth-century natural religion.
The following two chapters, on spaces of hostility amongst believers (Jansenism and Protestantism) and non-believers (libertinage, atheism, and
deism), demonstrate effectively the many perceived threats both within and outside the Church, which led to the censorship and control of books and ideas (the subject of the final chapter).
Deism, child of the Renaissance and the beginning of modern science, was the common bond of a loose movement of thought originating in England.
