It's as dependable as Oregon rain: In the weeks following our July 4 Independence Day celebration, people write in to declare that America's founders were not Christians and that they were just nature-loving
deists.
Stewart claims that most and nearly all of the founders were
deists who were closet pantheists and, functionally, atheists.
Specific essays and the volume as a whole argue that Baur is dependent in some way on the British
Deists John Toland and Thomas Morgan, both of whom wrote over a century before Baur.
Nonbelievers--who generally identified themselves as "
deists"--were far more numerous and influential than is widely supposed.
He is a
deist, an altogether different disposition.
She explains that "Finding the proper label for Fichte's religious views is problematic, for the most common titles (atheist, theist, or even
deist) all carry connotations contrary to his position" (312).
In his early life, he appears to have been a
Deist, but on St.
The first section (Chaos) covers the overthrow of Aristotelian science, the development of calculus, the role of mathematical laws in the
Deist model that Newton developed, and some information on the multifaceted dynamo Gottfried Liebniz, who was Newton's intellectual equal in many ways.
Once he has argued that Spinoza has a
deist conception of God that undermines traditional morality, Velthuysen then makes an even more crucial point.
As far as a child being atheist or
deist by birth, one can support both sides of the question with equally convincing arguments.
In the debate over Washington's religion, Mary Thompson urges us to avoid the false choice of classifying him as a
deist or as a devout Christian, suggesting that Washington's writings and behavior correspond to that of an Anglican/Episcopalian of a latitudinarian bent.
He has signed for the
Deist club, from Brussels, who also include British Olympic hope Darius Knight, the England No.2, in their ranks.
Milton is unmistakably monotheist, as he declares in De doctrina, but "his commitments to the rigors of monotheism were read by Leslie, Toland, Collins, Hume, and Defoe, as well as Pope and Bolingbroke, as
deist" (168).
