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I find myself leaning more and more to Deism as I listen to YouTube debates by leading theologians and digest their views, while applying them to what I have observed over the last ten years.
A Wiki definition of Deism:
Quote:
Deism holds that God does not intervene with the functioning of the natural world in any way, allowing it to run according to the laws of nature. For Deists, human beings can only know God via reason and the observation of nature, but not by revelation or supernatural manifestations (such as miracles) – phenomena which Deists regard with caution if not skepticism.
I can identify with this definition much better than I can with the traditional views of Christianity, which I believe are dissolving before our eyes as the internet kills traditional Christianity by a thousand cuts. A few reasons why I am now leaning toward Deism:
* unanswered prayer: quite simply, God doesn't answer prayer, or He does but it's very hit-and-miss.
Church members prays and tithes all their lives to be lifted out of poverty and dies in poverty as atheists. Other members ask their church leaders to pray for a healing for their children's cancer but the children die of cancer anyway. The parents also lose their faith and become atheists.
Is this what Jesus intended when He said, "Ask My Father for anything, believing, and you will receive it."
Apologists try to invent all sorts of excuses for why their prayers weren't answered and the question is not, "Did God hear the prayers?" Of course He did. But His policy is to let the world run on its own according to natural laws and under those laws the innocent will suffer along with the evil.
In this the Bible is right, "God makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on both the good and the evil."
Simply put, natural laws determine who gets cancer and dies and the natural order determines why millions of children are sexually, physically, mentally abused and die of starvation without any intervention by God.
* absence of any miraculous or supernatural events such as withered hands being restored or limbs growing back.
Jesus said that miracles greater than what He had done would follow those who followed Him, but when was the last time you saw a Christian raised from the dead or a missing limb restored?
I know of spontaneous remissions of cancer but this happens to atheists and Hindus and Buddhists as well as people of the Christian faith, so were these a miracles or just cases of the laws of genetics at play?
So can we honestly say this is the work of God? Nobody bothers to pray for a missing limb to regrow or for a paraplegic with a shattered spinal cord to walk because they know that it cannot be done. Nobody prays for a dead loved one to rise from the dead because they know they'd be judged a lunatic if they did because it just plain doesn't happen. Show us one verified case of a corpse dead for three days and decomposed like Lazarus being reanimated.
Once again, we have enough common sense in this day and age to figure that if the miracles Jesus did were true miracles, they were a one-time event, and that once Jesus departed the earth the Age of Miracles ended and God allowed the world to revert to natural laws governing the universe.
I see God at a distance, not as He is portrayed in Exodus hovering ten feet above His people in a cloud watching and judging their every move. If He were doing this San Francisco would have been wiped out for its sins of sodomy centuries ago. Sure there was the great SF earthquake in 1906 but was this a judgment of God or just a natural event caused by a seismic shift on an unstable tectonic plate? SF is 1000 x's more evil than it was in 1906? Where is the judgment that God visited on Sodom?
With this new view, one can rationalize the horrible things that happen to Christians and other good people by pointing out that the same things happen equally to evil people as well. It's just a natural order--some will thrive and others will suffer and there's no rhyme or reason to it except the laws of chance. This is also why, despite the fundamentalists saying God is at the door ready to start the Apocalypse, the world is at greater peace now than at any time in its history. What is threatening the earth now has nothing to do with God or the Bible, but with natural law: global climate change which will wipe out 3/4's of the world population in the next 100 years.
If I were going to cling to my old theism in any way, it'd have to be as a deist. But what I don't get is, what's the point? If god is absent or indifferent it's no different than god being nonexistent, for any practical purpose. An absent or indifferent / uninvolved god would not care for us to know him, or to know us, or care what we thought or did, nor would he be subject to our influence or attempts to communicate. Indeed, such a god would be even more ineffable and inscrutable than the standard-issue god of the book.
To me, deism is a pointless distinction between itself and no god at all.
I rather suspect that many who talk in terms of being Agnostic rather than atheist or Irreligious theists, or Theists with no liking for organized religion may in some cases have doubts about whether God operates in this world in any more than a rather remote -control way.
If so, they may be as near to Deist as makes no difference.
If I were going to cling to my old theism in any way, it'd have to be as a deist. But what I don't get is, what's the point? If god is absent or indifferent it's no different than god being nonexistent, for any practical purpose. An absent or indifferent / uninvolved god would not care for us to know him, or to know us, or care what we thought or did, nor would he be subject to our influence or attempts to communicate. Indeed, such a god would be even more ineffable and inscrutable than the standard-issue god of the book.
To me, deism is a pointless distinction between itself and no god at all.
Your post makes a lot of sense. A number of the Founding Fathers have been identified as deists, although I'm not sure that such a term even existed in the late 18th Century. However, the existence of the Jefferson Bible makes Thomas Jefferson seem like the poster child for Deism (is that a real word?). Washington may have been a deist, and Franklin has been labeled by some historians as a deist. Others think he was actually an atheist, although nobody in the 18th Century colonies would have EVER admitted to believing in no God. To admit such a thing would have meant you'd have been burned at the stake in the public square.
I have often thought that Deism is in many ways consistent with my own beliefs. But to answer Mordant, to say that God does not intervene in the world is not the same as saying He is absent or indifferent. The idea is that He set this whole thing up at the Beginning, and is now just watching it unfold according to His plan.
I share Thrillobyte's thoughts on prayer. Obviously, some prayers seem to answered and some not. If you believe that everything happens according to God's perfect plan, than to pray for any specific outcome would be to ask Him to change His plan and follow yours instead. The point of prayer is to change your own mindset, not God's.
Finally, it is true that suffering happens to both the innocent and the evil. Suffering is not in itself good or bad - it is neutral. What matters is our response to suffering, our own or that of others.
If I were going to cling to my old theism in any way, it'd have to be as a deist. But what I don't get is, what's the point? If god is absent or indifferent it's no different than god being nonexistent, for any practical purpose. An absent or indifferent / uninvolved god would not care for us to know him, or to know us, or care what we thought or did, nor would he be subject to our influence or attempts to communicate. Indeed, such a god would be even more ineffable and inscrutable than the standard-issue god of the book.
To me, deism is a pointless distinction between itself and no god at all.
I have seen a lot of former theist/fundamentalists like Dan Barker, Jerry deWitt, Joe E. Holman, Bart Ehrman and a whole bunch more do a 180 degree about-face in their belief to non-belief, and to me, that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
To me, Deism is a comfortable medium between the radicalism of fundamentalism and atheism. I cannot be an atheist whenever I see the beauty of a human cell operating on a level of complexity 1000 x's greater than a computer. Then put all these trillions of diverse cells into an organic whole like the human body and watching teeth evolve to crush foods that grow specifically for teeth to crush them, and stomach cells to evolve to produce gastric juices to dissolve that food in such a specialized way as to make the food perfectly absorbable to feed the body. No need to mention the 100,000 other ways the human body has evolved to survive.
Then move this into the plant and animal kingdoms and see the diversity of life on an ordered scale from simple to complex and one knows instinctively that this did not happen by random chance in a pool of billions of elements sloshing together and somehow the right combination of 300 elements or so came together precisely to make a cell molecule. The odds have been calculated to be about 1 to the 250th power or some such mind-boggling number.
That a God created all this, but that He seems to be totally absent in all this makes Deism the best of both worlds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Leo58
I have often thought that Deism is in many ways consistent with my own beliefs. But to answer Mordant, to say that God does not intervene in the world is not the same as saying He is absent or indifferent. The idea is that He set this whole thing up at the Beginning, and is now just watching it unfold according to His plan.
I share Thrillobyte's thoughts on prayer. Obviously, some prayers seem to answered and some not. If you believe that everything happens according to God's perfect plan, than to pray for any specific outcome would be to ask Him to change His plan and follow yours instead. The point of prayer is to change your own mindset, not God's.
Finally, it is true that suffering happens to both the innocent and the evil. Suffering is not in itself good or bad - it is neutral. What matters is our response to suffering, our own or that of others.
Exactly. I believe God set all this up at the beginning, He set certain laws of natural order into place like gravity and thermodynamics and quantum physics and made us subject to those laws. I find the purpose of life here not to decide whether or not the fundamentalists or the atheists are right, but to grow in wisdom and to help our fellow man along the way. These two fulfill the two great commands of Jesus and when we die, our life continues pretty much as it was here, albeit in a whole new dimension and in a different type of body adapted to that dimension.
Through all of this God sits back and lets human history unfold on its own terms, with one BIG exception to me: God has never allowed man to wipe himself off the planet with thermonuclear war, but I do believe He will allow us to come close to destroying ourselves with this climate change we seem to be going through. But then, this many be just another natural law in operation of balancing the human population and resetting the odometer back maybe 10,000 years and starting over.
Your perception of unanswered prayers is your reason for believing in a God that doesn't have any input into the world he created? What about the times when his hand is clearly seen?
If I were to be a theist, I would probably be some variant of Deist. It seems to me, however, that Deism is primarily a Rationalist position. That is, one believes because of logical argument and inference. As I tend to Empiricism, a demand for evidence, it is not really any more compelling than any other form of Theism, but I like it better
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,916,433 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vizio
Your perception of unanswered prayers is your reason for believing in a God that doesn't have any input into the world he created? What about the times when his hand is clearly seen?
Name one that can't be explained rationally or by science?
And please, name something that is substantive, recognizable, and repeatable.
Or is this another one of my questions you won't or can't answer?
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