Divining God

As church congregations continue to dwindle, triumphalist atheism proudly struts across TV screens in the personas of media scientists and stand-up comedians displaying their aggressive cleverness. Anyone daring to profess a belief in God must be prepared to be patronised at best or vilified as an anachronistic reactionary.

But for all it is garbed in modern fashion the arguments between theists and atheists would be better dressed in eighteenth century attire. It was during the Enlightenment, with the emergence of science as a significant force, that religion spawned its own nemesis, the sceptics, the free thinkers.

By the early nineteenth century militant atheism had become significant, typified by Ludwig Feuerbach who gathered a following for this position. His was a rejection of God, specifically the Christian God, on the grounds a recourse to the divine is to project the human onto some notion of the transcendent.

In other words, humanity has its worldly, historical and social content extracted and then moulded into a personification beyond this world in the idealised form of God.

Theists, meanwhile, maintained a fideistic theology, insisting on an absolute requirement for faith. For them, God existed beyond human comprehension, denying any possibility of rational justification.

However, as the century advanced so did thinking in this field. Karl Marx, often mistakenly identified with Feuerbachian atheism, rejected both Christian theism and the atheism of Feuerbach. He insisted each was equally replicating antithetically identical essentialist and abstract accounts of the sacred and the secular.

For Marx, humanity and nature exist for each other and people have become consciously aware of this. The idea there is a being existing above humanity and nature, with the consequent implication of the unreality of humanity and nature, has become practically impossible.

Therefore, the denial of such unreality, atheism, has become obsolete. Atheism negates God to assert humanity’s existence. But, such negation is no longer required as the positive self-consciousness of humanity has moved beyond the abolition of religion.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that subsequent regimes claiming the title Communist acted against religion, in the case of Albania outlawing it altogether, thus proving them Feuerbachian, not Marxist as they claimed, at least in this respect.

Effectively Marx moved the argument beyond the disputants of theism and atheism. Religion, specifically the Christian religion and by extension the other two Judao-religions, or its absence was rendered irrelevant.

Deism as a coherent and identifiable strand of thought also arose during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, emerging as a reaction to the clash between existing Christianity in its various denominations and atheism as a product of the emerging sciences. It was a strand of free thinking in its own right.

While Marx cannot be claimed as a Deist, his analysis can be drawn on by Deism in its rejection of both theism and atheism. The conclusion drawn, however, is markedly different from that of Marx.

Deists embrace rather than reject the concept of God, but in doing so they most certainly do not deny the reality of this world. In that sense they are as philosophically materialist as Marx. Nature is fundamental to Deism, its starting point, sometimes referred to as the one and only true gospel.

Deism is an apophatic philosophy recognising that what is referred to as God is actually beyond language to express. Many Deists prefer the term Deus to differentiate from theistic implications of using “God”. Perhaps it might be preferable to have no word at all, except that would make having any sort of conversation impossible.

Unlike fideistic theology, which also recognises the ineffability of God while rejecting any possibility of rational justification of their belief, Deists begin from a standpoint of using reason to identify in nature the consequences of God while accepting the divine is beyond the limitations of human comprehension.

Intelligent Design (ID) is often pressed into service at this point, but that has unfortunate associations with anti-scientific fundamentalist creationism. Perhaps it might be better for Deists if ID were to stand for Immanent Design, design integral to creation.

God or Deus signifies the source, the prime mover, the primal cause of all there is. Not a supernatural being or glorified superior humanoid dispensing favours on the faithful, visiting wrath upon the sinners. For Deists God is the X in the cosmic equation humanity is not equipped to solve.

That there is consciousness and intelligence in the universe is indisputable, humanity is both the evidence and witness to this. Reason leads Deists to the conclusion that such features play a crucial role in there being a universe at all let alone one that manifests those very features. It is how they divine God.

Deist Christmas

Deism rejects the notion of Divine revelation; the claims of revealed religions are, therefore, considered counterfeit. For Deists, all religions, including Deism, are man-made: God is the object, not the founder, of Deism.

As a human belief system, Deism appeals to reason in fathoming the laws and evident patterns in creation, positing God as the ultimate source. As such, God is beyond our partial understanding, so while we can have intimations of the Divine it is beyond our ken to define.

Revealed religions claim the direct word of God is recorded in Holy Scriptures, which the faithful must acknowledge, even if they defy reason. This is a dangerous concept as it relegates reason, the source of science and learning, in favour of unreasoned faith.

Ethan Allen, in “Reason: The Only Oracle of Man”, wrote, “Such people as can be prevailed upon to believe, that their reason is depraved, may easily be led by the nose, and duped into superstition…”

So, with reason being central to Deism, what are Deists to make of Christmas? A virgin pregnancy and birth, angels, shepherds and Magi, an immobile star, the stable and manger, ox and ass, all the stuff of school nativity plays. Reason, at the very least, questions all of this.

Or it would if there is a requirement to accept it all without question because it’s written in the bible. However, reason does rather more than challenge such assertions to declare them false. There is the metaphorical and the mythic to be considered.

In the northern hemisphere, especially in the more northerly regions, December has been a time to mark the dying of the old year around the winter solstice, and the rebirth of hope and the new year. Christendom simply appropriated such festivities.

The annual fuss in the media over some hapless local authority opting to call its celebrations a “Winter Festival” rather than Christmas is actually misplaced: such a council is actually recognising a venerable truth. This is what has been celebrated in a variety of forms over thousands of years.

An advantage of a “Winter Festival” is no one is excluded; those of all religions and none can participate and enjoy proceedings without having to compromise their own beliefs or, worse, pretend to subscribe to the prevailing orthodoxy.

Thomas Paine in his “Age of Reason” wrote, “Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.” How many participate in church carol services and yet have little or nothing to do with Christianity for the rest of the year?

Much of what constitutes the Christmas nativity story can be found in a variety of other religions and cultures. Visitation by celestial beings (angels), miraculous birth, the appearance of a God-King on earth who will ultimately be killed and then reborn (resurrected), the bringing of gifts by the humble and the highborn, an occasion marked astrologically.

Gospel writers were not historians, they were charged with propagating an idea. It was the custom of the time to achieve this by including apparently biographical details that were in fact traditional memes indicating the special nature of the person being written about.

Such memes predate Christianity by thousands of years repeatedly reappearing dressed in the guise of the prevailing culture. This is no different to how our society has adapted Christmas to include Santa Claus and fir trees, neither of which appear in the New Testament accounts.

Sceptics occasionally compare God and Santa Claus: a comforting idea, but not real. This is to confuse an image with the essence. Santa Claus is an idea, or a bundle of ideas, personified. Children identify with the personification, but as they mature they develop a more sophisticated appreciation of the “spirit” of Christmas.

Similarly, God has, historically, been presented as a figure in tangible form, but this is reductive, no more than an idealised extension of a human being. Deists understand any meaningful use of the word God is in the way of the “spirit” of creation.

The use of “” around the spirit is to denote that it is a problematic word and could be taken to indicate a supernatural association. This is not the case: the usage is more analogous to games being played in the correct SPIRIT, that is, sportingly.

Christmas can be a celebration of the miraculous, the natural miracle, that is, of a coherent universe giving birth to sentient life with reason enough to appreciate and even to come to some understanding of it.

The essence of the nativity is that a baby is created spontaneously, in that no actual cause and effect conception was involved, rather in the way the universe appeared from not-being, a void made pregnant with potential. As Deists cite God as the source of the latter, they can relate to the former as a personification of the process.

So, sing the carols, attend the school nativity plays and know that, while they may not be factual they do contain truth in the way art does.

And behind the Christian façade, and that of other religions, there is an underlying point of agreement, belief in God. Potentially, Deism can reach out to people of all the varying faiths and identify the principle that unites, rather than divides, them. Look beyond the bible and learn to read the natural gospel of creation.

Deism may have been born small, but wise men, and women, seek out this lone star shining through the darkness of superstition and dogma, bringing the gift of their reason. The flock desert the shepherds who’ve kept them penned for centuries and find their way individually to God.

Happy Christmas from Deism.

Scouting For God

The Scout movement is contemplating changing its oath. Presently, the prospective recruit makes a promise along the lines to do his or her best for the Queen, and for God. It seems this may be discouraging some potential members.

In an increasingly secular society a growing number of young people profess disbelief in God and uphold no religion. Accommodation has already been made for those of non-Christian faiths, so the logical step is to actively include those of no faith.

Enforced allegiance is, of course, no faith at all, so even if a pedantic adherence to the traditional oath were preserved it would not create a single new young believer. Any non-believer desperate to join could simply mouth meaningless words, an encouragement to dishonesty.

Deists understand that God does not require oaths of allegiance or any particular recognition. The Divine is not a person partial to praise, dispensing favours on favourites while wreaking terrible vengeance on those in disfavour.

By way of a thought experiment, consider two people who both step into the path of a speeding train. One is a thorough going sceptic who dismisses God out of hand, the other a dutiful Christian who lives a life of faith.

In this world it is certain each would be killed, faith or the lack of it having no bearing on the physics involved. However, in a world where God absolutely protects and rewards faithful followers, the atheist is still virtually obliterated while the Christian walks away uninjured.

For this to occur all the known laws of physics, and biology for that matter, would have to be utterly compromised if not abolished. The whole of creation would become a series of unpredictable, random acts or so predetermined as to make any exercise of choice or responsibility impossible.

Deists most certainly do not promote such nonsense, even in its lesser form of prayers intended to persuade God to grant favours amounting to localised suspensions of known scientific laws.

It is because creation operates according to discernable laws, and can be understood rationally, Deists posit God as the overarching source or creator. That there is such a universe is the only “sacred text” Deists require for their theology.

Whether God is aware of human beings as individuals or a population is a moot point. The evolutionary process that produced Homo sapiens would fill the niche left if people became extinct. We are of God, but so would be a virus bringing about the termination of our species.

The miracle is the existence of life and the subsequent development of consciousness to the point where products of the universe, human beings, are instrumental in the universe coming to an awareness and understanding of itself.

Perhaps the wisest notion in the Hebrew bible is the injunction not to make graven images of God. All attempts to do so result in producing some version of ourselves. God responsible for the whole of creation is so far beyond human comprehension that even abstraction cannot possibly represent the Divine.

The God of the Scouts’ oath is a graven God, a human creation rather than the other way around. As such, a graven image is disposable when no longer required. Scouts who develop a sense of wonder by direct experience of nature might well come to a sense of the Divine, even if they resolutely choose not to use such a word as God.

There are many Deists who do not realise they are. They are members of all religions and none, but they have in common recognition, however vague, of a sense of purpose, a pattern, an inkling creation is more than chance random accidents, while not conforming to traditional religious dogmas either.

Any organisation charged with developing the sensibilities of youth need to shed any impediments to that mission. The Scout movement in opening young minds to possibilities will nurture adults who’ll come to terms with creation in their own ways.

Deists are confident the Deus, God or whatever, can be freely appreciated by open-minded adults whatever language they choose to express this fundamental concept. As the Scouts’ motto insists, “Be Prepared” to experience nature and use reason to discern the divine therein.

God and Compost

Recently I constructed a compost bin. Not some pre-formed plastic number from a garden centre, but, in the spirit of recycling, using otherwise discarded lengths of timber. It turned out, if not beautiful, at least functional.
The timber was not intended for this purpose being essentially the frame and laths of an old wooden bed combined with frames from dilapidated shelving units. The whole lot had lain tied in bundles for weeks and might easily have become part of a 5th November bonfire.
However, the need to replace an ad hoc compost pile that was spilling uncontrollably became pressing. With saw, hammer and nails the old bed and shelving became the new compost bin.
This is a product of human purpose and endeavour linked with happenstance, the fortuitous availability of the raw materials. The bin is not the result of pure chance and accident, neither is it a precise component of a carefully drawn plan.
Also, that bin exists because of human being. For hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, humans have developed tools, techniques and know-how that may well have begun with sharpened sticks and has progressed Mar’s rovers.
The timber for the bin was purposely grown, harvested and fashioned for other purposes, functions once served enabled the use of the materials to be redirected. Similarly, iron ore was mined smelted and subjected consciously to processes resulting in hammer and nails.
The builder was able to call upon skills developed over millennia to bring the required elements together with a purpose. As soon as the last nail was driven home and the first consignment of peelings deposited thoughts turned to spring next year and using the resulting compost in the garden.
Such is human being: not as a single person, but the collective of every human there’s been, is now and ever shall be. Similarly, divine being, often referred to by such a simple word as God, does not mean some single entity, but the whole dynamic making creation possible, whether a single atom or whole galaxies.
Like all analogies, comparing human being with divine being has severe limitations; fundamentally that human being is a part of divine being which is so much greater it stands beyond direct human comprehension.
Yet the analogy does allow for an indication that just as human being has progressed purposefully, even incorporating chance and accidents into that progress, so divine being on, and perhaps beyond, the cosmic scale, acts in ways that to human eyes appears purposeful.
All of this is stated in human terms, how could it be otherwise? This is the basic difficulty with considering God because whatever is said or written must always be inadequate. How would we expect a fly to describe the latest computer software?
There are undoubtedly those who’d say this whole premise is a load of compost. If that’s all it is maybe it’ll at least fertilise a growth in thinking. Anyway, this is a personal reflection not a rebuttal of anyone else’s view.
However, my rough and ready compost bin is as much evidence of human being as the finest art or scientific discoveries. Nature, the universe and our conscious appreciation of it is the best indication of divine being, God.

Bells, Smells and Life Eternal

Bells and smells! This, like “happy clappy”, is a pithy, if somewhat flippant, description of a certain sort of church service: Anglo-catholic rather than evangelical. It was certainly true for the memorial commemoration for those who’d died during the previous twelve months.

For someone not used to such proceedings there was a moment of alarm when smoke began billowing from a side chapel. Was the Devil making a surprise appearance or could it be the church was on fire? Neither as it turned out, it was merely the thurible being stoked up.

The service was solemn and formal, the hymns sung as tuneless dirges punctuated by coughs as the incense smoke caught in throats as it was wafted over sacred texts and in the general direction of the congregation. Then there was the homily.

It wasn’t a sermon as such, just a casual verbal digression around the theme of saying goodbye. Delivered without notes, it was well constructed and dealt poignantly with those significant goodbyes signalling fundamental changes in people’s lives.

Death was, of course, the final goodbye. Or was it? The priest conjured an image of all “who’ve gone before” standing decorously around Heaven in a state of bliss praising God and waiting for the rest of us to join them. Perhaps poppy essence was one of the incense herbs.

Atheists often claim that fear of death and personal extinction is the root from which religion grew, and continues to grow. Plausible, except the history of thinking on the possibility of life after death hasn’t always been so encouraging as to merit taking solace from it.

In the ancient world death was vaguely survived in the form of shades, barely being at all. Achilles is cited after his death on the battlefields of Illium as hankering after the drudgery of a peasant’s existence in life rather than the status of a prince in Hades.

While Christianity posited Heaven, the post mortem destination of most people, as sinners, was hell. The prospect of an eternity subjected to the vilest tortures inflicted constantly by pitiless devils was none too encouraging.

Stoicism was, in many ways, a precursor of Deism in that it favoured the use of reason, not superstition. MarcusAurelius, the Stoic Roman Emperor, thought life after death a possibility, though if there wasn’t it didn’t matter. Either way, death was inevitable and a natural phenomenon which it was pointless to fear.

While there are things that last for eons, everything is finite. However, every last constituent particle is recycled, not a single one “dies”, that is, goes out of existence. The universe is a process of ceaseless change that may itself be finite or infinite: whatever the speculation, no one really knows.

Eternal life is beyond comprehension. There again, so is God. For Deists there does not need to be a reward for what they advocate. If it could be absolutely proven that death is indeed final it would not invalidate the concept of God as each individual life in itself is an integral part of the creative process.

That there is a discernable process, and that it is dynamic, with destruction and creation being complimentary aspects, governed by identifiable laws is what leads Deists to posit God as the source. No anthropomorphic God dispensing privileges to humanity, but something way beyond limited human definitions.

Whether this entails the continuing employment of conscious experience developed in the course of a life has to be an open question. If life flows through a person as electricity flows through a light bulb, then as that current continues after the bulb has burnt out, so might the current of life continue.

Whatever the final consequence of death, a person remains significant to those who knew him or her. So when the surviving partner wishes to attend a service of commemoration it is incumbent on others to respect such a wish.

While dismissing any supposed supernatural properties, rituals can be a positive aspect of the drama marking an occasion. The bread and wine of the Eucharist does not, of course, become the body and blood of a saviour. But, as a stylised shared meal, taken in spiritual circumstances, such an act can have significance.

A Deist may choose meditation, personal or communal, a poem or piece of music or simply contemplate creation with awe and wonder rather than clouds of smells and clangour of bells.

Yet in the highest of high-church ceremonies a Deist can recognise the significance of a shared fundamental, God. Life, however brief or extensive, is a repudiation of notion that creation is pointless and meaningless. Otherwise, why bother to celebrate it at all?

Reconciled Man

When Boney sent his warriors
To serve as French conquistadors
Spreading the creed of Liberty
And thereby set all Europe free
To proclaim him their emperor,
He caused Iberia to stir.
In answer to his country’s call,
Volunteered Cayetano Ripoll,
Who, born beneath a questing star,
Pursued through the Peninsular
The right of Spain, as a nation,
To true self determination,
And would have died to free his lands,
But fell instead into the hands
Of those he thought his enemies.
What dreadful fate would it then please
His foes to inflict upon one
Who had defied them? Death upon
The guillotine? A firing squad?
Or some such to send him to God?
Indeed they sentenced him to die,
And he would swing from gallows high,
Yet while kept in captivity
French thought to set Cayetano free,
He saw what had long been concealed,
A revelation that revealed
Religion’s actual mission
Was to maintain superstition,
Thereby preserving Church and Pope
As sole arbiters of the hope
Of salvation. This subterfuge
Promoted a God as a huge,
Vindictive, very earth-bound king,
Who sacrificed his son to bring
Redemption to daughters of Eve,
Sons of Adam, who must believe
Every gospel word, or be damned!
Such a feudal demiurge, rammed
Into the consciousness of man
For centuries, at last began
To loose its grip as humankind,
Began to seek what it could find
On its own behalf. Sun displaced
The earth, as once fixed spheres chased
Through the heavens, each along
A predictable path. Past wrong
Notions were being exposed by minds
Trusting the evidence of finds
And observations, not the wraith
Of insubstantial, gullible faith.
Nature known, season by season,
Divine scheme exposed by Reason
To anyone with eyes to see
That God is greater than can be
Set in scripture. The unfolding
Conception; moulding, remoulding,
Never a moment still, a flux
More wonderful than sacred books
Can account for: the human hand
Can’t write what it doesn’t understand
Entirely. Yet science can show
What’s possible for Man to know,
And this inform the open mind
That always there is more to find.
If not seduced by arrogance
Claiming everything’s naught but chance
And therefore things are as they seem
Which must mean Man alone’s supreme.
Behind creation so immense
There is a greater competence:
From the theist and atheist
Emerges enlightened deist.
Finally, when the conflict ceased,
Cayetano Ripoll was released,
Returning from the martial schism
A teacher teaching deism
To eager students. What he taught
Caught the spirit of modern thought,
Yet by those things his pupils learned
It was feared the Church would be spurned,
Authority challenged, a crime
That brought from a barbaric time
Defenders of the faith whose zeal
Alone was enough to reveal
Them as tyrants, those who aspire,
In the name of their Messiah,
To simply to kill one and all
Who dared disagree. Thus Ripoll,
For being openly estranged
From the church, found himself arraigned
By the Spanish Inquisition.
Who’d expect such an imposition
In the new age of industry?
And the foregone verdict? Guilty,
Of course, of heresy, no less,
A crime he refused to confess:
Because he couldn’t embrace a lie,
Cayetano Ripoll had to die.
The craven state for which he’d fought,
Had by Church’s favour been bought,
Abjectly did as it was told
By bringing on to the scaffold
And honest man whose innocence
Was matched by dignity immense,
Whose last words spoken with élan,
“I die reconciled to God and Man.”
At least at the moment he fell
Cayetano had been spared the hell
Of the Inquisition’s real desire,
That he be properly purged by fire,
Burned at the stake for his treason,
Thereby incinerating Reason.
Dead, they stripped his church apparel,
Forced his body into a barrel
Painted with flames and this way bound
Buried, in unconsecrated ground.
Cayetano Ripoll for whom that earth
Would be, with any clay, of equal worth.

Man Eating Fish: Deism and Christianity

In the 1960s BBC Radio regularly broadcast a panel game called “My Word”. Each week the final round had two of the panellists, comedy scriptwriters Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, delivering humorous monologues.

A conceit regularly employed by Norden was a pseudo-psychological condition he termed Literalism. The supposed sufferer took everything literally, with no sense of the idiomatic: “Man eating fish” would be a sea-borne terror rather than some chap enjoying his battered cod.

Literalism describes the consideration of religious texts as being infallible revelations of God’s truth. The gospel truth claims to be the narrative and teachings of Jesus, events initially orally transmitted.

In what was for most people a pre-literate time, the verbal passing on of a message does not indicate inaccuracy. It does, though, leave scope for elaboration. As the tale is being told from the lectern of a modern evangelical church the story has been born again many, many times.

Whatever Jesus said he said it in Aramaic, subsequently was filtered through Greek, Latin, the King James Bible and a succession of updates and revisions. The effect can be illustrated simply: when referring to God Jesus used the term “Abba” rendered in English bibles as the patriarchal “Father”.

A more accurate transliteration of “Abba”, though, is the more familiar“Daddy”. So, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” is not quite so formal as, “Our Daddy,…”

The sense of a phrase is contingent on idiomatic understanding. So, Jesus walking on the water sounds miraculous. However, no one considers supernatural agency for Newcastle upon Tyne or Stoke on Trent as neither of them is actually afloat on its river.

The point here is not to explain, or explain away, but demonstrate that reading the bible requires a deep appreciation of the linguistic processes the text has been through. The claim it is the word of God begs the question, in which language and at what time?

Authors of the four gospels were neither historians nor biographers in the modern sense, but purveyors of religious ideas.

Miraculous birth attended by celestial beings, precocious wisdom at an early age, the feeding of many from very little, curing the sick and raising the dead, death, resurrection and assumption by heaven are all memes common to many religions, not just the Abrahamic.

The apparent dichotomy between religion and science is misleading: religion has more in common with the Arts and there are few who would claim scientific advance has proved music to be false. A great work of fiction contains truths and ideas that enhance the reader’s comprehension of the world, of creation. It is not a book of falsehoods.

There has recently been the discovery of a planet a quarter of the galaxy away basking in the radiance of four suns. This has startled astronomers contradicting previous thinking about destructive gravitational effects of such an arrangement. Yet science fiction writers have often envisaged worlds with a multiplicity of suns.

Just because something isn’t literally true doesn’t make it a lie. One factor common to all religions is the reality of the divine; even Buddhists who formally reject God or Gods come as close as makes no difference to deifying the Buddha.

In Socratic Athens there was debate as to whether there were actual gods on Olympus and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his Stoic Meditations raised the question as to the actual existence of gods. His conclusion was it didn’t matter; an individual’s responsibility was to live the good life anyway. Also he often opted for the less well-defined and definable Providence to indicate the divine principle.

Even the most ardent sceptical Darwinist’ insistence on natural selection alone poses a conundrum. Why does natural selection favour the favourable? Why isn’t the cosmos just a seething mass of contending forces incapable of creating anything?

The universe is intelligent and self aware because humans are an intelligence within the universe, aware not only of themselves but increasingly of the wider cosmos. How has humanity advanced? By naturally selecting in a conscious way what has favoured progress. It is hardly a leap to consider intelligence on a grander scale, beyond human limitations or comprehension.

Even if absolutely proven Jesus never existed, the gospels would still have a spiritual value. They would become parables, addressing the ineffable and a pervading sense of purpose within humanity.

A distressing and disastrous form of religious literalism concerns faith healing. On biblical pretexts parents deny children medical procedures in the belief that faith will be rewarded through divine intervention. Children suffer and die.

Humanity is blessed with God given reason, granting the miracle of medical science. Faith in reason enables the sick to seek and accept treatment with confidence. But healing is not just about surgery and medicine, love and attention aids and speeds recovery and in those tragic circumstances where there is no cure, then how much stronger love and attention need to be.

Born in the Enlightenment from which science emerged, Deism offers a religious perspective that does not contradict human progress and understanding. Religious cultures and traditions trying to remain fundamental bastions of revealed truth fall foul of unnecessary literalism.

Evolution is not just about the development of species; it also applies to ideas that, like everything else in the universe, are in constant flux. Christianity has patently changed through the two millennia of its existence and comes in a wide variety of forms.

How many Christians still subscribe unquestioningly to the fundamental literal “truth” of the Pauline version? A Deistic sensibility would mean the drama of its narrative and rituals could be preserved and dedicated to celebrating the universe, its nature and the God of reason whose conception it is.

Becoming a Christian Deist opens Christianity to new exploration and interpretation, just as it emerged from within Judaism. Man eating fish on the beach could be Jesus, preparing a fresh meal to share with the world.

Deism: An Overview

Deism, derived from Deus, the Latin word for God, is a natural religion. The existence of God is posited on rational grounds with no reference to revelation, sacred texts or religious authority.

This makes Deism very different from the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three are based on the notion of prophets receiving the Word of God and relaying it to the rest of humanity.

So, Deists…

• Reject the belief common to most religions that God is revealed through holy texts.
• Disagree with atheists who assert there is no God.
• Appeal to reason, that in the universe there is nothing that exists without a creator, therefore the cosmos, logically, will have a creator, that is God.
1. “God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon.” (Thomas Paine)
2. “…everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself…” which takes us “…to the belief of a first cause eternally existing…this first cause, man calls God.” (Thomas Paine)
3. “How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self replication capabilities and coded chemistry?” (Antony Flew, long-time atheist who became a Deist)

History of Deism

Originally, Deism was belief in a single deity as opposed to many Gods or no God(s). However, in the 17th century it came to refer to types of radical Christianity rejecting revelation, miracles and the infallibility of the bible.

Eventually, this led to a complete separation from Christianity, and today Deism is not associated with any established religion. As there is no Deist organisation of churches, priesthood or over-arching authority, it is not a religious movement in any traditional sense.

Deism emerged during what has become known as The Enlightenment, developing its ideas from the scientific advances of such as Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo et al. It was the employment of techniques used to study nature applied to religion.

Early Deists still considered the bible contained important truths, but it was not divinely inspired or literally true. They developed bible study as historical analysis rather than revealed truth.

One of those early Deists was Lord Herbert of Chedbury who listed 5 articles of English Deism in his book, “De Veritate” (1624)
• Belief in a single supreme God.
• Humanity has a duty to revere God.
• God will forgive sins following repentance.
• Worship linked with practical morality.
• Good works will be rewarded (evil punished) in life and after death.

Some leading Deists of the day were; Anthony Collins (1676-1729), Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), JJ Rousseau (1712-1778) and FMA de Voltaire (1694-1778).

Deism was particularly influential amongst leaders of both French and American revolutions. American Deists such as John Adams, Ethan Allen, Ben Franklin, James Madison, George Washington, along with English radical Thomas Paine, insisted on the principle of separation of church and state, a clause in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Deism Today

There are no fundamental creeds all deists subscribe to, indeed such would be anathema to Deism. However, there are some broad principles most Deists could accept as a starting point:
• All religious texts and creeds were/are created by humans.
• Deists look to nature as its “gospel” of reasoned creation (not creationism). Nature is not eternal, so it is reasonable to posit the existence of a Creator.
• This non-anthropomorphic Creator has/does not reveal the purpose of creation, so humans must make their own way in the world.
• Deism’s basic premise is that a pre-existing Prime Mover set the universal process going (wound it up or lit blue touch paper or “said” ‘Let there be light’) and allows it to evolve along its own path.
• Some Deists contend that God still occasionally intervenes in human affairs. Most, though, believe God is transcendent and does not listen to or answer prayers, nor interfere with nature through miracles.
• Inspiration can be drawn from traditional sources such as sacred texts as a repository of human thinking on religious themes.
• The universe operates under laws established at the outset by God.
• God does not have human form or feelings such as love, hate etc.
• Deists insist a practical system of morals/ethics can be developed through reason. There may well be an innate sense of right and wrong even if the way this finds expression evolves over time and is socially determined.
• Some Deists, while accepting God stands outside/beyond creation, use prayer and/or meditation to contemplate on and express their appreciation of God’s work, the universe.

Conclusion

Deism is not a fixed ideology; like the universe, it is subject to constant flux and variety. It is very aware that it is a product of human thought not divine inspiration and, therefore, not the ultimate truth which is probably beyond human conception. It cannot be proved to be correct, just as the existence of God can only be inferred not conclusively demonstrated. Deism does not stand in contradiction to science, but rather celebrates scientific discovery as further uncovering and making known the workings of divine creation.

Resource: Religious Tolerance.Org (See Blog Roll for link)

Religion and Science

The following article by Albert Einstein appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4. It has been reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 – 40. It also appears in Einstein’s book The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 – 28.
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions – fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.
The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer’s outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples’ lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events – provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.
It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

Article courtesy of they Celestial Lands Library!
http://celestiallands.org/library.htm

God and Providence

Deism emerged during the enlightenment of the eighteenth century, but that does not mean it was the formulation of a completely new set of ideas. Its core assertion, that there is a God, is as ancient as humanity’s consideration of such a notion.

The perennial problem in considering God is getting beyond the anthropomorphic. It seems a human tendency to portray the divine in the image of Man, especially so in the Abrahamic faith traditions.

However, there have been other ways of dealing with the concept. The Stoic school of philosophy was, religiously, a forerunner of Deism. Rather than a God known only through revelation recorded in scripture, Stoics identified what they termed Providence as the essence of creation.

God, for Stoics, consisted of Fire, or active energy, and Logos, reason. God’s presence in the universe could be deduced from Nature operating according to Laws, the result of Cosmic Reason or Providence. Providence ordered all things, even humanity whose freedom existed only within the context of cosmic necessity.

The Fire or active energy aspect of God is the vital principle from which everything in the universe emerges, is shaped, cycled and recycled. God, as vital force, moulds and directs passive matter into all the forms existing at any given moment, reshaping them for the next.

God is not a being outside the universe, drawing up plans and directing operations. Providence is the chain of cause and effect, itself part of creation it regulates and is subject to the immutable law of necessity. Rather than a proper noun, God is a verb, the doing of creation.

“Providence” comes from the Latin “providentia”, meaning foreknowledge and forethought. In this sense the universe is subject to intelligent design, but that intelligence or forethought is immanent within the universe, with design being the result.

This does not imply some celestial blueprint whereby the universe is plotted out in advance. Rather, it is dynamic design responding to the needs of the moment, always in a state of flux.

The question is often posed; if creation follows God’s plan, why are their glaring design faults and imperfections? However, if the universe was perfect it would have to be in stasis, there could be no change to perfection. A dynamic creation requires an element of chaos to be creative.

But, no matter how chaotic the world might appear the universal laws of physics (and biology and chemistry) continue to apply. The cosmos is not a place for arbitrary happenings even if it can be the realm of the unexpected.

There have always been those, like the Epicureans, who espoused the idea of the world being subject to blind fate, just as now evolution is often posited as being purposeless. The Stoics did not deny the existence of a controlling power, just as Deists fully accept evolution, but insisted it was a manifestation of divine will, the power of Providence.

For Stoics, and Deists, everything there is in Nature has a reason. Throughout all creation there is an active “force” or “element” (insert your own word or phrase) that is co-extensive with matter everywhere.

Every manifestation of the individual is but a temporary arrangement that must decay and be subsumed by the whole, but not one single particle is lost. All is to be continually shaped and reshaped according to those laws science has identified.

As Providence acts out of necessity not favour, it follows no one and nothing occupies a divinely privileged position. The Stoic ethic insisted there is no difference between people of various nationalities, or men and women. Providence is truly universal: every individual being a member of “one body partaking in reason.”

When it came to religious practice Stoics did not concoct elaborate ceremonies or rituals. Rather they had a preference for prayer (meditation/contemplation), self-examination and praise. And by praise was meant the appreciation of the wonder of creation. Providence worshipped in the temple of the heart.

Deists likewise do not create liturgies nor build temples. The possibility of God, or Deus, or Providence arises from the experience of individual Deists of Nature. This is not a romantic view, nature “red in tooth and claw” is as apparent to them as a beautiful tranquil sunset.

There is a recognition that seeing in nature the malign as well as the benign arises from a subjective view, while the universe does not operate according to good and evil, but by objective laws.

God is not the fulfiller of human wishes: if Man can be assigned any privilege it is having been granted the ability to play a consciously active role in shaping creation to some extent. This is achieved not through random actions, but intelligent human design.

To deny such a design feature is absent from creation in general is a somewhat arrogant assertion that humans alone somehow transcend an otherwise purposeless and pointless universe.

The concept of Providence is useful as a reminder not to view the divine as being human shaped. God is ineffable because language is necessarily limited to human concepts. Unless Man was the equal of the divine it cannot be otherwise.