In a society where God is all too readily dismissed, especially by the cognoscenti (actual and aspiring), it has become almost a truism that secularism is in the process of finally vanquishing religion. The reaction of religious fundamentalists merely reinforces the notion of believers being little more than deluded or fanatics.
Those who style themselves deists may well be regarded as agnostics or even atheists who cannot quite bring themselves to let go of childhood or childish beliefs. Alternatively, they are accused by theists of believing in a God so remote from and inactive in creation as, to all intents and purposes, be non-existent.
Unsurprisingly, deists take a different view. Rather than an infantile clinging onto an outmode concept, the complexity and order they see in nature is indicative of the divine.
It has been said that to view the universe as a chance event, or series of chance events, is like exploding a bomb in a scrap yard, blowing junk randomly into the air and having it fall as a ready to fly jumbo jet.
Sitting in an aircraft at 40,000 feet reflect how it is we got there. That first Wright brothers’ flight, the string and paper bi and tri planes, the advances in aircraft building through two world wars and the eventual development of the jet engine.
Before all that there were hot air balloons and men in giant kites: the painful, often fatal attempts to leap from tall towers with wing contrivances proving ineffective. There is still silent film footage of bicycles also fitted with wings that never got off the ground.
Looking down on the earth so distant below the one thought that doesn’t occur is; I’m up here purely by accident. Indeed, at that height accidents are the least welcome episodes. Today’s aeroplanes are the product of a process of evolution during which failed versions didn’t survive, while each success contributed to the development of the next stage.
All this was achieved through a conscious process: if the history of flight was utterly unknown the most reasonable assumption on coming upon an aeroplane would be that it was the product of meaningful development, not just a fortunate accident.
Of course, this is flawed analogy, as all analogies are, and is not meant as a literal comparison with the development of the universe. The developers of aircraft are known directly and the process is wholly comprehensible to the human mind.
Not so creation, but there again that is on a scale human thinking has yet to fully grasp and may never do so. However, science has made tangible both the cosmic and sub-atomic realms of the universe, and has clearly identified evolution as the mode of development.
That science is able to do this means creation is rational otherwise it would not be susceptible to reason. There is chaos at work, it seems to operate as the dynamic for change, but it operates within the physical laws governing the cosmos. Referring to the analogy above, there were undoubtedly many accidents and chance discoveries along the way and they contributed to the overall aero-development. Human reason became cognisant of, and educated by, them.
Deists do not believe in an anthropomorphic God: there isn’t some celestial design office in which an old chap with a long beard as white as his gown, drawing up intricate plans for how His creation will be. God is ineffable: the creator/cause of what is, is not a person in any sense, of any gender.
The Roman Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, often referred in his Meditations to Providence or the Natural Cause without any attempt to define either.
Unlike theistic religions, deists do not cast humans as the very image of God, not does God dispense favours or even choose humanity as favourites. Deism has reverence for life’s creator, regards the vastness of the universe with awe and seeks ways to approach the source of all.
Humans may not be as important or central to creation as sometimes we tend to think. But that we are, and imbued with consciousness, which at the very least proves the universe is self aware as we are conscious of it as an integral part of it, indicates there is rather more to creation than what we presently know.
And as there is creation, so a creator, God far beyond our powers of definition, yet God we can aspire to contemplate.
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