Deism: Cultural And Personal
Gateway To Atheism?
[unsigned]

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From: "Positive Atheism"
To: [unsigned]
Subject: Web_Guide
Date: September 19, 2001

We've had the World Union of Deists <www.deism.com> on the list almost since the beginning. It's also listed in the Thomas Paine Historical Index (and has been part of it since the whole Historical section was a single file). I just placed the World Church of Deism <www.deism.org> on there as well. Since it's not strictly atheism, it has lived in the "And" section until I could think of an adequate one-word title to replace the "Atheism" title. But I have been sneaking other theistic sites into that section anticipating a new title, so I just put both in the main "Atheism" index as well.

We have the largest collection of Thomas Paine biographies and appreciations that I know of, plus the largest collection of his quotations in the form of Joseph Lewis's Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine, which I hand-typed from the original edition (and that means it's been up for a long time because it wasn't too long after I started this before I had enough money to buy a scanner). Thomas Paine is one of my favorite people of all time; he makes a most compelling case for Deism as well as an entirely available (understandable) description of that system. I would go so far as to say that Deism is better represented on our web site than it is almost anywhere else. Surely we're within the top ten places to learn about Deism as long as Thomas Paine is recognized as one of the greater authorities on Deism.

Positive Atheism Magazine is not anti-religion. We discourage gratuitous and indiscriminate denunciations of religion itself, preferring instead to reserve our vitriol for those expressions of religion which are intrusive, exploitative, or dangerous. Deism, as you can see from the above, has long been on our list of benign religions, being one of the healthier expressions of religion we have encountered. I will discuss why I think Deism is so utterly lacking in popularity today.

Deism was very popular during the times of the American Revolution. Surely the majority of the U.S. Presidents from Washington through Lincoln were Deists even if they belonged to a specific Christian denomination besides. Humankind's inhumanity to humankind spoke strongly against the notion of a God who takes in interest in the current goings on within our family. Particularly discredited was the idea that God would have anything to say to us in the form of a Revelation or Scripture.

So the idea that God can be found in Nature or that we can learn about God through the study of Nature obtained great favor. The most compelling argument for the existence of God that we've ever seen was the Argument from Design, and Deism was probably more entirely dependent upon this argument than any other system. Most Deists of this era also seemed to be unwilling to abandon the presupposition that the God of Deism was a good God.

But as we learned more and more Nature, it became increasingly clear that Whoever designed her was anything but benevolent. Nature is fiercely cannibalistic and horrendously wasteful; many things about her, particularly when it comes to life but also considering the sheer size of the Universe, the vast amounts of empty space compared to how little matter there really is, seemed to many as utterly absurd. A film which vividly describes this view of God is Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, circa 1968. In it, the "hero" (who died before the film begins) found God in the Galapagos Islands. He watched the tortoise struggle to lay her eggs in the sand and then slowly creep, almost dead from exhaustion, back to sea. On the day that the eggs hatched, the local predatory birds knew that it was feast time, and they all gathered from miles around and feasted upon the young hatchlings, leaving literally two or three to try to survive the brutal sea. This was God Who made this!

The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species worked from the other end, making atheism "an intellectually viable position" (as Richard Dawkins puts it in his book, The Blind Watchmaker). Until Darwin and his colleagues proposed natural selection as an explanation for apparent design, the Argument from Design was just way too compelling. This is one of two reasons why you'll find very few outright atheists before 1859 (the other being the systematic persecution, over the course of fifteen centuries in Europe, of anybody who defended atheism). But Deism was very convenient for a long time because we could say "God" and most people would think they knew Who we were talking about -- and that was usually fine with us!

After Deism rolled over and pretty much breathed its last, the English called themselves "secularists" or "atheists" and the Americans tended to prefer the term "agnostic." I suggest that all were pretty much the same thing: the English secularists described atheism as the simple absence of a god belief, such as what a baby has before it develops the cognitive powers to formulate a god belief. The most popular of the American Agnostics was Robert Green Ingersoll, who more closely resembled the common (but not atheistic) definition of an "atheist" than even the British atheists did: Ingersoll repeatedly declares the nonexistence of God. Agnosticism later became a sort of middle ground between dogmatic theism and dogmatic atheism. We side with the nineteenth century British secularists in suggesting that neither theism nor atheism are dogmatic enough to warrant there being a third "middle ground" choice: both views cover a rainbow of possibilities from dogmatic assurance to barely cognizant.

After Darwin disposed with the Argument from Design, the origin of the Universe still presented a formidable problem for atheists. About a hundred years ago, we knew enough about physics to realize that the laws of entropy demanded that the Universe lose entropy over the course of time. Thus, God was popularly posited as the explanation for why we still see order in the Universe rather than pure chaos: God was intervening in the course of natural physical law and creating this order in the form of living things. Then, several astronomers ending with Edwin Hubble determined that the Universe is constantly expanding. This meant that with an expanding Universe, there remains room for tiny pockets of order to exist. Once more, God gets sent back to the Cosmic Unemployment Line, without a job to do and lacking yet another purpose in the eyes of humankind.

More recently it has been shown several different ways that the amount of matter and energy in the Universe currently equals approximately zero. Since matter and energy are the same thing (E=mc^2), zero doesn't have to come from anywhere. That which is commonly seen as "matter," being the equivalent of rest energy, came from gravitational energy during the expansion in the early universe. It all started from nothing and since it's still zero, it didn't need to "come" "from" anywhere or anything. God is spotted perusing the "Help Wanted" section while sipping a caffé latte at Starbucks!

Most recently, neurologists such as Andrew Newberg showed that the very mystical experience of the sages of old (and today) has a physical, biological explanation. A portion of the brain which Newberg calls the "object orientation area" (OOA) tells the organism where it is in relation to its environment and also distinguishes for that organism itself from everything else (the "self-not self" dichotomy). To train oneself how to shut off input to this ordinarily busy section (even while sleeping) would be quite a show: this would probably feel as if one had become "at one" with all things (being unable to distinguish between self and not self). It would be as if one had touched all points in time and space simultaneously (being unable to orient oneself within the time-space continuum of one's environment). When Dr. Newberg studied the brain activities of mystics while they meditated and nuns while they prayed, this very center of the brain displayed a drastic loss of activity.

And guess what? The subjects returned from their trances with descriptions of an experience where they lost all sense of Self and became "One" with everything around them, losing touch even with space, location, and even time! This they called "God"; this they called "Ultimate Reality" (more real, say many, than even the waking experience). But wait a minute! This is what happens when the OOA center loses all sensory input! Are you telling me that God just got handed the ultimate Pink Slip? This experience has always been among the most precious and intimate assurances that a God not only exists but actually communes with His creation -- a "proof" that most atheists won't even touch, the personal religious experience!

Nevertheless, were I to get religion, I would probably become a pantheist of the Spinoza variety. Deism is tempting, but I just don't see any God Who is not part of physical reality having created physical reality. If I'm going to use a term such as God, I would prefer to think of the Universe itself as the Ultimate Reality (or, if it exists and if we can find a way to verify its existence, the "super-universe" speculated by some forms of Inflationary Cosmology). I can at least verify the existence of the Universe. My favorite thought along those lines comes from Carl Sagan:

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Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

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I could be comfortable with this thinking as either an atheist, a pantheist, or even a Deist, but I don't see a theist, someone believing in a personal Creator, a "Him," having an easy time with this statement. Deism played an extremely important part in helping us coax ourselves culturally over from straight-up theism. Deism took us through the times when we were still required by "proper society" to admit belief in "God" (but that was usually all we were asked). She carried us on to the time when it became intellectually satisfying to take that ultimate leap and accept outright atheism, or, at most, Spinoza's pantheism (which today comprises the bulk of natural religion). Unfortunately, as pivotal as was Deism's role both in the history of atheism and in the history of Europe and America, Deism is, for the most part, pretty much passé. Very few people adhere to deism today. Most who do are either private individuals or have checked "Deism" as their option at the local Unitarian Universalist Church.

Of all the different religions out there (more than a few of them extremely wacky, to be sure), I wonder why there's little if any room for Deism? Considering the important accomplishments of the historical figures who were Deists, we could (and have and do) do a lot worse.

Cliff Walker
Positive Atheism Magazine
Six years of service to
    people with no reason to believe

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From: "Positive Atheism"
To: [unsigned]
Subject: Web_Guide
Date: September 19, 2001

Aye, it's not that bad! We're all in this together and everybody is always in a constant state of learning -- that is, barely knowing anything. I hope I didn't come off as a know-it-all, 'cause I just wanted to explore the history of Deism for a few moments, and this was as good of an excuse as any to get it all down in one spot. Thanks for the opportunity to do this and to learn a few things about Deism that I previously did not know.
 

I highly recommend going with the "weak" definition of the word atheism for a number of reasons. The "weak" or "negative" sense is defended aptly in a piece by George H. Smith called Defining Atheism. Basically, atheism itself is the absence of a god belief, the lack of theism. As such, atheism does not necessarily assert that no gods exist. By applying this to my personal theism, I fall short of asserting that gods do not exist, and simply throw it back into the theist's lap by saying, "I have yet to encounter a god-claim that holds water."

Our understanding of what it means and how it's used (and just how far to take it) is discussed in our FAQ piece called "Introduction To Activistic Atheism" (see the section titled "What Is Atheism?" which [in the current revision] takes up the entire first file).

It is a little complex the way I write it up there, so just remember that I am distinguishing between "weak" and "strong" in two different contexts: I recommend defining atheism as a whole (overall and big picture) always in terms of "weak" atheism but I encourage individual atheists to be either "weak" or "strong" in their own outlooks depending on their personal viewpoint. The former is the definition of the word atheism (I say, let it be "weak") and the latter refers to an individual's personal response to god claims (I say, let the individual decide).
 

I capitalize the personal pronouns for a number of reasons, not the least of which is clarity: I wish for people to understand what I am writing, and if there's an excuse for capitalizing one "Him" over a plethora of pronouns in a sentence, then it's easier for the reader to keep track of which "him" I'm talking about. Secondly, I do this in protest to so many atheistic writers (if you'd call them "writers") who deliberately lowercase the proper nouns "God," "Jesus," and "Bible" solely out of disrespect for theists. I have removed almost every occurrence of "xian" from Forum letters for the same reason (leaving two or three instances because the context demanded it). Thirdly, part of me thinks it's comedic that they ever did this to begin with (quit flattering yourselves, you guys!), so I remind myself and our readers that theists, at one time, thought so highly of themselves as to capitalize even the personal pronouns referring to deity. Finally, another part of me thinks it's quaint and kinda romantic. You'll notice that I inject quite a few old-timey things into my writings.

Cliff Walker
Positive Atheism Magazine
Six years of service to
    people with no reason to believe

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