r/deism

And what is Creator, in your opinion? Can it be a natural force? The laws of physics?

I've only just realised this but deism makes sense in regard to the problems of revealed theology. Why would an all loving and all intelligent God send down messengers and then hinge the salvation of their whole creation that they love so much on the words of human prophets who's words can be misunderstood and even twisted. It just sounds illogical and kinda stupid, I feel God has placed the foundations to live a fulfilling and good life in our hearts and it's completely up to us to find it. We can know and love God through so many more fulfilling ways than strict adherence to dogmatic scripture.

For me personally, I believe in Heaven after this life, and also possibly a Hell. But I believe if there's a god they understand eternal hell in the sense Christians or Muslims believe in is unjust. If there's a Hell, I believe it's likely meant as a kind of purgatory before certain souls can enter Heaven, with some serving longer and more severe sentances than others, though with a focus on rehabilitation rather than purely punishment.

Call it cringe but I believe that's the most logical outcome if whatever god there is had something planned for us after this life. What's your personal belief?

As a deist, do you believe that God is personal, has conscious will, is intelligent, and is a creator? Or do you deny those traits as anthropomorphisms? God is more like an impersonal force that does not “create” but the universe flows from God?

I recently started exploring philosophy on theism and atheism, and recently came up to conclusion that I’ll probably never become an atheist. My problem with atheism is, that it states that all our universe, life, and matter was caused by a pure accident. And even if it can be so, I found such an explanation be kinda weird, as if someone didn’t have an answer what the cause was, and just convinced themselves and others that there was no cause.

I don’t really know anything about God, and what he (it?) can be. But I’m sure for certain that such an organised, complex reality had a minimal chance of being created by accident.

So, I’m rather agnostic-deist. And I’m happy to join you here

If God can't interact with the world, how is that different from Atheism?

It seems like the arguments for contingency and related ones are compelling, and many atheist explanations are baseless or illogical. The 2 strongest (generally) arguments against theism are divine hiddenness and the problem of evil, which Deism doesn't have to deal with. So for someone who just wants an explanation while being agnostic to everything else, it seems like a reasonable endpoint.

I came across the concept recently of Universalism.

Is it possible for someone to be a Deist, and hold a Universalist view? I personally don't really see any contradiction in a supreme being creating the universe to run on natural laws, and then to be reconciled ultimately in the end with them after death.

That is, if I got the Universalist way of thinking correct.

I'm thinking of writing an essay, called something like "articles of modern deism". I may change the title later since it is more my personal views. It defines God and Deism, but also seems to explain the following:

• God does not take the form of creation. We cannot imagine God's form and God lacks human characteristics. God has no gender. (I use the traditionally gender-neutral pronoun "he", but "she" and "they" are also fine, obviously "it" is bad because it is inanimate and generally seen as disrespectful when applied to something animate).
• God is omnipotent and omniscient. God is logically above having human emotions - our anthropocentric view of everything causes many organized religions to fail to understand this.
• Organized religion is a result of the human zeitgeist trying to reconcile the fact that something clearly created all of this with the fact we can't typically perceive the divine through traditional senses like (sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing). They try to explain the inexplicable through dogma and legend.
• Since God created the universe, life is an indirect creation of God as well. As such, we can do our best to respect this life in all of its forms. However, by observation of the natural world, it is evident that personal health and the survival of one's self and ones species should always come as a top priority. Essentially, there is a loose "do as little harm (as feasible)" doctrine. E.g., killing animals for meat is fine because it's good for one's health. But we should try to be as humane as possible.
• Just because we won't be struck down by lightning for doing so doesn't mean we should disrespect God. He created us, after all.
• We need to recognize that there are universal human morals (I'll list out what they are and why), we do not need God to police us in order to understand this.
• The omnipotent force outside our physical reality is not subject to the entropy of that physical reality.

Also, I'll include:

• How deism explains the problem of suffering
• How we can tell prayer is useless ("God answers in his time, and sometimes doesn't answer at all in a way you wanted" means that you're selectively looking for evidence that it worked.
• Evidence for the existence of God from both our current scientific understanding and the observation of the natural world (I won't list it out here because there's so much of it)
• Evidence against the dominant Abrahamic religions, such as "Why would God, an omnipotent force who could literally speak to humans "from the heavens", only communicated through prophets, in very small regions of the Levant? Why wouldn't God want all of us to know about Him and make the choice to believe or not to?
• Evidence that revelation isn't really from the divine (again, too much to include here)
• It may be easy to assume that monotheism is an idea originating in the Levant (the OG one Atenism, as well as Judaism, Christianity, Islam all originate in or around the Levant). But actually, the idea was present in several other places. Several pre-contact native American groups, Sikhs from India, and ancient China also practiced a form of monotheism, albeit theologically different from Abrahamic religions. Many societies realized that monotheism makes the most sense.

Sorry, I tried to keep it brief. Is there anything else I should add?

Edit: forgot the one of the most important ones, "why doesn't God intervene and why are we selfish and anthropocentric enough to think that He does?"

I now believe there seems like there is an intelligent creator. Or ot seems more likely than not.

Some of the motivations for me believing this are the contingency argument (and its stronger form the modal cosmological argument not to be confused with the modal ontological argument). The unmoved mover argument is also pretty good but not as decisive for me.

The main reason is four teleological / design arguments: the fine tuning argument, psychophysical harmony, nomological harmony and psychonomic harmony (by Joe Schmid). Specifically psychophysical and psychonomic. These arguments are extremely good. Even Richard Dawkins says that the fine tuning argument could rationally convince one to be a deist.

If you are not familiar with all the arguments I just said I would highly recommend looking them up. They are extremely good.

Anyway those are the main arguments for me that really move me.

I just can't be a traditional theist though who believes in an all good god because of the problem of evil especially natural evil such as tsunamis and the evolutionary history of suffering of animals. Free will does not explain this.

But I do believe in an intelligent designer. Agnostic Paul Draper argues that "aesthetic deism" which is a view of god which states that he is motivated by aesthetic beauty rather than moral goodness creates the world the way it is to be beautiful.

This just makes a lot of sense. The world seems largely indifferent to good and evil and pleasure and pain seem randomly dispersed and virtuous people don't necessarily end up better of than people with vices. I am a moral realist as well and I believe goodness has nothing to do with god because of the eurythpro dilemma.

Maybe "aesthetic" deism is wrong and god is not motivated by aesthetic requirements but he is motivated by something else.

Essentially I just think there is a lot of reasons to infer an intelligent designer of the world. It just is very intuitive based on how harmonious everything is. And I dont mean just on a biology level but on the level of physical laws (which make the biology inevitable) and psychophysical laws (there are so many reasons to believe consciousness is immaterial such as the hard problem of consciousness and I am far more confident that consciousness is immaterial than that deism is true).

Anyway I dont believe that the deist god would have to be evil. Just morally ambiguous and motivated by some other transcendental ideal.