It is human nature to want other people to agree with your opinions because when they do, it strengthens your conviction that you are correct. You will often see endorsements from famous people for a particular philosophy, as though you are in good company. Nowhere is this more evident than in discussing religion. For example, atheists like to quote Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding fathers, saying that,
“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”
as though he was one of them. But he was not. In his autobiography, written over decades and published posthumously in 1791, a year after his death, he said,
“I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity, that He made the world, and governed it by his providence; that the most acceptable service of God was doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter.”
Clearly, he was a man of faith in God, yet his particular brand of faith was Deism. Exactly what is Deism and does it agree with what the Bible says about God?
Deism was a popular theology among educated people until the end of the eighteen century. Its roots were in the Age of Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century, primarily in France and Britain. It is debatable if Deism was suitably enlightening since its main tenet was rejection of knowledge about God that came by revelation. That is to say, to a Deist, the Bible wasn’t divinely inspired so he denies the Bible’s claim to the contrary. But this constraint appealed to men and women who had an interest in spiritual things but disdained divisions within Christendom over how to interpret the Bible. With the rise of reason, or rational thinking, and coincident development of the scientific method at the end of the sixteenth century, philosophers were looking for a way to extract what could be known about God without debate. They looked at the world around them, concluded there must be a Creator God, and from this premise, ‘natural theology’ was born, the study of truths revealed by reason.
Educated people, for the most part, realize that a complex problem is often solved by starting with basic or fundamental facts which form the foundation for the problem. From these facts concise conclusions can be drawn which depend only on them. These conclusions are then themselves, building blocks toward an answer to the original complexity. This practice, reminiscent of the Socratic method developed four centuries before the incarnation of the Christ, formed the basis for the Deist’s view of God. Ironically, this view would reject the incarnation because it would be a miracle that defied the laws of nature set in motion by the Creator. You see, a dichotomy existed in the mind of a Deist between the reliability of nature and its disruption by the supernatural. Often this conflict would result in the idea that God set his creation in motion and then left it to run on its own. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t of this mindset, however, because he was a Deist who acknowledged divine providence, that is, God being involved in the affairs of man.
Today, an outcropping of Deism would be the Unitarian movement. Thomas Jefferson, who is also erroneously claimed by atheists, was a self-proclaimed Unitarian. Following their dogma, he was so convinced the supernatural doesn’t happen, that he actually edited the Bible to remove all miracles surrounding the life of Christ. Yet he too, was unwilling to eliminate divine providence from the spiritual equation. Whether Deist or Unitarian, when a man tries to encompass God with only his reasoning, he is always going to fall short and confusion will ensue.
Men need to realize that a god would can speak the universe into existence is independent of that universe, being its antecedent. Granted, the universe is all there is in the physical world but it is encompassed by the spirit world, where God has existed before time was created. This is why the Bible can say that God is everywhere and is the ‘I AM’, having always existed. If you try to explain that rationally, you will fail.
So, can any religious movement survive without revelation from its God? Moreover, can any man know God personally without God revealing his divine nature? These are fundamental questions which make Deism and its Unitarian outcropping untenable. If reasoning is the basis for these beliefs and God is unknowable without revelation, then the Deist’s understanding is at best, a well-founded suspicion.
In the world today, there are many people who share the dichotomy of miracles versus natural law without bearing the label of a Deist or Unitarian. Yet their understanding of spiritual life is just as confusing. If and when people are willing to think about the origin of the world and their own existence, they are met with conflicting ideas. To resolve these conflicts, a look at some basic questions is helpful: How can anything exist without a beginning and how can a beginning happen without an originator? And how can you learn anything about an originator without his revelation to you? Like Socrates, let these fundamental questions point to their complex conclusion— there is a God who has revealed himself through nature and if you desire to know more about him, you must use a revelation like the Bible as your source. There is no other viable method because our abilities of detection are limited to the physical world. As a corollary, it is pointless to try finding out more about God without his help. That is why the Bible encourages those who seek God beyond his natural revelation, to read its pages and develop their communication skills with him.
