On Deism

Readers of this blog have now become familiar with the views of Elihu Palmer (1764-1806) through the long series of quotes I've posted from his book, Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species. Palmer was an American deist and founder of the Deistical Society of New York and similar organizations.

As a deist, of course, he was no atheist. Nor was he an agnostic. He seemed quite certain that the universe had a creator. You'd think that a creator of the universe would have had to precede and exist apart from its creation--that it was supernatural--but deists rejected that idea. It has been suggested that since the word supernatural was a term of disparagement among deists, they must have believed that the deity was thoroughly natural, simply part of the system of cause and effect in which things necessarily happened because of the nature of the entities that exist. It's as if this unique natural being created what we know as the universe from itself. This the flavor of the deist writings not only of Palmer but also of Thomas Paine and Lysander Spooner, although deists were quite a diverse group with many disagreements, including over whether the deity intervened in human affairs. (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin thought it did.)

This anti-supernaturalism can be seen in the deists' insistence that the universe is completely open to our reason. A supernatural realm would not be open because it would be beyond our reach, outside of logic and natural laws. What could serve as evidence for the supernatural? The deists went so far as to portray revealed religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam most prominently), filled as it is with miracles and divine atrocities, as an insult to human intelligence. In The Age of Reason, Paine wrote, "My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

For deists, to rationally understand nature just is to understand its creator. I hear Spinoza in this.

Here's what George H. Smith writes in Why Atheism?:

"The deist and the atheist have much in common: Both reject revealed theology, both value knowledge over belief, neither is willing to subordinate reason to faith, and neither is willing to exempt some beliefs from the rigor of critical scrutiny.... [F]ew could equal the deistic enthusiasm for scientific progress and unrestrained freedom of thought.

"As for the contention that reason can prove the existence of God--even this core belief of deism tended to strengthen the alliance with atheism. According to the deists, if reason can demonstrate this highly significant truth, then we should not dismiss it as incompetent in any sphere of knowledge, including religion. For the deist, as for the atheist, reason is the sovereign judge of every belief."

Smith also notes that deists were in the forefront on the intellectual and moral critique of the the scriptures.

Deism thus looks like the best position of rationalists who couldn't avoid thinking that a first cause had to have kicked the universe into motion, but this necessary fact provided no grounds whatsoever for abandoning reason because it was arrived at via reason. Note the deists' harsh condemnation of revelation, the idea that special people can have private access to ultimate truths that are denied the rest of us. The only path to knowledge is publicly affirmable reason. No one is epistemologically privileged. 

What also is impressive is that the deists embraced rational natural law in all respects. If the natural world exists, and if the things that comprise it must must have specific natures (how could they not?), then natural law--fully comprehensible to rational beings--must follow. Hence, miracles--violations of natural law--were to be ruled out. And natural law covered morality as well as hard science. Palmer demonstrated his commitment to natural, objective morality in many of the quotes I posted.

For me the upshot is that deism falls short of logical atheism only because the deists saw no alternative to thinking a first cause, even a natural first cause, was required to make sense of the world. The problems with the first-cause argument have been pointed out countless times. Why is the first cause exempt from the law that everything must have a cause? Why couldn't the universe in some form just exist permanently without regard to time, which, at any rate, is something inside rather than external to the universe?

I'll say this about this admirable group of thinkers: if you have to be wrong, that's the way to do it.