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