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The Dispute Over the Soul

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The Dispute Over the Soul

Deists agreed that the creator does not intervene. They did not agree on what becomes of a person afterwards, and the disagreement runs deeper than it first appears: it decides whether deism is a religion with anything at stake, or a cosmology with no consequences for the one holding it.

Herbert of Cherbury put rewards and punishments after death among the five notions he believed every people had arrived at by reason alone, alongside the claims that a supreme God exists and ought to be worshipped. William Wollaston argued the same way in The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722): if virtue is frequently unrewarded in this life, a just creator must settle the account in another. On this view deism keeps the moral architecture of the religions it criticises and discards only their machinery of revelation, priesthood and miracle.

Others pulled the other way. Anthony Collins, in A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713) and in his long exchange with Samuel Clarke, defended the possibility that matter can think, a position that makes the soul a function of the body rather than a tenant of it, and leaves nothing obvious to survive the body's death. Bolingbroke's philosophical writings, published after his death in 1754, treated personal immortality as unsupported. Peter Annet went furthest and was punished for it: he was prosecuted for blasphemy and pilloried in 1763, at an age past seventy.

The split matters for how deism is read. Where a deist retains judgement after death, the position is a stripped-down theism and behaves like one. Where a deist does not, very little separates it in practice from the naturalism that atheism and secular humanism hold, which is one reason nineteenth-century deists dispersed as easily as they did.

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