This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, is often called the father of English Deism on the strength of his 1624 work De Veritate, which argued that the core truths of religion, the existence of God, the duty to worship, and rewards and punishments after death, were known directly to reason and conscience rather than delivered through revelation or scripture. That title, father of English Deism, has stuck to Herbert for centuries, even though Deism itself was never a single movement he personally founded and led.
Deism developed instead as a family of positions that later English writers took up from Herbert's starting point and then diverged from in different directions over the century that followed De Veritate's publication. Some of those later writers pushed considerably further than Herbert's own position had gone, rejecting an afterlife or a duty of worship outright in ways Herbert's more moderate argument had never claimed, so that the movement bearing his paternal title grew well beyond what its founding text had actually asserted.
Herbert's own position, that reason and conscience disclose religious truth directly, remained comparatively restrained next to the deism his book is credited with starting, a founding role built on setting the terms of a century long argument rather than on settling where that argument would eventually end up among the writers who followed him into it.