Deism

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.

Deism was never a church, so its history is largely the history of an argument. For roughly half a century English divines answered it in print, and the answers shaped the position as much as its own advocates did.

John Toland opened the exchange with Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which argued that nothing in the gospel is above reason and that mystery is a later accretion. The book was burned in Dublin. Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) pressed the case to its conclusion: if God is just and wants all people saved, the terms of salvation must have been available to everyone in every age, so revelation can add nothing to what reason already supplies. It drew dozens of published replies and is often called the deist's bible, though not by deists.

The most durable answer was Joseph Butler's The Analogy of Religion (1736). Butler did not defend revelation by attacking reason. He accepted the deists' own premise, that nature is the work of the creator, and argued that nature is quite as full of difficulty, apparent injustice and unexplained arrangement as scripture is. If those features do not disqualify the book of nature, they cannot disqualify the book of revelation either. The argument was aimed precisely at readers who had already conceded the deist starting point, and it is generally held to have taken the force out of the controversy in England.

What followed was less a defeat than an absorption. The historical and textual criticism the deists had turned on scripture was taken up by scholars inside the churches and pursued further than the deists had taken it, while their positive doctrine, a creator known through nature, morality independent of revelation, passed into Unitarianism and liberal theology. Deism stopped being a party because a good deal of what it argued stopped being contested.