Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His book De Veritate was published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls “particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He “asked for a sign,” and was answered by a “loud though gentle noise from the heavens.” He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder: “Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.” God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of “An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.” Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.
“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world” (Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”
We object to this view that:
(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.
Deism regards the universe as a “perpetual motion.” Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.” Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.
(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.
The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say: “There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.
(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.
Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.” Ruskin: “The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.” See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.