When God Meets Changes: A Brief Analysis on the Origins of Deism

Abstract

As the scientific revolution transformed the way people perceived the world, in the 17th century, Deism gradually emerged as an important component of Christian doctrines and had a profound influence on the rise and growth of the Enlightenment. It began as a system of strict intellectualism. Its aim was to remove superstition, miracles and mysteries from religion and to expose the latter to the light of reason. It adhered to the new principle that exclusively reasonable, trustworthy, and substantial evidence for the presence of a Supreme Being as the universes creator can only be found in empirical reason and observation of the natural world, which was a radical perspective for the time. This paper analyses the multiple origins of Deism from different perspectives, illustrating the circumstances under which Deism initially arose and the factors that led to its emergence from scratch. This paper finds that Deism emerged as a product of the confrontation between theology and science. Neither rejecting science, as traditional Catholic theology does nor erasing the existence of God, as atheism does, it sought to find a balance between the two from the very moment of its origin.