Deists believed in God but threw out every holy book
Deism accepts a creator yet rejects scripture, prophecy, miracles and religious authority. Reason and the natural world, Deists argue, are the only reliable guides to God, who made the universe and then stopped intervening. The idea flourished in Enlightenment England, France and North America, and was shaped by John Locke's attack on innate ideas.
The name comes from the Latin deus, god, just as theism comes from the Greek theós, and in English the two words once meant the same thing. They began to diverge in the 17th century; Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621 is the first English use of deist in the modern sense. In French the word had already appeared in 1563, in a treatise by the Swiss Calvinist Pierre Viret, though it stayed obscure in France until Pierre Bayle's famous dictionary in the 1690s.
Precursors appear in many traditions. The Stoics, founded by Zeno of Citium, prized logic as a route to living in tune with nature. In 8th-century Islam the Muʿtazila school held that God's commands could be grasped by reason and that the Quran was created, one of the most divisive claims in Islamic theology; the later Māturīdī school taught that reason alone can recognise a creator. Thomas Aquinas, writing around 1250, fused Aristotle's philosophy with Christian natural theology.
The first major Deist statement in English was Lord Herbert of Cherbury's De Veritate of 1624. Like Descartes, Herbert hunted for the foundations of knowledge, and proposed five Common Notions, truths imprinted on every mind, that underlie all religions, such as the duty of virtue and repentance. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690 wrecked that approach by denying innate ideas. Deists then turned to experience and, under Newton's influence, to the argument from design. John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious in 1696 provoked a furious response, and Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation of 1730 became known as the Deist's Bible because nearly every argument of the controversy appears in it.
Enlightenment Deism rested on two claims: reason and nature are valid sources of religious knowledge, and revelation is not. The historian Leslie Stephen later separated its constructive side from its critical one, which rejected books claiming revelation, the doctrine of the Trinity, and reports of miracles. The movement revived in early 19th-century Britain and North America, and some of its tenets lived on in Unitarianism.
Source: Deism
