The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog

Christian theism held sway for a long time in the West, but intellectual unity was broken at the dawn of the early modern period. This break was caused in part by numerous philosophical and theological quarrels (“family squabbles” and even “religious wars”) among Christians. Many began to feel both that the quarrels were pointless and that the supernatural claims of Christian theism were no longer tenable. Indeed, reason (as opposed to revelation) began to be viewed as the real and sole source of knowledge.

The idea, central to the theistic worldview, that the world as created by God was “rational, orderly, knowable” and that human beings had the capacity to study and know the world around them led to the development of modern science (37). (This view eventually won out over a Platonic Christian view according to which matter was something inferior to be transcended.) In particular, scientific thinkers began to conceive of the world as a “huge, well-ordered mechanism, a giant clockwork” (37). Deism was born as a philosophy that posited the existence of God, but without the specific claims of revealed religion. Historically, claims Sire, deism was the “result of the decay of robust Christian theism” (41).

Sire notes that the label “deism” actually covers a range of different but related beliefs held by various intellectual figures in the 17th and 18th centuries and after. Indeed, there was no single “orthodox” form of deism, and deists reached different conclusions on various issues. One distinction that can be made is between warm deists and cold deists. Warm deists held beliefs that were closer to traditional Christian theism, while cold deists pushed their beliefs farther away from Christian theism. Sire argues that defining deism in its more extreme (cold) form will help us understand its implications for the history of thought in a clearer way.

Deists believed in a transcendent God as an all-powerful being, force, or energy that created the universe, then “left it to run on its own” (39). This God is impersonal, not a being who loves and can be loved and worshiped in return. The laws of nature that God set in motion are absolute and determined by “a uniformity of cause and effect” (40). Thus, the universe is “closed,” which rules out any possibility for miracles or supernatural occurrences in which God “reorders” things.

Human beings, while personal in nature, are part of the clock-like system of the universe; one deist went so far as to describe man as a “machine,” though this was an extreme view. Deists differed on whether human beings had an existence beyond death, with some believing in an afterlife with rewards and punishments and some not.

The world is in its normal state and exactly as God created it; it is not “fallen or abnormal” (41). Because “whatever is, is right” (44), the universe reveals to us what is right and true. Human beings can, through their reason and senses alone, learn about the world around them and the principles of right and wrong and infer something of what God is like. Revelation is not necessary, and the scriptures are not divinely inspired but are human legends and creations. Deists chose various life goals as their core commitment, with a special stress on freedom, ethics, and public welfare.

Although deism had its heyday during the Age of Enlightenment (17th-18th centuries), it left its mark on society and culture, and various forms of deism continue to exist. According to Sire, modern deism includes such forms as: sophisticated scientific deism (Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking), sophisticated philosophic deism (Anthony Flew, Vaclav Havel), and popular deism (sometimes manifested in the form of “soft Christianity” known as moralistic therapeutic deism).

Sire argues that popular deism—including the belief in either God as an abstract “force” or God as an approving, undemanding father figure—is the “vague belief” millions of people in the Western world, including both academics and ordinary people, unconsciously hold.

However, the original Enlightenment deism turned out to be an unstable worldview and eventually went into decline. Sire identifies five reasons for this:

1. Once human reason replaced revelation as the sole source of truth and knowledge, anything became possible. The subtraction of traditional beliefs followed a slippery slope; eventually, deism slid into agnosticism and then into atheism.
2. Once human reason replaced revelation as a source for moral values, deism was on shaky ground. Although deists believed that human reason would allow everybody to agree on what was right or wrong, this turned out not to be the case.
3. Once deism denied the fall and assumed that the current state of the world is as intended by God, there was no longer any explanation for the presence of evil. To say that “whatever is, is right” is to deny the distinction between good and evil (53).
4. Since the universe is closed and determined by scientific laws, human action loses its significance and “people become cogs in the clockwork mechanism of the universe” (53).
5. Deism became even less credible with advances in modern science. Scientists discovered that the universe is not like a machine but is more complex; this includes the existence of human personhood, which cannot be reduced to mechanistic terms.

Instead of surviving in its original form, Sire claims, deism morphed into naturalism, the subject of the next chapter.