THE CROOKED LINE
Saturday has finally arrived, and it’s time to hang those shelves your wife asked you for, six months ago. So, you go out to the garage and start gathering the tools you’ll need, only to find that you accidentally drove over your brand new, four bubble, aluminum level with your car. After the initial anger and frustration wears off, you begin to wonder, “Well, how am I going to level the shelves now?” Taking the badly bent up level over to the workbench, you start trying your best to flatten it back out and return it to its original shape, when it dawns on you; “How can I accurately repair this level to true straightness, when the level itself is the ultimate standard for what for straight?” The implications of this simple revelation stop you in your tracks, as you realize that this level can never be trusted again because you have no other standard to verify its accuracy.
One might also use this analogy when considering the worldview known as Deism, whose advocates claim to believe in a god who created the universe and then walked away from it, never to return again. They based this 17th century ideology loosely on the teachings of Scripture, but to do so, they had to take that “level” or standard of the Bible, over to their workbenches, and they beat, banged, and mangle it, until it took the shape that they desired; one that left out all of the in-congruent features that did not fit the characteristics of the god they desired to believe in. The crooked level that they left behind was no standard at all, and it failed to even keep their own ideologies straight and true. This blog will discuss the Deism worldview in greater detail; attempting to highlight its main features and flaws.
Two of the most well-known Deists in America were, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and it is believed that their goal in Deism was to, “…dispense with Christian dogma and recover the true faith, which was a quality of living rather than a set of arcane propositions which (as they saw it) the guardians of orthodoxy defended in order to protect their own power” (Kidd 2). This may be the most apt expression of the Deism philosophy, because it encapsulates the main principles very well. The “true faith” as they saw it was the logic and reason of the enlightenment period and the fruit of that faith was morality and ethics.
The history of the organized Church for the last thousand years leading up to this point, told a disastrous tail of corruption, intrigue, and hypocrisy, and these Founding Fathers may have been somewhat justified in this assessment about church hierarchy, but their conclusions were even worse. These, and other Deists of an even colder variety, ended up throwing the proverbial, “baby out with the bathwater”! Instead of siding with the great reformers of the faith in returning to the true faith of the Bible, they took out the pen of the scribe and began to edit the Bible in order to conform to their own beliefs about God, and in the process, they created a new god in their own image.
There are some positive aspects of Deism that we can hold on to concerning their view of God as a great watchmaker or architect, however. They saw the entire universe symbolized as a massive clockwork mechanism of precision gears, cogs, and springs, all finely tuned to operate just as the master clockmaker had designed it. We still used this apologetic argument in orthodox Christianity today, and can appreciate that brilliant men like Franklin and Jefferson would see the truth of intelligent design in the universe, even back then. Also, many Deists believed that high moral standards and charitable deeds were quite in-line with their faith, based on the teachings of Jesus, and that this type of living should characterize our lives. In fact, it is said that, “…Jefferson was almost obsessed with the person and teachings of Jesus… that in his teaching and behavior Jesus served as the preeminent example of human excellence…” (Kidd 2). Beyond this, however, little else can be said for the redeeming value of the Deist worldview.
Deism can be seen as an unstable compound of various religious ideals and secular notions that ultimately amounted to little more than, becoming a gateway to the secular humanistic and naturalistic worldviews that pervade our society today. This is due primarily to following reasons: First and foremost, “…autonomous human reason replaced the Bible and tradition as the authority for the way ultimate reality was understood… and the authority for morality” (Sire 64). No longer was the Bible considered the authoritative document which would guild the consciousness of the western world, and this opened the flood gates for all manner of concepts, philosophies, and doctrines of demons, to invade the seminaries and institutions of higher learning. It was only a matter of time before the God of the Bible had been obscured by the competing views of rationalists who seized the opportunity to improve upon what had been written in scripture.
Additionally, none of these Deists could agree on how and what they believed themselves, much less agreeing with each other concerning their new found faith. For instance, “cold deists”, could extrapolate their extreme views to the point of essentially becoming full-blown atheists, while some of the “warm deists”, could cling to their biblical roots so closely that they might have been comfortable attending a liberal Christian church, without any doctrinal conflicts. One the other hand, “classic deists”, basically agreed that they should incorporate, “…several derived tenets stemming from the primary premise of God's role. These included anti-supernaturalism… which is at the heart of Enlightenment thought…” (Harbin 650). This essentially meant that, miracles no longer had a place in the natural world, and by implication, “…Deists deny the divine nature of Jesus Christ” (Harbin 650). If it wasn’t clear already, this point drives home the undeniable conclusion that, Deism must be rejected by Christ followers in favor of the Christian Theism worldview.
In his classic novel, Mere Christianity, the great apologist C.S. Lewis, stated that, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust” (2-2)? Again, we can see the importance of a reliable standard to give us an accurate frame of reference to work from. Lewis found that there had to be order and reason in the universe, and he eventually found the creator of that order and reason in the face of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. Deists, on the other hand, departed from that standard of God’s word and went looking for it elsewhere, and it destroyed them, leaving many others shipwrecked in a system of false doctrines known as, Deism.
There are too many problems with the Deism worldview to cover sufficiently, but if I had to pick one, I would have to say that I agree with Sire's assertion, that it isn't even a real worldview at all. The flimsy premise and haphazard assortment of ideas about why the world exists, known as Deism, would be laughable, if it hadn't damned so many people to hell in centuries past. In its feeble attempt to pay lip-service to the God of the Bible, it actually ends up making the Bible-light, Emergent church theology of our day look scholarly and profoundly orthodox. It isn't a religion, it's not a worldview, it doesn't even make for a very good philosophy; it’s just an excuse to justify disobedience to God's word.
By Pastor Glen Mustian
Works Cited:
Harbin, Michael. Theistic Evolution: Deism Revisited. Journal of the Evangelical Society, (JETS). 40/4. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials: 1997. Print.
Kidd, Thomas. “What Is Deism”. Patheos. Patheos.com. 03/24/15 Web. Retrieved on: 07/30/15.
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. C.S. Lewis. Pte. Ltd. UK: 1952. Print.
Sire, James. The Universe Next Door. InterVarsity Press. Downers Grove, IL: 2009 (5th Ed.). Print.
