Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

God and the Philosophers

Deism: Traditional & Contemporary

Robert Griffiths looks into an anti-religion, pro-God way of thinking.

Deism is belief in the existence of a creator God who does not intervene in the universe, and in particular, in the lives of people. Cleverly, deists try to detach God from religion. As far as religion is concerned, they look and sound like atheists: they reject religious revelation, and often call religion ‘superstition’. But they hold on to God.

Deism seems to come in what I call a ‘hard’ or sceptical version, and a ‘soft’ version.

…