When I lost my Christian faith, I knew that this was going to be a big change for me. It's not as if I was converting to a different religion. Instead, I was just cutting my whole Christian framework out and carrying on with whatever was left. It felt very strange in those early days not to be consulting the Bible for guidance and not to be praying to Jesus or worshiping him.
One thing I've been pretty clear about on this blog is that I continued to believe in God. Of course, I no longer believed in the Christian God, meaning I no longer had to puzzle over the claim that God exists as three distinct persons who are somehow united as a single divine being. This actually felt like a relief, since the doctrine of the Trinity had become more and more troublesome for me in the last year or so of my Christian journey. I could now affirm a view that seemed far more coherent and intelligible: that God was a single, unified person.
Of course, since I now no longer had concerns about remaining faithful to any sort of orthodoxy, I realized that I was free to fully explore other conceptions of God that had always seemed off limits. Plus I was also free to reevaluate my views on a number of other issues. Did I still believe in the soul? How sure was I about free will? What is God's relationship to morality? What is the nature of time? What if something like reincarnation is true? What if there is nothing after we die? Would a creator of the physical universe really know anything? And so on.
I wavered for a long time on the topic of omniscience—of all the "omni" attributes, that one always seemed the hardest to wrap my head around—so I held what seemed like sort of a barebones belief in something like God. I believed in a transcendent, probably personal creator who probably had an affinity for goodness, but I kind of got stuck with saying anything more than that. And I also felt that I probably couldn't expect to ever have more to say about it than that, because who was I to figure anything out about God? It's not like I have a good grasp on physics. At the time I didn't even really understand that much about evolutionary biology. And I no longer believed that God was actively revealing this sort of information to people.
For a time, then, I just described myself as a non-religious theist. But at a certain point I wondered if maybe what I really meant was that I was a deist. I'd known about deism for a very long time, and there were two basic ideas that I associated with it. First, deists don't believe that God has given us any sort of special revelation like a sacred text or prophet. Rather, we only know about God through reason and perhaps through rational reflection on our experience. Second, I'd always heard that deists don't believe in miracles, apart from the creation of the world itself. I met the first criterion no problem, and as for the second, I didn't deny the possibility of miracles, but I also didn't really believe in them either. I was just sort of agnostic about it. But didn't that make me a de facto deist?
Nothing really could have prepared me for how absolutely confusing this topic turned out to be. Suffice it to say, here I am more than a decade later and I'm still not totally clear on whether I count as a type of deist or not. I've consulted lots of different resources, many of an academic nature and many others (like personal websites and books) that were produced by self-described deists. And let me tell you, nobody seems to agree on what it actually means to be a deist. Even deists give different answers!
That led to further confusion about what it even means to be a theist. My confusion with this actually started when I was still in seminary. At some point I read a book by John Shelby Spong in which he said, "You don't need to be a theist to believe in God" (I don't remember the reference unfortunately). This sentence seemed baffling to me. I'd always just treated "theism" as belief in any sort of God. Spong promoted, I think, a sort of panentheism, or maybe it was something else. But he seemed to equate "theism" with the view that God is a transcendent, personal creator of the universe. It just seemed very strange to me because "theism" comes from the word theos which just means "god."
And then of course there is classical theism, which holds that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, perfectly good, and so forth. Classical theism very often gets equated with Judeo-Christian theism or Abrahamic theism (referring to the Abrahamic religions, which includes Islam). The end result is that if you reject all three of these religions, then some people seem to take this as a denial of classical theism. This became an added source of confusion for me as I found myself becoming increasingly drawn back to classical theism, even though I still see absolutely no reason to accept any of the Abrahamic faiths.
And so I have been on this strange sort of journey just to figure out exactly what I am. I know exactly what I believe, but I have no idea which theological camp this puts me in. Here are some examples of issues that I've found conflicting data on:
- "deism is a type of theism" versus "deism and theism are fundamentally incompatible"
- "theism is a belief in any sort of god" versus "theism is classical theism" and "some types of belief in a god are not a type of theism"
- "deists have not always agreed that miracles are impossible" versus "you can't believe in miracles and call yourself a deist"
- "deists often believe that God is not a personal being" [implying that some deists do believe in a personal God] versus "deism is incompatible with belief in a personal God"
- "deists don't believe in miracles" versus "deism is compatible with mind-body dualism" [this one is strange because I've heard people affirm both views at once but depending on your definition of "miracle," the existence of a mental substance that isn't caused by physical processes would be quite miraculous!]
- "deists do not believe that God is a personal being" versus "deism is compatible with belief in God as a supreme moral authority" [an impersonal moral authority seems like an incoherent concept]
- "there is no agreed upon definition of deism" versus all of the other definitive characterizations of deism mentioned here
I've sometimes been accused of caring too much about labels, but I'm not sure that's really a fair response to all of this. The real motivating factor in wanting to get a clear answer to any of this is that it would make it easier to try to connect with other like-minded people. Having an accessible label is a billion times easier than saying "Here's a list of all the things I believe on a variety of topics, tell me if you also agree with all of this..."
As of right now, my views seem to be incompatible with how deism is often characterized. Even though I am agnostic about (and somewhat inclined to be skeptical of) miracles, my openness to them puts me at odds with the definitive claim that God doesn't intervene in the natural world, as does my continuing belief in mind-body dualism. My belief that God is a personal being also puts me at odds with how one of the only deist philosophers I know of has characterized deism to me in personal correspondence. So the safest thing I could say is that I might be a type of deist, but not a very popular type (and since deism isn't very popular to begin with, I am in a minority of a minority).
For that reason, I usually just characterize myself as a theist. If atheists get to call themselves atheists for not believing in God, I think it's fair to call myself a theist for believing in God. Or maybe I should just call myself an adeist.