As part of my recent effort to get a final answer on whether or not I can accurately describe myself as a deist, I sought out feedback from a couple of professional philosophers. One of them was Leland Harper, who currently teaches philosophy at Siena Heights University (although I understand that the school will be closing its doors soon). I reached out to him because I found a book of his called Multiverse Deism that was interesting, although I didn't find it to be very persuasive. Still, I was thrilled to find someone in the philosophical world who openly affirms deism. Professor Harper was gracious enough to answer some questions for me via email.
The other person was William Lane Craig, who is an extremely influential Christian philosopher and whose work I've been following since I was a teenager. Craig's biggest claim to fame is that he was personally responsible for revitalizing the Kalam cosmological argument to such a degree that it went from being an obscure, easily dismissed argument to one of the most well-known and heavily debated arguments in philosophy of religion today. In spite of my strong disagreements with Craig's Christian beliefs and his conservative political and social views (many of which I find to be deeply distressing and problematic), I still find him to be a brilliant philosopher when he speaks on topics related to his areas of expertise, especially when it comes to the nature of time and the debate over abstract objects. Personally, I think his defense of the Kalam argument is solid.
I did not correspond directly with Craig. Instead, I submitted a question through his website, where he responds to questions every week. I asked a question about deism since it's a topic Craig has written about before, and since his distinguished position as a philosopher and a theologian makes him a credible resource on the matter. I was happy to learn that he had chosen my question, and his answer was just posted on Monday. (This is actually the second time Craig has selected one of my questions. The first time was back in 2014 when I submitted a question about God's relationship to time.)
If you read my last post about deism, you will know why this has become such a confusing topic for me, in spite of its great interest and personal relevance. Sure enough, the responses I got from Harper and Craig directly contradicted each other. This is fairly typical of how my exploration of deism has gone. However, I think that these exchanges did help me find some of the clarity I've been seeking.
Additionally, I also found a recent article from Cambridge University Press's journal Religious Studies (volume 62 issue 1) by Graham Renz and William Bell called "In defence of natural religion." This article was terrifically validating and it shed some important light on the topic for me, even though it contradicts the views of both Harper and Craig.
In what follows, I will talk about my interactions with Harper and Craig. After that I'll talk about the article from Religious Studies, and then I will share some final reflections.
Interaction with Harper
When I reached out to Harper last month, I asked him a series of questions, and he responded to each one of them, which makes it very easy to relay the information here. To begin with, Harper draws the line between deism and theism based on whether one believes that God is active in the world after creation. In doing so, he affirms what seems to be the classical deist position of a God who lets the world run on its own steam and never interferes. Because of the way Harper delineates deism and theism, it follows (and he clearly states) that deism is not a form of theism, even though he also recognizes that the two have some features in common.
Now if this is correct, then I would think that it rules out a view that I'm calling soul-creationism, which I personally find to be more plausible than other views of the soul that I am aware of (namely traducianism, which implies that DNA has "soulish potentialities," and emergentism, which holds that souls somehow just emerge from physical matter when it reaches a certain level of complexity or organization). After all, if soul-creationism is true, then it really seems as if God is creatively active in the world. This is one of the primary reasons I've never been sure if I could consider myself a deist. However, I was surprised that Harper seemed quite open to the possibility that deism and soul-creationism might be compatible, although he admitted he hadn't thought about it very much.
Harper denied that deists could believe in miracles, but he also seems to believe that anything that happens in the physical universe is, by definition, not a miracle. He talks about this in his book and calls this the "Humean" view of miracles. I personally can't say whether that label is accurate, but I do find this view of miracles to be full of problems and I doubt that deists would all necessarily agree with it. For that reason, I am not sure how much confidence to put in his claim that deists always disbelieve in miracles. (I just note here that according to the Wikipedia article on deism, even though the rejection of miracles is typical of deism, some deists "were reluctantly forced to accept at least the possibility of miracles. God was, after all, all-powerful and could do whatever he wanted including temporarily suspending his own natural laws.")
Additionally, I asked Harper if deism is compatible with belief in a personal God, and he flatly denied this. This seemed a little surprising to me, since he also claims that deism is compatible with grounding moral obligations in God's will, and I am not sure what it means to speak of God's will if God is not a personal being. Harper also said that deism is compatible with an afterlife, and that it's possibly compatible with a final judgment scenario (which seems like another point that would be hard to make sense of if God is not a personal being).
All in all, I was very grateful that Harper responded because it was great to hear about deism from a philosopher who actually affirms it. Nevertheless, I continued to feel puzzled by the apparent tensions between some of the points he affirmed.
Interaction with Craig
My question for Dr. Craig and his answer are both available on his website, but I will quote them substantially here. First, in my question I tried to summarize my current theistic beliefs as clearly as possible:
I believe in a personal, supreme or maximally excellent being who created the universe, and I am sincerely open to the possibility of miracles, obviously I believe in the miracle of creation, although I am agnostic about whether God performs miracles like those discussed for instance in Craig Keener’s big book on the topic. I also accept the moral argument and see God as the source of moral values and duties; to the best of my understanding I accept a divine will theory of ethics. I am a substance dualist – I lean toward a creationist view of the soul but ultimately remain agnostic about which view of the soul is correct. I expect there to be an afterlife and am inclined to believe in ultimate moral accountability. I won’t go into the reasons why I left Christianity after growing up in it but just for full context, I am not persuaded that God has chosen to speak to us via a special revelation like a written text or a prophet.
After this, I posed a handful of questions that, in light of the above context, are similar to those I asked Professor Harper:
Am I still a theist if I reject all the revealed religions? Am I a deist if I am still open to the possibility that God directly intervenes in the natural order? I’ve heard conflicting claims about whether you can believe in miracles, an afterlife, and a “final judgment” and still be a deist. Is deism one form of theism or are the two completely different things? Does deism necessarily entail the “absentee landlord” view of God, or is it more just a question of accepting “natural religion” as opposed to “revealed religion”?
Given all of the confusion that comes up with this topic, I was shocked at how straightforward Craig's response was:
No doubt about the answer, Dan! You are a classic Deist!
I could have fallen out of my chair when I read this. Not only am I (according to Craig) a deist, but I am even a "classic" deist! Of course, this means that Craig disagrees with Harper on a number of points. In fact, he says quite clearly that "Deism is a form of theism." And he sees no conflict between deism and belief in a personal God or open-mindedness about miracles. Obviously Craig defines deism and theism differently than Harper does. As far as I can tell, theism (at least in this context) is merely an affirmation of the existence of some sort of God, and entails no commitment to any doctrines based on religious revelations from holy books or prophets. But it also seems that, for Craig, the main defining feature of deism is its rejection of revelation. (I regret not asking Craig for a definition of deism. But in the remainder of his response, he mentioned a book he's written on the topic, called The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus during the Deist Controversy, and I'll probably be checking that out.)
If it's true that deism is just theism without any religious revelation—in other words, it's really just based on what can be known about God through reason and experience—then as Craig says, there is no doubt about my being a deist. I'm happy with that answer. However, things may be a bit more complicated than that.
The Article by Renz and Bell
In my question to Craig, I asked if deism was just about accepting natural religion instead of revealed religion. To be clear, revealed religion is based on alleged supernatural revelations delivered through holy books or prophets, whereas natural religion is based on what we can know about God by rationally reflecting on nature and human experience. Craig answers this part of my question in a somewhat backhanded way by telling me that I need to take another look at Jesus, since if he reveals who God is, then deism comes up short. Craig says that this moves us into the realm of revealed religion.
This provides a perfect starting point for discussing the article by Renz and Bell. They bemoan the fact that the Abrahamic religions, and especially Christianity, tend to dominate the discussion in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. As a result, the discipline is heavily focused on dealing with questions that are only of interest to Christians or perhaps to members of the other Abrahamic faiths. In many cases, it is hard to distinguish philosophy of religion from Christian apologetics. In Craig's response to my question, his answer is primarily focused on telling me to think more carefully about Jesus. Of course, it is his own apologetics website, so I am not complaining; but it is very difficult to find good resources for natural theology that don't give significant space to defending Christian beliefs. A good case in point is The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by Craig and J. P. Moreland, featuring a number of essays (some of them quite good), all written (as far as I know) by evangelical scholars, with one of the eleven chapters offering a historical defense of the resurrection of Jesus.
One cannot fault Christian philosophers for focusing heavily on Christian concerns, nor can one fault them for dominating the field. I certainly don't fault Craig for using my question as a springboard for encouraging people to study the evidence for Jesus's resurrection. This is just how things go. But I certainly feel the frustration of having to sift through so much material about Christian doctrine just to work out my own, non-Christian beliefs.
Renz and Bell devote most of their article to defending what they call "traditional, but non-religious views of God." I find it interesting that they treat deism as a non-religious view, because, as I've already indicated, deism is closely associated with natural (as opposed to revealed) religion. In footnote 8 they appeal to Keith Yandell's definition of religion as "a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, rites, institutions, and practices." This definition would not seem to apply to deists, since deists typically don't have their own rituals, institutions, or practices (although there are deist churches, so in some cases this definition of religion would apply to deism). This makes it seem like the concept of natural religion is unintelligible.
I won't press this point too hard, since I have often described myself as a non-religious theist. My reasoning was very similar to Yandell's, so I am not terribly concerned with clinging to the concept of natural religion. However, I obviously do place a lot of stock in natural theology.
It's how Renz and Bell characterize non-religious views of God that I find more interesting:
The range of views we hope to defend has Deism on one end and Philosophical Theism on the other end. Deism is the view that there is a personal, transcendent ontological source of the world, but one that doesn’t much care for the world, or, more minimally, doesn’t intervene in the world. Philosophical Theism holds that there is a personal, transcendent ontological source of the world, but that it does care for the world, and may intervene in it. We’re interested in this range of views because we’re drawn to the idea of an neutral creator, a mere source of the world, yet think a creator might be loving, interventionist, and so on.
Renz and Bell agree with Harper that the God of deism doesn't intervene in the world, but they specifically characterize the deistic God as a personal God, which (you'll remember) Harper flatly denies. On the other hand, they introduce another label that captures my own view nicely: philosophical theism.
As with deism, so with philosophical theism: if that really is the label that fits me best, then I am happy with it. The problem, however, is that there seems to be a fair amount of disagreement about what counts as philosophical theism. Renz and Bell portray deism and philosophical theism as two ends of a spectrum of non-religious views about God, marked by a disagreement about whether God interacts with the world. Of course, since some deists have believed that God interacts with the world (and since a contemporary deist like Harper is open to the possibility of soul-creationism) it seems that the distinction between deism and philosophical theism might be an artificial one. Additionally, this label creates some potential confusion since many Christian philosophers are engaged in the project of philosophical theology, but they are not (on this definition) philosophical theists.
Another problem here is that, in footnote 6, Renz and Bell acknowledge that what they refer to as philosophical theism is referred to by other philosophers, such as Kenny Pearce, as "generic theism." So whether or not philosophical theism is even the appropriate term here seems to be a matter of some debate. Personally, I am not keen on identifying my own carefully considered set of beliefs about God as a generic view. Generic theism should refer to a kind of belief that is embraced by many theists, regardless of which specific kind of theism they embrace. I am not a generic theist because I am not a generic person. It's also worth saying that, at some level, I can't help but feel that Christian philosophers like Craig and Pearce should not be the ones to determine what someone else's position should be called (and I am not even sure if they would agree with each other about the nature of deism!). But then I am stuck with puzzling over the disagreement between Renz and Bell on the one hand, and Harper on the other.
Final Thoughts (For Now)
It seems that I can call myself a deist if I want to, but if I do so, it will only be with the knowledge that some of the only professional deist philosophers in the world would say that I am labeling myself incorrectly. It's not that this makes me nervous so much as I find it incredibly irritating. Of course, I can call myself whatever I want. But surely there is something weird about all of this. At the very least, my journey to get clarity on whether to call myself a deist has taken me full circle, back to describing myself vaguely as a "non-religious theist," which is a label I've been using for myself since leaving the church back in 2013. At least Renz and Bell have validated that much.
But as I reflect on all the frustrating aspects of this personal quest, I think I can actually draw a stronger conclusion. The root of all the uncertainty about deism is that, by its very nature, deism does not have any institutional leaders to set down firm guidelines about which beliefs count as being truly deistic. In rejecting revealed religion in favor of what can be known on the basis of reason and experience, deism eschews religious orthodoxy. For that reason, it really does seem that the only essential ingredients for deism are (1) a belief in God that is grounded in reason and experience, and (2) a rejection (or at least a very strong suspicion) of anything that claims to be a divine revelation. To set any further boundaries for deism is an attempt to establish some kind of orthodoxy for deism, which doesn't make any sense. This means that deism is inescapably messy, because there is no authorized body to keep its boundaries sharply defined. Look at the books and websites that deists have made to promote deism, and you will see just how weird and messy it really is. Given the sheer number of people who insist that there are other boundaries to deism (e.g., Harper's insistence that deists can't believe in a personal God), I can't help but find the deistic identity to be somewhat frustrating, but then again, that's just how the world is. Christian theists and atheists have their own discordant families to deal with too.
In short, my conclusions are that deism really is a type of theism, and that it is the same thing as non-religious theism, provided that we are using the term "religion" in the sense described above. What Renz and Bell characterize as deism is really just one specific (and more commonly known) type of deism. The same goes for Harper's deism. The fact that Renz and Bell disagree quite blatantly with Harper about whether deists can believe in a personal God only strengthens my conviction here. Ironically, then, I find myself agreeing with Craig that I am a deist.