Deism After All

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.

Theism and Deism

Ever since leaving the Christian world (which was thirteen years ago!), I've struggled with finding the best way to characterize my current beliefs. Almost overnight, I went from having a full, prepackaged framework for my belief system to now just having a bunch of beliefs about a bunch of different (often related) topics, without any sort of overarching framework for them. Christians disagree with each other about lots of different issues, like free will and divine simplicity, but those who hold to a traditional theology typically have a shared set of core beliefs about ultimate reality (e.g., that God is perfectly just and good, that Jesus is God, that humans need redemption, and so on). That's not to say that there aren't strikingly different systems within that framework of core beliefs, just that the framework itself helps to make everything feel more cohesive.