I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist during my childhood, but I certainly was un-churched and if someone had asked me about my opinion of god I would have shrugged my shoulders and said “I don’t know. Maybe”. But my friends believed in him and he seemed important to them, so I decided to test his existence by asking for him to show me a tornado because I had always wanted to see one. I mean, he was supposedly all powerful and such, so that shouldn’t be such a difficult task, right? I lived in Colorado where tornados were fairly common and I found that even under what should have been easy circumstances to produce a tornado (inclement weather), god could not do it when I asked. I mean, god, god, you couldn’t even give me a god damn tornado when it was like all windy and lightning-ing and thundering everywhere? Pathetic. And so I decided there was probably nothing out there.
Eventually my critical analysis of god/no god became more sophisticated (one day I saw a tornado go halfway down from the sky and then fizzle out… was that god like trying but failing miserably? Perhaps not the best reasoning for atheism. I just imagine a guy with a beard holding out his pointed finger and scrunching his face like he’s constipated trying to get the tornado to go all the way down, but can’t because he’s just not all that powerful and then giving up). But my reasoning came down to a few things. Certainly the Judeo-Christian god can be easily ruled out. How? LIFE SUCKS. I should be more specific. Life sucks/doesn’t suck equally across all belief systems. Seriously, pick 100 people from any belief system and you will assuredly find a bell-curve distribution of suckiness levels of their lives. This goes strongly against the idea of the Judeo-Christian god that rewards and protects its faithful members. And also the Bible doesn’t make any damn sense. I mean, haha, a guy walking on water!? It must have been FROZEN water, am I right or am I right?
The other religions suffered from similar fallacies…but did that rule out the existence of a god that farted out a universe and now just sorta sits on his la-z-boy chair and watches everything? What about the deist perspective? The deist perspective is like staring at the refrigerator and wondering if there is a cheesecake inside. An undetectable cheesecake. A magical undetectable cheesecake. The cheesecake wouldn’t affect any of the other food, you wouldn’t even have the means to taste the cheesecake to see if it was chocolate or raspberry. It is as if the cheesecake doesn’t exist so it isn’t even worth wondering about. Deism is literally the biggest waste-of-time philosophical pursuit because the implications are nothing and there are no proofs or disproofs. I think it is a cop-out for people who are uncomfortable with conventional religion but still want to cling to their soft and furry “spiritual side”.
Richard Dawkins said it best I think; “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Or in other words, we are nothing but bags of atoms in the abyss.
Ruthy McCoy
United States
That made me laugh.
The best summation of deism I’ve ever read.
I agree, it’s a great summation of deism, along with other things. To me, deism is as intellectually lazy as theism, but at least acknowledges there doesn’t seem to be any sign of god in our lives. That being said, it’s still a waste of time and an intellectual dead end.
S/He could have known where the stepping stones were….
Wonderful simile!
Or, in other words, a refrigerator without cheesecake.
Glad I read this one!
Nice one. And of course the ‘faithful’ perspective is that God answers our prayers but we shouldn’t pray for anything where we could distinguish that from coincidence because…. it’s uppity to test God. Luckily you didn’t know that!
If you read Thomas Paine’s THE AGE OF REASON, you’ll find that the main point of Deism was not a creator-god who then did nothing else. It was a rejection of alleged “revelation” as evidence for anything. Some guy claims to have heard from a really big ghost who claimed to be the Creator of the Universe, wanted our obedience, and made promises and threats. Paine’s point was that if there WAS a god who wanted my obedience, they should speak to ME, not you. “Any ‘revelation’ is revelation only to the person to whom it is made… his account of it to another person is not revelation, for he may have been deceived, or may have dreamed it, or he may be an impostor and may lie. … [if anyone makes such a claim] the proper response should be, ‘When it is revealed to me, then I will believe it to be a revelation, but I cannot be obligated to regard it as revelation before then; neither is it proper to take the word of a man as the word of God, and put a man in the place of God.”
Paine regarded the Argument from Design as convincing support for the existence of a creator-god. He was writing before David Hume’s work was well-known, and before Darwin. So his conclusion was, anyone who wants to believe in a god may do so, pray if they wished, hope for Heaven as they wish, just pay no attention to those horrible “Bible prophets” and the cruel religion that they founded.
Deism never got a large following, but those few who were deists then were educated and influential, and played a major part in promoting freedom of religion.