Deism
Deism is the combination of the intuition of the transcendence of God and the belief that God cannot, or, at least, does not, interact with, nor otherwise involve Himself in, the Creation. Deism is contrasted with pantheism, in that pantheism is the combination of belief in an omnipresent Creator God and the belief that God's omnipresence implies that God is the Creation.
In its mildest form, Deism is nearly equivalent to a belief that no one can truly know whether there is a God or not (agnosticism). In its strongest form, Deism is a systematic religion of rejecting all claims to a personal, or otherwise involved God, in that God is supposed incapable, by His transcendence, of any kind of interaction with the Creation.
In its typical modern form, deism is anti-Christian, as it denies the divinity of Jesus Christ, rejects the Bible (and all other texts) as God's scripture, and denies his signs and miracles to men. It lacks any coherent morality, and is an excuse to claim to be religious while engaging in immoral activity. Thus it is a favorite of liberals who do not want to be branded with atheism.
Deism is also only a short step away from atheism, and deistic beliefs often create a slippery slope to atheism[Citation Needed]. This is a common tactic of atheist evangelists: first convince a Christian that God has left the world alone, and then deny the necessity of God. Atheism and Deism are, for the most part, morally and cosmologically equivalent, given God's presumed inaction of any moral and cosmological revelation, an exception being that Atheism more easily permits worship of man by man while Deism holds that God is greater than man.
Origins
In ancient times, Aristotle was a deist as is evident from his arguments for a prime mover in his writing, Metaphysics. Even though the word deism was not yet coined, he still believed what deists believe: that God exists and is knowable through natural reason.[1]
The founder of the offshoot of that found a place in England during the Reformation and reached the colonies was Lord Herbert of Cherbury.[2] He came up with 5 essentials of Deism which are "(1) a belief in the existence of the Deity, (2) the obligation to reverence such a power, (3) the identification of worship with practical morality, (4) the obligation to repent of sin and to abandon it, and, (5) divine recompense in this world and the next".[3] This was a rather odd variant mixing in many Christian virtues without Jesus, and rather foreign to tr