doubtingt

The concept "god" has virtually no conceptual boundaries and a god can have any one or more of an infinite set of attributes. Thus, it is useless to define any philosophy in terms of whether
it includes any form of "god" concept, since this concept in the abstract is boundless.
One way to deal with this is to dispense with vague undefined and abstract "gods" and categorize atheism and theism as they relate to the acceptance or non-acceptance of specific God concepts. This is what I attempted to do in my previous post.
This is a very useful approach, because which gods a person accepts and which they reject is far more revealing than simply knowing than whether or not they accept something, anything, that could be construed to fit into an ill-defined, infinitely vast "god" category.

An alternative is to limit the general god concept, so that it includes only a subset of possibilities. For instance, something only counts as a "god" if it is a "personal" god and conceived as a kind of conscious entity with its own mind, motives, will, etc.
Thus, whether a person uses a term like "god" is irrelevant. Theism here would be defined by whether the concept of the god they accept falls within the finite boundaries.
I still think the above approach is more useful, but at least now we can reasonably determine whether or not a person accepts the existence of any entities that fall within this bounded "god" category.

You run into a whole other prolem when you add the requirement that theists must believe in "proof" of god, rather than simply believe in god. MAny if not most devout believers in specific gods would not assert that their god can be "proven". In fact, the very concept of faith is defined as belief in the absence of proof. I have a good deal of data (hopefully I will publish it within a year) showing that nonscholars explicitly recognize that their belief in religious ideas is not related to assuming there is any "evidence" or "proof", but is based on simply accepting it based on its emotional appeal.

It is problematic to use theism as the requirement for "religion". As you point out, deists accepted a god on rational grounds b/c they thought that God could be logically deduced from empirical facts of nature. Their belief is essentially a scientific conclusion. Although this is no longer a reasonable scientific conclusion, it is perfectly possible that evidence could be uncovered that once again made some form of theism a valid conclusion of scientific principles. To say that just b/c a scientific conclusion supports the existence of some god-like entitiy makes it "religion" is confusing and problematic.

It makes more sense to define religion according to whether the accepted beliefs are arrived at via faith based revelation, versus
logical inference from empirically valid premises.
Thus, deism may be theism, but it is not religion.
Defining religion according to its epistemology rather than content is both theological valid and consistent with non-scholar intuitions about what constitues "religious" belief.


To the contrary, theism and atheism (like all terms)
only have useful meaning to the extent that they refer to specific
concepts that have identifiable boundaries. The idea of "god" in the abstract lacks these qualities, so terms which refer to the acceptance of such an ill-defined idea have little meaning.

doubtingt

I'm not trying to prove Paine wasn't a type II deist. I'm saying
that his own explicitly stated argument about what theistic assumptions are rationally warranted, exclude the assumption that god responds to prayer. He's very clear that "god exists" is the only assumption that is not a human invention.

Exactly!!! And according to Paine's argument, the fact that "god exists" provided the only known answer to the design question, was the only rational basis upon which theism could be based. Since all added assumptions, including intervention on behalf of humans, were not neccessary to answer this question they were mere human invention according to Paines own philosophy.
Which is why I suggested that since evolution provides an non-theistic alternative to "how did we get here?", and Paine
seemed to accept Deism only b/c it provided the only answer to this question, it is likely that Paine and other Deists would
have either had to become non-theists or be hypocrites in terms of their claim to a rationally based theism.


Type II Deism may have existed, may have been widespread among the founders and my even have been Paine's view.
However, it contradicts Paine's and others arguments that deism
makes only the needed universal and rationally based assumption that god exists.

Butters

Thank you for the info Fr. Andrew! This is the most I've ever seen on the subject. It seems to me the Paine may have a point.