muTron the homeless

I think Deism seems attractive as it explains just enough to keep the rational mind satisfied while supplying a modicum of comfort to know we are not totally alone. It's existentially pleasing and logically non-problematic to not have to explain what this "God" may or may not be. Plus at times it seems almost intuitive, especially after a couple of glasses of Old Bastard Barley Wine.

Joan of Bark

Historically speaking, I think deism was a way for early atheists to explain the origin of the universe, and perhaps life as well. I imagine the problem skeptics had during the enlightenment (pre-Darwin) was that there was no real scientific explanation for creation. This limited God explained the origin of the universe while denying divine intervention in its operation.

gurugeorge

I sort of know where you're coming from. Although I can't believe in a God, because there's no good reason to do so, I still sometimes feel that the Universe has, let us say, personality. In some obscure, poetic sense the universe seems to "speak" to us sometimes. Every event, every happening, is like a syllable or word of that speech (I mean the very event itself).

Whether this feeling points to anything real about the universe, I don't know, but I would be hesitant to rule it out. In everyday life we sometimes do have feelings that prove, subsequently, to have been pointing at something real. (e.g., we might have a sense that somebody is looking at us, we turn around, and indeed there is somebody looking at us). These kinds of everyday intimations can have reasonable biological/cognitive explanations of course. But maybe the intimation of personality in the Universe also will turn out, upon further investigation, to have a reasonable explanation too.

One possible scenario, for example, might be that we find out in future that there is indeed something like an extremely powerful Entity that created our Universe - as a joke, or experiment or something - and that this Entity has always allowed an "open channel" of communication with Him. Of course this isn't the more philosophical Absolute type of God of Deism or Theism, but it would be the kind of explanation that would make sense of the intimations we have of personality to the Universe.

Or the sense of "personality" might portend something weirder and more wonderful than we can even imagine at the moment. Like that.

Of course there are thousands of plausible, or at base internally self-consistent explanations one could make up, but since we have at the moment no purchase, no grip on anything sufficient to help us to decide which possible scenario is true, rationally there's no point in plumping for any one of them as true - so, one can either be agnostic or atheist, depending on other prior assumptions.