Anti-Creedance Front

belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world

That's the second part of the definition. Deists don't believe God is immanent in the world.

Keith Russell

Anti:

That depends on which deist you ask, and how that particular deist defines 'immanent'--which is becoming more and more obvious, the longer this discussion continues.

As we've seen, if you had asked Lord Herbert of Cherbury, he certainly believed in a 'God' who was 'immanent' in the world...

Keith.

Jayhawker Soule

Except, of course, those who do.

Anti-Creedance Front

Main Entry: im·ma·nent
Pronunciation: -n&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: Late Latin immanent-, immanens, present participle of immanEre to remain in place, from Latin in- + manEre to remain -- more at MANSION
Date: 1535
: remaining or operating within a domain of reality or realm of discourse : INHERENT; specifically : having existence or effect only within the mind or consciousness -- compare TRANSCENDENT
- im·ma·nent·ly adverb

Remaining or operating within the realm of reality. I have usually heard a deist is someone who believes in a universal God, but that it is not active in human affairs. So in that definition, deists don't believe God is immanent in the world.

capnkirk

Keith,

I respectfully disagree. Theists believe in a God that has revealed himself to man through scripture. Deists, by and large, do not believe in that revelation. That is a significant difference.

Deists generally believe that all organized religions and all scripture are corruptions because they are all works of man and therefore are to be eschewed. At least that is how Thomas Paine expressed it in "Age of Reason".

capnkirk

Sir,

You are being overly defensive. As I recall, the name of this thread is "Debating Deists". My proposal was to clarify OUR terminology so that we can better organize our thoughts and arguments to that end.

We cannot discuss ANYTHING intelligently until we can AGREE on the definitions of the words we use. Since it is clear that Deists cannot themselves agree on what constitutes Deism, then we cannot use "Deism" as a basis for our discussion about how to debate them.

We DO know that some Deists believe in an interventionist god, and others do not. This suggests that different arguments be applied to the different groups.

The arbitrary divisions I proposed were nothing more than LABELS to help US differentiate between those various groups as we develop our arguments. The assignment of these arbitrary labels was intended to that purpose an no other (You will recall that I prefaced my proposal with "So for the sake of establishing some commonality of terms useful for dialog within this thread" to communicate just that purpose.)

Pursuant to that, it appeared that the most convenient division between the two groups was to separate out all the beliefs that WE recognize as theist and use the anti-theist arguments we all are intimately familiar with to debate (alleged) Deists who profess those beliefs, and develop other arguments to address our differences with Deists who eschew scripture and interventionist god(s).

Until we can communicate which beliefs we are arguing against, we will only succeed in talking in circles.

Keith Russell

capn:

I agree with your post, above.

But, it seems to contradict your response to me, in the post above that.

How can you be right (when you said that I am wrong that some deists believing in an immanent 'God', when you yourself say in the very next post that some deists do believe in an immanent (interventionalist) 'God'?

My point was only that deists don't agree with other deists about what deism is, so how can atheists argue against it, if what it is--apparently--keeps changing?

(I think I just found another word to add to my list of 'meaningless words and phrases to avoid': 'faith', 'free will'...and now 'deism'.)

Keith.

Jayhawker Soule

Sir: That is your opinion. My preference is to stay on this side of the Looking Glass ... It is my position that deists are fundamentally theists, and that the fundamental problem with deism is theism. "Pursuant to that", I am uninterested in "arbitrary" wordplay which serves to obfuscate this commonality as it encourages the discussion to devolve into issues of semantics.

capnkirk

First, because you didn't say "immanent" god; you just said god.
Second, you didn't say "some" Deists; you said Deists.
Third, I don't necessarily consider immanent and interventionist to be synonyms. (The former only means "present in" or "indigenous to", both of which describe "states of being". The latter requires that said god actually "do" something (i.e. intervene).
Fourth, there is a huge difference in believing in the existence of a god (Deism, as I understand it) and claiming that this god has revealed himself to man through scripture (theism, as I understand it).

For the abovestated reasons, I understood your statement to be categorical. I took issue with that. After reading in this thread just how many different god concepts claim to be "Deist", I also qualified my response by beginning with "generally". (I still consider "deists" who believe in an interventionist god to actually be theists, which from the posting quoted above I now believe is what you meant.)

I see a great irony here. Deists reject scripture because they believe that because it was received by man and transcribed by man, that contact has corrupted it. It seems that Deists are not immune from that corruption of understanding either.

capnkirk

If Deists are fundamentally theists, then there is no reason to debate them any differently than you would theists. While I agree with you that the problem with deism is theism, I DO make a differentiation. First, I don't consider (professed) deists who believe in an interventionist god to be deists; they ARE theists (and that problem is the same regardless of how the believer labels himself).

If Humpty Dumpty wants to lump all deists into one ideological bucket, it's his privilege. But there is another brand of deist, who I consider mistaken, but otherwise harmless (not that I wouldn't challenge him philosophically). That is the deist who believes that there was a creator, but that his work is finished. That deist has more in common with athiests than he does with theists. That person, like athiests, knows that he must make his own way and his own decisions with no expectation of divine intercession in this life and no expectation of a hereafter.

P.S. If you weren't so defensive, you would have realized that I wasn't trying to make words mean "so many different things". I was trying to find a way to STOP precisely that. Everyone had different meanings for the same words (a la Humpty Dumpty); I only proposed a means to ENSURE THAT EACH OF US MEANT THE SAME THING when we used a specific term! I used the word arbitrary to signal that these labels were useful only within this thread. There was absolutely no difference between establishing convenient labels for the purpose of clarification of terms, and arbitrarily assigning "x" to designate an unknown in an equation.