#THEISM

Daily Devotionals

Psalm 14:1 fool has said in his heart “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have committed abominable... The terms atheism, the dogmatic denial of God, and agnosticism, a profession of ignorance, indicate a material distinction from theism. The term deism, however, a Latin derivative, and theism, a Greek word, are linguistically equivalent; yet they are used conventionally to designate two different positions. It was in the 18th century that many launched an attack on supernatural Christianity. Although they believed in God, they denied the occurrence of miracles and special revelation, and defended a purely natural religion. Their God is sometimes called an absentee God, one who started the universe going, but thereafter never interfered. If the term absentee is technically inaccurate, at least they insist that divine action is uniform and is not to be distinguished from the laws of nature. This philosophy was called deism. Theism, its opposite, asserts that God has spoken and has acted at particular times and places. Although theism and deism are thus distinguished, the former term is often used to refer simply to the arguments for the existence of God, and some of these also are found in deism. The term theology no doubt covers a discussion of the divine attributes as given in Scripture, and in a wider sense includes also anthropology and soteriology but usually theism designates a philosophical defense of the existence of God. No doubt it ought to and sometimes does defend miracles, but philosophically the theistic proofs are its main contents. First, the ontological argument, not used by the deists, is based on logic alone and makes no appeal to experience. Second, the cosmological argument is based on the minimum of experience; and the third, the teleological or the physico-theological argument appeals to the maximum of experience. God must exist in the fool’s understanding otherwise he would not understand his own denial.