
As an example, when encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, in France, translated into French the works of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, one of the important English Deists, he often rendered “Deism” as théisme. Historically, a distinction between theism and Deism has never had wide currency in European thought. So stark an interpretation of the relations of God and man, however, was accepted by very few Deists during the flowering of the doctrine, though their religious antagonists often attempted to force them into this difficult position. In this sense, Deism was represented as the view of those who reduced the role of God to a mere act of creation in accordance with rational laws discoverable by man and held that, after the original act, God virtually withdrew and refrained from interfering in the processes of nature and the ways of man. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the word Deism was used by some theologians in contradistinction to theism, the belief in an immanent God who actively intervenes in the affairs of men. Deism took deep root in 18th-century Germany after it had ceased to be a vital subject of controversy in England. The high point of Deist thought occurred in England from about 1689 through 1742, during a period when, despite widespread counterattacks from the established Church of England, there was relative freedom of religious expression following upon the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of James II and brought William III and Mary II to the throne.

Though an initial use of the term occurred in 16th-century France, the later appearance of the doctrine on the Continent was stimulated by the translation and adaptation of the English models. In general, Deism refers to what can be called natural religion, the acceptance of a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every person or that can be acquired by the use of reason and the rejection of religious knowledge when it is acquired through either revelation or the teaching of any church. These writers subsequently inspired a similar religious attitude in Europe during the second half of the 18th century and in the colonial United States of America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in the middle of the 18th century.

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