A Creator Who Does Not Intervene

Deism affirms that God created the world but does not intervene in it, that a rational Creator established the universe and its natural laws and then leaves it to run according to those laws, without miracles, providential interference, or ongoing supernatural action. In the classic image, God is likened to a clockmaker who builds the mechanism and sets it going. The world's order and regularity are taken as evidence both of the Creator's wisdom and of the absence of any need for further intervention in its workings. The deist picture of a lawful, self-sustaining universe drew heavily on Isaac Newton's mechanics, set out in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which showed the heavens governed by discoverable mathematical law; deists took this as evidence for their clockmaker God even though Newton himself was not strictly a deist, since he held that God's ongoing intervention was periodically needed to correct accumulating irregularities in planetary orbits.

The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace later showed, in work built on Newton's own foundations around the turn of the nineteenth century, that the solar system's stability could be explained by gravitational mechanics alone without such periodic divine correction, a result often summarised, whether or not Laplace used the exact words himself, in his supposed reply that he had "no need of that hypothesis."