A Religion of Nature

This affirmation defines deism against the revealed religions, which ground truth in scripture and divine disclosure. The deist accepts a Creator known through reason and nature while setting aside the authority of any particular revelation, and this leads to the further deist positions that miracles and revealed prophecy are not credible and that God does not intervene in the world. As a rational and natural religion, deism influenced Enlightenment thought and several of its leading figures, and it is presented here as the outlook its proponents held.

English deism reached a high point in Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), often called "the deist's Bible" for its influence, and the outlook spread across Europe and America: Voltaire championed a rational, providential deism against both atheism and revealed Catholic orthodoxy in France, and in the newly independent United States, Thomas Jefferson, working between 1819 and 1820, compiled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, now commonly called the Jefferson Bible, by cutting all miracles and supernatural claims from the Gospels while retaining what he considered Jesus's authentic moral teaching, a concrete practical demonstration of deist method applied directly to Christian scripture.