God created the world but does not intervene in it

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."

This is the most characteristic deist belief, from which its other positions follow: because God does not intervene, miracles and revealed prophecy are set aside, and religion rests on reason and nature rather than on divine disclosure. It distinguishes deism sharply from the theistic religions, which affirm a God active in history, answering prayer and working miracles, and equally from atheism, which denies a Creator altogether. The affirmation locates deism as a distinct middle position, and it is presented here as the view deists held.

Critics, both theistic and atheist, have long pressed a practical objection against this picture: if God never intervenes in the world after the initial act of creation, answers no prayer, and works no miracle, some ask what practical religious difference such a distant Creator makes compared to a universe with no God at all. Deists themselves generally answered that the difference lies not in any expected future intervention but in the metaphysical grounding the Creator provides for the universe's order and for objective moral law, and in the reasoned confidence that existence has a purposeful origin, even though that confidence yields no different expectation about what will actually happen in the world than a consistent naturalism would.