DEISM

The world we experience has three extraordinary features. The first is the fact that it exists at all. There is absolutely no reason we can think of why it did happen: the birth of this apparently meaningless and purposeless Cosmos. After all, there are many things that just are not there: flying horses, conical roses, two integral cubes that add up to a third cube, let alone a person who can sing in a hundred different tongues at the same time. Likewise, we could have had no world at all, an eternal no-space dimensionless void. But the fact remains that there does seem to be a world that all normal human beings (brains) experience for a while, and also rejoice and suffer in. This in itself is quite remarkable.

The next intriguing thing about the world is that we have absolutely no idea of how it came to be. True, prophets and scriptures, wise men and fantasists have told us how it all came about: From Chaos, from Nothingness, as an act of God, as the work of the architect P’an Ku, and so on. Ignoring all these time-honored answers which had satisfied and continue to satisfy  billions of people over millennia, modern physics has come up with its own answers to this question, using a number of technical terms and mathemagical formulas. They include Higgs bosons, symmetry breaking, big bang, and the like. Higgs bosons refer to fundamental physical entities that, through mechanisms that can’t be understood except through complex mathematics, like special unitary groups, adduce mass to otherwise massless entities. Through processes called symmetry breaking they ignited what has come to be known as the awesome di-syllable Big Bang: an extraordinarily creative conflagration that resulted in space and time, matter and energy, natural laws and all their stupendous consequences. The net effect of that initial outburst in an inconceivable nothingness that had persisted since unimaginable infinity started the first tick of time and other spectacular wonders that we can only contemplate it all with unbounded wonder.

All this could well have happened by sheer chance, some have suggested. However, what makes it difficult to trace our world to a mindless monstrous miracle of randomness is that the end product is not a cluttered heap of hotchpotch, but a fascinating dynamic process subject to meticulously precise and quantitatively describable laws, like E = mc2, F = ma, G: gravitation. The working of the universe follows patterns that conform to partial differential equations and invariance principles. Not only that: The material components of the universe owe their existence and persistence, their properties and propensities to incredibly precise values for certain modeling parameters such as the charge on the electron and the strength of the strong force. Ever so slight deviations from these would have resulted in an altogether unimaginably different cosmos.

Given all this, it is difficult to satisfy the curious mind by saying that it all happened helter-skelter, by sheer slot-machine slips. The law-bound universe does not seem like the result of random hits on the key-board, or idle doodling by shaky hands. Reckless coloration on canvass could at best cause a Jackson Pollock spray-painting, or perhaps even a Wassily Kandinsky kind of work. But a Rafael or a Ravi Varma could not have risen from mindless meanderings of causeless eruptions. This intriguing circumstance has led many reflecting minds, not just to postulate, but to be quite certain that an Intelligent Creative Principle had consciously designed and expertly executed the mammoth project of the creation and sustenance of the Cosmos.

Reflecting minds are here on earth, so it was natural for them to imagine that the Intelligent Creator had in mind not only the sun and the moon, stars and silicon, but also, perhaps more importantly, human beings as an ultimate adornment to Creation. This led to the suspicion that God has always been immensely interested in our well-being, comfort, and happiness: an idea that was reinforced by the abundance of fruits and grains for our nourishment, beasts for carrying our burdens, as also birds and butterflies to add to our aesthetic delights.

When humanity repeatedly experienced natural catastrophes from hurricanes and floods to earthquakes and epidemics, let alone innocent children dying, droughts causing famines, and unpleasant characters winning elections, some doubts begin to rise as to the constancy, if not reliability of Divine mercy and help. For the truly faithful, this does not matter in the least, and it does not shake their faith in a caring and compassionate Creator.

But theologians and thinkers are as much concerned with logic and proof as with feelings and devotion. So some of them felt it was time to modify our view of God. They reasoned that while God did create the complex world such as it is, once He had done the job He let it function by itself. This view of God, which crystallized in eighteenth century when science and enlightenment were raging, came to be called Deism.

In the Deist view, God is like an artist who, after finishing his creative enterprise, just put it on exhibit, instead of constantly tinkering with it here and there to modify or make it better. He just let the laws do the re-shaping and the creation of new entities within the constraints of the laws of nature. Perhaps – and this was not something the original Deists had in mind – Deus goes on to make another universe, imposing a different set of laws on it, then yet another, and so on. This idea is compatible with current multiverse theory.

But now there has been another variation of the Deist doctrine. After creating the world, God got smack into it Himself, pervading every niche and nook of his created work. What this means is that God is literally omnipresent in everything, in the hadrons and leptons that are in the core of  matter as in the far-stretched galaxies and the Dark Matter whereof modern cosmologists speak. He is there in the heart of supernovas as in the singularities of black holes. He is mutely present in every breath of Man as in every neuron fired in brains. The Creator is into the Creation: In creatura creator. A crude analogy would be a playwright who writes a one-hero play and gets into its performance himself: not very common, but not impossible. This has come to be called Pan-Deism.

Thus, Deism was a response to doubts that were slowly emerging as a result of the science of the eighteenth century about the God of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Holy Qur’an. The two major factors in modern science are (a) regard the natural world as the primary object of study, even veneration; and (b) going beyond being awed by its wonder and splendor, and systematically observing and studying the world by the use of reason. In this process many strongly held traditional beliefs began to morph into questionable assertions or plain superstitions. But sensitive and reflective minds saw the need for a God without Whom life would be reduced to a meaningless flicker in eternity, a fleeting firefly in the pitch darkness of eternity. The challenge was to hold on to belief in an omnipotent Creator-God and weed out what many saw as needless paraphernalia.

That is how Deism arose. It accepts the existence of God, and recognizes the world and physical laws as having emanated from Him. To explain how or why a God would permit pain and penury, it came up with the tenet that God invented the cosmic machine and let it run on its own. Our responsibility as His creatures is simply to accept the world such as it is, study it carefully, and be thankful to God for this opportunity.

Like all systems that affirm God of one kind or another, and like all who emphatically proclaim their non-belief in God of any kind, the propagators of Deism have also something to say about the beliefs of others. One ardent subscriber to the Deist view, writing for the World Union of Deists,  referred to traditional religionists as “people chasing after the nonsensical violence promoting myths of the ‘revealed’ religions.” On the other hand some religious theists call Deists atheists who are afraid of being without a God. Believers are seldom satisfied with their own beliefs: they have to condemn or castigate those of others for full satisfaction.