What about deism? (Introduction)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Sunday, June 15, 2008, 15:05 (6004 days ago) @ Cary Cook

Deism was a reasonable position for enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Paine to take in the 18th century because the natural world of animals and plants and their complex ecology seemed to be designed and thus to need a designer, though even then there were some independent thinkers like D'Holbach, Laplace and Erasmus Darwin who were able to do without that hypothesis. However since the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace who were able to provide a natural explanation for biological order, it is no longer needed for that purpose. Indeed, as Richard Dawkins argues, the evolutionary principle questions where such a necessarily complex being as a creator god could have come from, other than by some form of prior evolution from something simpler. - The cosmological discoveries of the 20th century now make even the idea that there was a coming into being of the universe from out of something previously existing a questionable proposition, although a lot of thinkers in the field still seem to find it difficult to get there minds around this concept. - So we now know that there is no need for the postulation of any god or creator of any kind. Trying to base ethics on the postulation of a good creator can therefore now be seen to be a pointless exercise. The evidence of physics and biology is that Nature (the way the universe works) is not guided by moral or ethical principles. The rain it rains equally upon the just as on the unjust, though the unjust steals the just's umbrella.