Deism

All varieties of the non Christian worldview presuppose that the  intelligibility of human experience can be attained on autonomous lines. Deism is no exception. It teaches a non-interventionist god who just creates the world and leaves it to itself. Like how we handle any other variety of unbelief, we can compare the deistic view to the Chriztian, noting the points in which it denies the Christian worldview. Through this, we can show the folly of unbelief.

Deism proposes a mute god. A god who has not communicated to humanity or acted in history. We can see from this that a deist would not claim to have received revelation and as such cannot adhere to a revelational epistemology as the Christian does. Hence, a deist is in no better position than the atheist is in providing an epistemology that accounts for knowledge and provides the preconditions of intelligible experience.

Unlike the Christian who's epistemological starting point is God's revelation, the deist would posit the self as the starting point. But such a predicament is problematic. Arguments that start with the self, end with the self. The deist cannot get to the objects of knowledge and cannot answer the skeptic.

We can also press the deist to tell us how he knows his god exists. The deist, by rejecting revelation, cannot know anything about his god. There's a disconnection. He cannot then claim to know what his god intends. The reliability of his cognitive faculties can then be reasonably called into question since he  has no reason to think his god intends that they produce true beliefs.

The deist is also lost in terms of accounting for the uniformity of nature and thus justifying inductive inferences. There's no sort of imposition in the deistic view. There's no personal care over the universe and no imposition of law-like regularity. This lack of imposition also affects the deistic scheme when it comes to abstractions such as logical principles. There's no way to bring the world of abstraction in meaningful contact with the world of empirical  experience in a deistic view.

Morality is also rendered impossible. The deist cannot appeal to the nature and character of his god to account for moral absolutes since, as was mentioned earlier, that nature is completely hidden from the deist.

Although not exhaustive, we've been able to see how the  rejection of the Christian worldview - exemplified by deism in this case - leads to abusrdity.

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