Deism

The word déiste carried a negative valence in its first appearance in the Lausanne reformer Pierre Viret's (1511–1571) Instruction chrestienne (1564). Viret recognized a difference between Deism and atheism, if only in seeing the latter as the superlative of the former, but by déiste he was likely referring to a group of Lyonnaise anti-Trinitarians rather than those who would later be identified by their rejection of Christian revelation. The word's emergence in the mid-sixteenth century was, whatever its precise referent, not accidental. Much like early modern skepticism, Deistic ideas were fueled by four major changes associated with the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the ongoing recovery of works from antiquity; European encounters with non-European cultures; the confessional conflicts, both conceptual and material, that followed the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; and the spread of experimental science. All had the effect of destabilizing certainties and encouraging some men and women to recover fundamental truths from doubt. And all contributed to the context in which cultural conservatives hurled "Deist" as a term of abuse in their various attempts to confute heterodox ideas and restore unsettled epistemological foundations.

The effects of these four destabilizing changes shaped the earliest expression of arguments that prefigure Enlightenment Deism, which were published in De veritate (1624) by the English ambassador to France, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648). Herbert argued that "common notions" would ultimately lead men and women of any religious upbringing to worship God piously, avoid sin, and intuit divine justice. Reason given to us by nature, in other words, could rescue belief from skepticism. The argument seemed flimsy to René Descartes (1596–1650) and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), much as in a later form it would strike Hume as entirely empty. But the notion that we all have the capacity to understand religious truth regardless of culture and tradition became a compelling central assumption of later Deists.