Deism is the philosophical position and rationalistic theology that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge, and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator of the universe.
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The word deiste first appears in French in 1564 in a work by a Swiss Calvinist named Pierre Viret, but Deism was generally unknown in France until the 1690s when Pierre Bayle published his famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, which contained an article on Viret.
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Enlightenment Deism consisted of two philosophical assertions: reason, along with features of the natural world, is a valid source of religious knowledge, and revelation is not a valid source of religious knowledge.
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Central premise of Deism was that the religions of their day were corruptions of an original religion that was pure, natural, simple, and rational.
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English Deism was an important influence on the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and the principles of religious freedom asserted in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
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Palmer is noteworthy for attempting to bring some organization to Deism by founding the "Deistical Society of New York" and other Deistic societies from Maine to Georgia.
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Peter Gay describes Enlightenment Deism as entering slow decline as a recognizable movement in the 1730s.
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Some critics of Deism have accused adherents of facilitating the rise of nihilism.
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Deism stressed that the term signified political disassociation from the churches, not an act of religious apostasy.
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