Deism and philosophical arguments for God

Some people complain that the typical philosophical arguments for God are not sufficient to bring one to theism, but that if they are sound, they only rise to the level of deism. Deism is the view that God created the world but does not intervene in the world. That would mean that any revealed religion, like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, is not true. It could be that under deism, God doesn't intervene because he is unable to, or it could be that God doesn't intervene because he isn't interested. One could hold to either view and still be a deist.

It seems to me that if God created the world, it's unlikely that he'd be unable to interact with it. So any version of the cosmological argument would undermine the claim that God is unable to interact in the world.

The moral argument seems to undermine the claim that God is uninterested in the world. I remember reading somewhere that Benjamin Franklin thought God would judge sinners, but that in the meantime he doesn't intervene in the world. But it seems to me that if God is interested in how we behave, especially in how we treat each other, he would have a motive in intervening in the world. To the degree that our moral obligations are for our own good, they show that God cares about our well-being. If he cares about our well-being, we should expect that he would intervene in some way. At the very least the fact that God would have standards that he expects us to follow, and the fact that he bothered to let us in on it, shows that God is not indifferent about us.

The fact that we know right and wrong shows that God must have intervened in the world in order to impart this knowledge. Humans came into the world fairly recently by cosmological standards. God had to have created us in such a way as to impart this knowledge. The only other possibility is that when he created the world, he set the initial conditions in such a way as to guarantee not only our existence, but that our brains would be hardwired in such a way as to know about his moral standards. Although possible, that seems unlikely to me. I suspect our knowledge of morality, if it reflect God's morality, had to have been imparted to us by a divine intervention in the physical world at some point in the history of the universe.

Of course the argument from evil (or suffering) is invoked to show that God does not care about our well-being. The moral argument answers the problem of evil, though, by showing that God is perfectly good and therefore must have a morally sufficient reason for allowing or causing evil and suffering, whether we know what that reason is or not.¹ So in spite of evil and suffering, there is still reason to expect that God would have a motive to intervene somehow in the world. According to Christianity, he intervenes primarily by saving people from his wrath by providing atonement through the death of Jesus Christ. He also promises that he will intervene by raising the dead, judging sinners, and granting eternal life to the redeemed. But he also answers prayers and rescues people from calamities. Why he rescues one person and allows another to suffer is a mystery.

So the cosmological argument and the moral argument together seem to rule out the two reasons for why, under deism, God doesn't intervene in the world. I don't think this is a definitive proof against deism, but I do think it's a reasonably good reason to doubt deism or to reject the claim that the typical theistic arguments only amount to a deistic God. They don't prove that God intervenes in the world, but they do undermine any reason to think he can't or wouldn't.

NOTES

1. See A quick and dirty response to the problem of evil.