Voltaire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Voltaire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: François-Marie Arouet; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state.

Voltaire did not believe that any single religious text or tradition of revelation was needed to believe in God. Voltaire's focus was rather on the idea of universal laws, demonstrable, and in the main, still waiting to be discovered in the physical world as well as those of the moral world, underlying every religious system, along with respect for nature reflecting the contemporary pantheism.

Like other key thinkers during the European Enlightenment, Voltaire considered himself a deist, expressing the idea: "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."

In a 1763 essay, Voltaire supported the toleration of other religions and ethnicities: "It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?"

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Deism  is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine  the existence of a God, accompanied with the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious  knowledge. Deism gained  prominence in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Age of  Enlightenment—especially in Britain, France, Germany, and in the United States—among  intellectuals raised as Christians  who believed in one god, but  found fault with organized religion and did not believe in supernatural events  such as miracles, the inerrancy of  scriptures, or the Trinity.


Deism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Though deists rejected atheism, they often were called "atheists" by more traditional theists.

Deism holds that God  does not intervene with the functioning of the natural world in any way,  allowing it to run according to the laws of nature. For Deists, human beings can only  know God via reason and the observation of nature, but not by revelation or  supernatural manifestations (such as miracles) – phenomena which Deists regard  with caution if not skepticism. See the section Features of deism, following. Deism does not  ascribe any specific qualities to a deity beyond non-intervention. Deism is  related to naturalism because it credits the  formation of life and the universe to a higher power, using only natural  processes. Deism may also include a spiritual element, involving experiences of  God and nature.

The words deism and theism are both derived from words for god:  the former from Latin deus, the latter from Greek theós  (θεός).

Prior to the 17th  century the terms ["deism" and "deist"] were used interchangeably with the terms  "theism" and "theist", respectively. ...  Theologians and philosophers of the seventeenth century began to give a  different signification to the words... Both [theists and Deists] asserted  belief in one supreme God, the Creator... and agreed that God is personal and  distinct from the world. But the theist taught that God remained actively  interested in and operative in the world which he had made, whereas the Deist  maintained that God endowed the world at creation with self-sustaining and  self-acting powers and then abandoned it to the operation of these powers acting  as second causes.