Reply To: Okay, Nerdy Keith, I'll bite: Why would someone be a deist?
NK, I found this argument online. Basically, one important thing it asks is whether, if God isn’t present and doesn’t act in the universe, what about Heaven and Hell? Is there no religious reason to do good, or is it just a practical matter. And is there no retribution for people who do terrible things and a reward for do-gooders? Is there an afterlife at all?
And what about The Bible? If The Bible is the revealed word of God, wasn’t that God acting in the world a couple thousand years ago?
If your view is that God never acted in the world, then he never revealed himself to mankind and we are left with just the universe and your claim that something/someone must have caused it, but couldn’t the cause of the universe be nothing more than a set of necessary antecedents and not a personal being at all? In other words, a cause which is just a cause and no more?
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Deists claim that God plays no practical role in the lives of human beings. Deists claim that proof of God can be found through nature and the sciences. However, God isn’t necessary to explain anything naturally, and it makes no sense to disregard God up to the Big Bang or to some other event that is of yet unexplained. Why? Quite simply because at this point, any explanation goes. If anything, attributing the beginning to God seals up any other inquiries to the matter. The Deist thus faces the dilemma: If God isn’t necessary to explain anything, why believe in him? Or if God is necessary to explain nature, why claim otherwise?
That aside, we determine that the only practical role that God can play in a human life is in the supernatural. Now, since Deists claim that God doesn’t interfere while we are alive, it follows that the only possible intervention or action from God can come in some sort of afterlife.
If this is so, then we come to the following complications:
Let us suppose that the Deist God rewards those that did good and punishes those that did evil. But wait a minute, if God has never revealed himself to humanity, and never will, how can a human possibly determine what this God think is good or evil? What may seem reasonable to a human may be but pure inanity to a God. Therefore, any search for what this God rewards will be marred by extreme uncertainties. The search will be futile and always inconclusive. In short, God plays no meaningful role in man’s quest for moral answers.
But if the Deist claims that God doesn’t reward anyone in specific in the afterlife, or treats everyone equally, regardless of beliefs, why bother believing in a God that doesn’t play any meaningful role in your life OR in explaining natural phenomena?
No matter how you slice it, Atheism is still the most practical and rational choice. (source)
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