Deism is the belief in a God who made the world but who never interrupts its operations with supernatural events. It is a theism minus miracles. God does not interfere with his creation. Rather, he designed it to run independent of him by immutable natural laws.
Deism flourished in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries but began to die in the nineteenth century. Today its tenets live on in antisupernatural denial of miracles, critical views of the Bible, and the practice of those who believe in a supreme being who has little or nothing to do with their lives.
The Father of English deism was Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). Some of the notable American deists were Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Hopkins, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. The effects of views of the American deists, especially Paine and Jefferson, are more widely felt today through the United States’ political foundation and heritage.
Not all Deists agree on God’s concern for the world and the existence of an afterlife for human beings. Based on these differences, four types of deism are discernible. The four range from ascribing minimal concern on the part of God to allowing his maximum concern for the world without supernaturally intervening in it.
a) The God of No Concern. The first type of deism was largely of French origin. According to this view, God is not concerned with governing the world he made. He created the world and set it in motion, but has no regard for what happens to it after that.
b) The God of No Moral Concern. In the second form of deism, God is concerned with the ongoing happenings of the world but not with the moral actions of human beings. Man can act rightly or wrongly, righteously or wickedly, morally or immorally. It is of no concern to God.
c) The God of Moral Concern for This Life. The third type of deism maintains that God governs the world and does care about the moral activity of human beings. Indeed God insists on obedience to the moral law that God established in nature. However, there is no future after death.
d) The God of Moral Concern for This Life and the Next. The fourth type of deism contends that God regulates the world, expects obedience to the moral law grounded in nature, and has arranged for a life after death, with rewards for the good and punishments for the wicked. This view was common among both English and American deists.
[Deists believe that] God is an absolute unity, not a trinity. God is only one person, not three persons. The Christian theistic concept of the trinity is false, if not meaningless. God does not exist as three coequal persons. Of this Jefferson scoffed that “the Trinitarian arithmetic that three are one and one is three” is “incomparable jargon.” Paine believed that the trinitarian concept resulted in three Gods, and thus was polytheistic. In contrast, deists contend that God is one in nature and one in person.
[They say that] God does not reveal himself in any other way but through creation. The universe is the deist’s Bible. Only it reveals God. All other alleged revelations, whether verbal or written, are human inventions.
Though some deists deny that humanity survives death in any respect, many believe that people live on. For most of these deists, the afterlife is of an immaterial nature where the morally good people will be rewarded by God and the morally bad ones will be punished.
If God created the universe for the good of his creatures, it seems that he would miraculously intervene in their lives if their good depended on it. Surely their all-good Creator would not abandon his creation. Instead it would seem that such a God would continue to exercise the love and concern for his creatures that prompted him to create them to begin with, even if it meant providing that care through miraculous means.
(Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, by Norman L. Geisler)