Puritan thinking and eighteenth-century deist thinking - Essay Example

The puritan philosophy emphasize on individual freedom and liberties of the common man (Vaughan, 1). The protests of the puritans against the influential power of the Pope exerted a spirit of liberty in other aspects besides theology. The demand for educated clergy brought about encouragement both in politics and intellectual life. Throughout history it has been suggested that the “Puritan concentration of attention upon the Bible had a remarkable educative effect on many minds” (Stimson, 323).

The puritans believe that religion must have the ability to have both intellectual and emotional influence on people. Their demand for reasoning called for a higher intellectual life and activity (Stimson, 323). The most commonly known philosophy of the eighteenth-century deism is that it is God who created the world but thereafter He has not exercised any control over worldly events. In other words, a deist is someone who believes that there is a divine creator but at the same time rejects any divine intervention.

According to deism philosophy, “human reason alone can give us everything we need to know to live a correct moral and religious life” (Craig, 853). There is however one group of deists who believe that God or the divine creator has a future world that stores rewards and punishments for human deeds in the current world. However, the other group rejects this philosophy. There is one common agreement between both groups that claim that only human reasoning can provide answers to questions of life and death, and there is no divine power to provide answer to religious questions that cannot be discovered by human reasoning.

Deism emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mostly in England, France and America (Craig, 853). Both puritans and deists believe in the God as creator of this world, but the difference lies in