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Positive Deism Store We have a paperback version of Modern Age of Reason available for purchase at our Positive Deism Store HERE. From the back cover: "Thomas  Paine, who was one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, held to a religious philosophy called 'Deism'. 'Age of Reason' was the book he wrote to share his reason-based theological beliefs with the world. The book was written in the 18th century, so we have paraphrased Mr. Paine's classic work into modern English in order to make it more accessible to modern-day readers." Purchase of this paperback, and other items in the store, will help support the Positive Deism website.

Why Deism? 2. Inspiring thoughts from one of our members “gnomon”.

For one thing, it's a modern worldview suitable for those who want their science, and spirituality too. To wit, Deism can place the contentious subject of Evolution into both worldly and cosmic contexts that make sense on all levels of knowledge. The Latin root word evolvere literally referred to the gradual, incremental revelation of the text on a scroll as it unrolled from beginning to end.

Even so, the progressive nature of Evolution, both natural and cultural, is not always apparent to the unaided eye of an ant on the scroll. The path of Chance & Change may be unpredictable in the short term, but it's still intriguingly directional over the long haul, to those who look for the big picture.

For some religious believers, Darwinian Evolution is regarded as an atheist myth. Their traditions and scriptures tell them that all things continue as they were from the beginning. Their guide to reality is an anthology of stories, told by poetic prophets, of king-like gods ruling an unruly world of temporal progression, without moral progress. Meaning is handed-down from on high.

But for those with a mundane materialist worldview, teleological Progress is an illusion. They see Evolution as a random concourse of atoms with occasional, accidental snowflakes of organization that flash and fade away over endless, pointless time. Such a reality has no over-arching storyline, just isolated individual events. Meaning is constructed based on personal experience.

Yet, for some of us, both the imaginative stories and the dry facts are integral to the happy, sad, boring, adventurous, second act we call life on Earth.

Natural Evolution is indeed a rambling, deterministic sequence of events, connected only by local cause & effect, and ruled by mindless, humorless principles of physics. But those rigid recipe rules we now take for granted seem to allow for a pinch of novelty. And the confections they create seem to increase in complexity of organization over time : sub-atomic particles evolve into cosmic scale galaxies, which in turn nurture small nests of ordered life and inquisitive minds.

On the other hand, Cultural Evolution bears a record of clueless humans seeking for some small measure of control over a remorseless nature---bloody, brutish, and amoral. Relying on their evolutionary legacy of rational wit and pattern-recognition, they have created imaginative stories to make sense of an otherwise senseless stream of unconnected events.

One constant in all of their fictional accounts of reality however, is an eminence grise looming in the background, above the fray of human history, as a mysterious, invisible, but intuited Prime Mover, Scroll Author and Law-Maker who coyly reveals himself in various forms to the imaginations of those who seek him. Some see only the patterns, while others connect the dots to see the outline of the Pattern-Maker.

In his recent bestseller, THE EVOLUTION OF GOD, Robert Wright traces how the face of God has changed over the years as the humanities and sciences have expanded their philosophical worldviews in step with their technical mastery of the natural and cultural environment. The human story-telling and god-revealing imagination has been limited only by the diameter of the cultural circle of science and literature for each age and place. Core families worshiped a god of the hearth; wandering tribes followed the sacred path illuminated by nature; city-states sacrificed to local Lords; and multi-national empires paid homage to cosmopolitan emperor-gods.

But as we enter a new age of global politics and business, the old dusty icons of God are inadequate to the task of inspiring and motivating a world that has seen itself from heaven. Our modern Science and Culture are now global, and verging on universal. So a modern religious paradigm will be necessary to keep step with our progress in understanding our place in the emerging scheme of Natural and Cultural Evolution.

Deism is not a revelation from on high, but a contemporary interpretation of all the evidence, both physical and metaphysical, regarding the perennial questions of human intelligence, as it continues to unroll the scroll of knowledge.