Maybe you have heard or read the word Deism, and wondered what it meant. Deism, is a word that comes from the Latin word “Deus” that means God. So, Deism means a belief in God. Deism has come to mean a religion or classification of believing in God, through reason and nature. Because the people who follow Deism, Deists, believe that they can best understand God through reason and nature. They refuse to accept what are called revealed religions. They also believe in the equality of all humans.

Let’s think about what this all means. A Deist is someone who believes in God, because they have reasoned by studying nature that there is a God. But, Deists do not believe that the revealed religions truly teach us about God. So, what does this all mean?

What Deists mean by studying “nature” as a way to understand God, is that they can learn about how natural things work. This way they can see how God makes things work. This helps the Deist to understand God, by understanding how God does things. By the word “nature,” Deist mean everything in the universe. Not just animals and plants, but the planets, stars, and even the atoms. Science is often called the study of nature. So, Deists generally do not agree with ideas that conflict with what science has shown us. This does not mean that Deists worship nature. Deists just use nature to better understand God. “Revealed religions” are religions that are based on other peoples’ revelations. A religious “revelation” is when God sends an angel, talks or shows someone directly, what God wants humans to do. People who follow a revealed religion, believe that someone else has gotten a revelation from God, so they follow that person’s words in the belief that they are doing as God would want them to do. So a “revealed religion” is a religion based on someone else’s “revelation.” Deists believe that someone cannot share a revelation with anyone else, without it getting all messed up. This is because words have a nasty habit of meaning different things to different people and all too often are rearranged to mean other things too. Because Deism doesn’t rely on others’ revelations, it is called a “natural religion.”