Theism

God is not received from faith but required by reason: without him the deduction would not hold. Descartes needs him to move beyond the cogito and guarantee that our clear ideas are not the work of a deceiver, and he proves him in the Third and Fifth Meditation. Spinoza identifies him with the single, necessary substance from which everything follows (Deus sive Natura), and Leibniz deduces him from the principle of sufficient reason as that which accounts for the existence of the world and grounds the pre-established harmony. The doctrine is not uniform: Descartes' personal creator God, Spinoza's immanent God and Leibniz's perfectly rational God differ deeply. What they share is a family resemblance: a divine principle that reason establishes and that secures the intelligibility of the world, rather than a primarily personal, revealed God.

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, V · Spinoza, Ethics, I, propositions 11 and 14 · Leibniz, Monadology, §§ 36-45

Stoicism is theistic, but with a pantheist theism: god is not a transcendent person but is identified with the logos, the seminal reason and providence that pervades and animates the whole cosmos. Zeno and Cleanthes, in the Hymn to Zeus, celebrate this immanent divinity that orders all things.

Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus · Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book II

Aristotelianism affirms a divine principle, the unmoved mover, the final cause of the universe's motion, which it moves as the beloved moves the lover. Yet Aristotle's god is impersonal: pure thought thinking itself, it is neither creator nor providence and takes no concern for the world. Hence a clearly non-extreme theist position that marks this impersonality, before scholasticism identified it, not without tension, with the personal and providential God.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Λ (book XII), 7 and 9

The reasoning starts from the notion all men form of the divine, the preconception (prolēpsis) of a being blessed and imperishable. But one who is perfectly happy has neither needs nor cares: such a being can know neither anger nor favor, for anger and benevolence are marks of weakness. To govern the world, heed prayers and punish faults would be so many disturbances unworthy of bliss: the gods therefore exist, made of atoms and lodged in the spaces between worlds, yet wholly detached from us. Epicurus thus inverts ordinary piety, which fears the gods and flatters them, and cuts off Stoic providence: he keeps theism while emptying it of all intervention, which removes the first of the fears.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 123-124 · Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, I

Thomas rejects both fideism, which would treat God's existence as a mere matter of faith, and Anselm's ontological argument, which claimed to deduce it from the concept alone: for a finite mind, God's existence is not self-evident, it is demonstrated from effects. Hence the Five Ways, which all start from a fact of experience (motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, the ordering of ends) and rise, to avoid an infinite regress, to a first term: an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause, a necessary being. Theism is thus held to be rationally established, and not merely believed.

Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 2, a. 3 (the Five Ways) · Summa contra Gentiles, I, 13

Immaterialism makes God indispensable, and Berkeley turns this into a new proof of his existence. My sensible ideas do not depend on my will: I do not open my eyes without seeing what forces itself on me, in a constant order I did not make. If to exist, for things, is to be perceived, and if they persist when no human perceives them, then there must be an infinite mind that perceives them all and sustains them: God. The world becomes the language God speaks to us, his ideas imprinted on us according to regular laws. A theism, then, deeply affirmed and of a rare kind, where God is not only creator but continual perceiver, guarantor of the existence and the order of the real.

Principles of Human Knowledge, §§25-33 and §§146-149 · Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II

God is the supreme, necessary and personal substance, cause of the pre-established harmony and author of the choice of the best world. Leibniz proves him along several lines: the sufficient reason of the contingent universe must lie outside it; the eternal truths presuppose a divine intellect; he takes up and amends the ontological argument. This is theism in the full sense, providential and creative, not the impersonal God of Spinoza, whom he opposes.

Monadology, §38-45 (God, sufficient reason, source of the eternal truths) · Theodicy, §7-8 (God, cause of the best world)

The cogito at first secures only my own existence: so long as an evil genius could deceive me even in my self-evident truths, doubt is not defeated. Proving God therefore becomes the keystone of the system. Descartes offers two proofs: the idea of infinity within me, which cannot arise from a finite being, demands an infinite cause (Meditation III); and existence belongs to the essence of the perfect being as the equality of its angles belongs to the triangle, the ontological proof (Meditation V). Now a perfect God cannot be a deceiver, deception betraying a defect: his veracity therefore guarantees that what I conceive clearly and distinctly is true. Far from inherited theism, the position is the keystone that lifts doubt and grounds the whole of science.

Meditations on First Philosophy, III and V · Discourse on Method, IV

Epictetus constantly affirms the existence of a providential god, the immanent reason of the world, whom he celebrates in a genuine hymn of gratitude. This theism is pantheistic and cosmic rather than personal, which holds the score back from the extreme.

Discourses, I.16 · Discourses, I.6

Locke holds God's existence to be one of the few demonstrable truths: from our own existence he infers, by causal reasoning, an eternal, all-powerful, intelligent being. This Christian theism underpins his ethics (natural law is the divine will) and his politics (natural rights come from the Creator).

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 10 (the demonstration of God's existence)

Bacon professes a sincere Christian faith and holds God's existence to be assured: it is, he argues, shallow philosophy that inclines to atheism, while a deeper knowledge of nature brings the mind back to religion, for the order of the world points to its author. Theism is never put in question, even though Bacon keeps it outside the field of scientific inquiry.

Essays, "Of Atheism"

Marcus affirms providential gods identified with the immanent reason of the cosmos, a pantheist rather than personal theism. The « or else atoms » hypothesis he always keeps open does not overturn this conviction but strips it of any dogmatic claim: he believes in providence without being able to prove it.

Meditations, II, 11 · Meditations, XII, 28 · Meditations, VI, 44

The Timaeus presents a Demiurge, a good craftsman-god who orders the world by looking to the Forms as models; the Laws assert the existence of gods and providence against atheism. This rational, impersonal theism, with no creation ex nihilo and no single God in the monotheist sense, holds the score back from the extreme.

Timaeus, 28a-30c · Laws, X, 885b-907d

Plotinus's whole metaphysics culminates in a single, absolute principle, the One, source of all that is and term of the soul's return: a first divine principle exists, and atheism is beside the point. But this principle is not the personal, creating God of monotheism: it is impersonal, "beyond being", does not know, does not will, does not create by decision but overflows by the necessity of its superabundance. This metaphysical theism, without personal providence or creation ex nihilo, holds the score back from the extreme while remaining firmly on the side of affirming a divine absolute.

Enneads, VI, 9 · Enneads, V, 1 (On the Three Primary Hypostases)

God is not a personal being separate from the world but the immanent reason that orders the whole, identifiable with fate, providence and nature. A Stoic pantheist theism, affirming a providential divinity while merging it with the order of the world.

Natural Questions, II, 45 (the names of God: fate, providence, nature) · Letters to Lucilius, XLI (God is near you, within you)

Śaṅkara distinguishes two levels of the absolute: a personal God, creator and object of devotion (saguṇa brahman, Īśvara), real at the empirical level, and, at the ultimate level, a brahman without attributes (nirguṇa), beyond all personhood and all relation. With respect to our axis this is not an atheism: the absolute is indeed the ground of everything. But neither is it the theism of a sovereign creator distinct from the world, for the personal God is himself a conventional figure that ultimate knowledge passes through. The tension between devotion and liberating knowledge is thus dissolved by the hierarchy of the two truths: God for the one who journeys, the impersonal for the one who knows, hence a theist but restrained position.

Commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, I.1 · Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā

Charged with impiety, Socrates replies that he believes in the gods more than his accusers do, and invokes the daimonion, the divine sign that turns him away from acting wrongly. But his piety reforms civic religion: a god, being good, can be the author of no evil, which condemns the Homeric tales of quarrelsome, deceitful gods. Theism, then, but moralized and rational, remote enough from ordinary worship to have been taken for unbelief.

Plato, Apology, 26b-28a, 35d (belief in the gods) · Plato, Euthyphro, 6a-c (critique of the immoral myths)

Aristotle demonstrates the existence of a first unmoved mover, pure actuality and final cause that moves the world as the beloved moves the lover, without being moved. This is a form of theism, but of an impersonal god that does not create, exercises no providence and does not know particulars, hence a value held well back from the extreme.

Metaphysics, XII (Lambda).7 and 9 · Physics, VIII.6

The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar affirms a God, author of an order of the world that the heart recognizes, and the immortality of the soul. But this theism is that of a natural religion, or deism: Rousseau rejects the proofs of theology as well as revealed dogmas, and parts clearly from the atheist materialism of a d'Holbach.

Rousseau, Emile, Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar

God exists necessarily, but is not the personal, transcendent God of classical theism: it is the single, infinite substance, identical with Nature (pantheism). Lacking providence or anthropomorphic will, this God is so remote from ordinary theism that Spinoza was charged with atheism; hence an intermediate value on the theist side, affirming a God while flagging its impersonal nature.

Ethics, I, prop. 11 (God necessarily exists) · Ethics, I, props. 14-15 (single substance)

Since all knowledge is bounded to phenomena, God, who is not one, escapes proof: Kant dismantles the proofs of God's existence one by one (ontological, cosmological, physico-theological), the first failing in its leap from concept to existence. Yet what is barred to knowledge is required by morality: without God and immortality, the accord of virtue and happiness (the highest good) would stay unthinkable. God thus returns as a postulate of practical reason, an object of rational faith and not of knowledge, which warrants a moderate rather than an assertive theism.

Critique of Pure Reason, "Transcendental Ideal" · Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic

Lucretius does not deny that the gods exist: made of subtle atoms, they lead an immortal and perfectly peaceful life in the intermundia, with no care for ours. But he draws a radical consequence: a blessed being has neither anger nor favour, so no providence governs the world, no god made it or rewards and punishes. The proof lies in the very spectacle of nature, too full of flaws to be the work of a divine power. This position is therefore not atheism, of which he was accused, but a theology without providence: the gods neither create nor govern anything, and its edge is polemical: so much wrong could religion prompt, it is religion, not impiety, that is the true evil to be fought.

On the Nature of Things, I, 62-101 (religion as source of crimes, the sacrifice of Iphigenia) · On the Nature of Things, V, 146-234 (the gods of the intermundia; the world too flawed to be divine)

Epicurus starts from the common preconception of the gods as blessed and incorruptible beings, and takes it seriously to the end: a perfectly happy being knows neither anger nor favour, for the care and toil of governing a world would betray a need, hence an imperfection. It follows that the gods, set apart in the intermundia, exercise no providence and dispense neither reward nor punishment: popular piety, which pictures them jealous and vengeful, is the real impiety. This theology is therefore not a covert atheism, of which he was accused, but a therapeutic strategy, the first remedy of the tetrapharmakos, which removes the ground of the fear of the gods.

Letter to Menoeceus, 123-124 (the blessed gods, unconcerned with men) · Principal Doctrines, I (the blessed and incorruptible being knows neither trouble nor anger)