History & overview · every faith gets one
A creator you can infer, and cannot petition.
The position that reason alone establishes a creator from the order of nature, and that every claimed revelation — scripture, miracle, prophecy, church — is human addition. It shaped the American and French revolutionary generations, has one modern organisation, and is unusual among the lines on this site in having almost no practice at all: no service, no sabbath, no sacrament, and no prayer of petition.
Why it is filed this way
A theological position rather than a body for most of its history — there were deists for two centuries before there was ever a deist organisation. The World Union of Deists, founded in 1993, is the first since Elihu Palmer's attempt in the 1790s, and it is small. Deism is filed as a philosophy because that is how nearly everyone who has held it has held it: privately, and without joining anything.
Never organised on any scale and largely absorbed by Unitarianism and secular humanism in the nineteenth century. The World Union of Deists has run continuously since 1993 and publishes online.
The founding
Herbert's De Veritate (1624) proposed five common notions he thought every religion shared and every priesthood had encrusted. The argument became a movement a century and a half later when Thomas Paine, who had already written the pamphlets that made the American Revolution, turned the same tools on the Bible in The Age of Reason and lost most of his friends for it.
Its founding is bound to Edward Herbert, Baron Herbert of Cherbury, and after him Thomas Paine — 1624 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A designed universe running on fixed laws that are never suspended.
The divine. One creator, inferred from design rather than announced by anyone. Having made the machine, it does not intervene in it: no miracles, no answered prayers, no chosen people, no incarnation, no revealed book. Some deists pray as thanksgiving or as attention; asking for an outcome is ruled out by the theology, not by taste..
Death and after. Disputed among deists. Paine expected to survive death; others hold that a non-intervening God offers no grounds either way..