The design is the revelation.
Nature is the only text that was not written by a human being, cannot be mistranslated and is available in every language at once.
Deism's argument is that a creator can be read off the order of the world without anyone having to be told, and that this is a positive religious claim rather than a subtraction from Christianity. Herbert of Cherbury set out five common notions in 1624 — that there is a supreme power, that it should be honoured, that virtue is the honouring of it, that wrongdoing must be repented, and that there is reward and punishment — and argued they were universal and that everything else was priestcraft. The eighteenth century then used the design argument as its main plank, and Hume and Darwin took most of the weight out of it. Modern deists mostly rest the case on the intelligibility of physical law rather than on biological design.
The same ground, other faiths
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