Why not deism?

[mordant]

In order for such a creator to leave evidence, it would have to intervene, don't you think?

Boru

Don't see why, the one act it's supposed to have done, creation, could leave evidence of divine creation. We haven't found any and I think the chances are infinitesimal (IMHO) that we ever will, but there's no logical contradiction in the act of creation having left evidence. Unlike the Abrahamic God, which is incoherent in concept and attributed authorship of events that we know didn't actually happen, the only problem with the God of deism is that there isn't any good reason to think it's real.

I have a philosophical problem with any sort of intervention in the sense that any deity posited to be above / outside of the natural order would by definition be incapable of interacting with it. As soon as it would interact, it would have to become part of the natural order, unless (and it's a big unless) its "interaction" was solely from the outside. In other words if you visualize the natural order as a bubble, a supernatural being could press on the bubble, distort it, heat it up, flash freeze it, even destroy it, and thus cause gross effects inside. But it can't reach inside the bubble to specifically comfort or heal or protect or communicate with one of countless individuals within, without extending at least some pseudopod aspect of itself INTO the bubble. It can't dictate holy books and issue marching orders or retribution for perceived slights (or even perceive the slights to begin with) unless it's intimately part of the natural order it's supposed to be apart from and so much better than.

These notions of supernatural vs natural are rooted in the ancient notions of matter being fundamentally bad and "sinful" and the resultant need to keep the pristine deities separated so as not to be soiled. To this day, fundagelicals prattle on about how god cannot "tolerate the presence of sin" lest he be defiled. And yet their god must of necessity literally wallow in this sinful reality in order to deal with it in any relevant fashion. This is why to me the supernatural is a useless and irrational concept.

Now if deism posits a deity whose SOLE involvement is to make the bubble to begin with, then at least that makes a little more sense (or, better, it is less nonsensical) but that begs the question of what the product of that creative act says about the creator itself. The bubble is full of pain and suffering and alienation and cruelty and ignorance and angst when it could just as well be reflecting other things ... things that would make it easy to be grateful to the creator and difficult to be dismissive of it.