Deist vs Christian debates?

[Pizza]

Theists believe in an interventive and super concerned entity, while deists prefer the model of the god that creates everything and step aside.

On which side of the spectrum would politheistic believers fall according to that? I've encountered quite a lot of them. Where every deity has it's own role and limited powers according to it's nature? I've also encountered pantheists, who believe everything to be part of the divine.

They could go either way. Polytheist or polydeism.

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Yeah, that is DeistPaladin's approach and I can see a lot of value in it.

I've tried it recently, and when I say "Now what?" they got nothing and slink away back into the corner. You can just say you're a Deist whether you believe it or not, in order to access that shortcut. What are they going to do, strap you to a lie detector? :p

I'd be willing to concede supernaturalism for the sake of argument then see what they do. Honestly, if you take supernaturalism seriously, there is few limits within reason for what we can predict supernatural beings can, can't, would and wouldn't do. We would have no conclusive reason to prefer one supernatural being over another. It's the which god problem extended to infinity!

[DeistPaladin]

Does anyone here know of any debates where a deist debates a Christian, especially debating the Bible being inspired by a god?

Sorry I didn't see this until now. 

I had a bizarre run in with one Christian on this forum who unabashedly tried to use the "Problem of Evil". I say "bizarre" because of the sheer double-think involved.

His/her argument was that Nature's God would have to be a monster for creating a universe without the intent to eliminate evil and suffering from it. This would be an interesting debate if he or she had been an atheist. What moral obligations would a creator have for eliminating suffering from the creation? Would a god of limited power or limited awareness still be morally accountable? I might actually like to wrestle with that challenge as an exercise in moral philosophy. 

But no, this was not an atheist I was debating but a Christian. His/her god was omnipotent, was omniscient and not only able to emotionally relate to humans but desires a personal relationship with us. So how does the problem of evil work out with his/her god? Well, free will, of course. So your god gets a free pass because of free will (a highly dubious defense but let that go) but that defense doesn't apply to anyone else's god? 

The double-think was mind-numbing. I'm used to special pleading from the religious but that was beyond my expectations.

Other Islamo-Christian criticisms of deism run along the lines of the straw man definition that "God created and then 'abandoned' the universe", following with "how can a god abandon what it created?" An argument along that lines is currently being discussed on another thread of Mystic Knight's. 

My clarification in response is that deism simply acknowledges the scale of the universe which makes the personal god near inconceivable. The personal god makes more sense if the universe were just our planet or even our solar system. In reality, we are a pale blue dot (footnote Carl Sagan) in the vast ocean of space. We only arrived on the scene some 100 thousand years ago. We are but a tiny portion of Creation both in terms of time and space. If God exists, we must be one of a great many projects, and that's assuming intelligent life is the objective. 

God having a personal relationship with me would be like a biologist having a personal relationship with a bacteria cell cultivated in a petri dish. It's a matter of scale. How could God even be aware of me, never mind desire my love? 

[Pizza]

The just-so stories Christians cook up are so underwhelming. At least non-religious theists don't need to come with many just-so stories and can be agnostic about the traits of god.