Deism

Wassim Alsafi

Prompt: Analyze the ways in which specific intellectual and scientific developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed to the emergence of the religious outlook known as "Deism."

Thesis: The discoveries of an imperfect world that is mathematical and and the thoughts of humans having more power over their rights and what they can do lead to people no longer believing that god controlled the universe.


 * 1) The belief in humanity being able to have more rights and successfully govern itself lead there to be less of a need for god's intervention making deism more accepted,
 * Rousseau's //The Social Contract//
 * Voltaire's //Candide//
 * Voltaire's //Philosophical letters on the English//
 * The //Encyclopedia//
 * Diderot
 * D'holbach's //System of Nature//
 * David Hume's //Treatise on Human Nature//
 * John Locke's tabula rasa
 * Montesquieu's //Spirit of the Laws//
 * Condorcet's //Progress of the Human Mind//
 * Bayle's //Historical and Critical Dictionary//
 * 1) The Scientific Revolution showed that the world was imperfect and could be predicted by mathematical laws making it not seem like a god was controlling it.
 * Copernicus's heliocentric theory
 * Kepler's three laws of planetary motion
 * Copernicus's //On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres//
 * Galileo's //Starry Messenger//
 * Galileo's //Dialogue//
 * Newton's laws of universal gravitation
 * Newton's P//rincipia//