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fubarobfusco comments on Leaving a line of retreat for theists - Less Wrong Discussion
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One "line of retreat" for theists, historically at least, is deism: the belief that while God created the world, God is not involved in it on an ongoing basis. Deism admits of no miracles, prophets, or divine intervention, but can maintain the notion of a God-created moral order as well as physical universe. Deism has a long history of association with rationality, philosophy, and science; as well as with Freemasonry and other older attempts to create a reason-based moral culture.
True, but it can also be a dangerously convenient get-out-of-debate-free card for people who are actually more traditionally theistic than their professed beliefs imply. e.g. one minute they'll talk about an impersonal, ineffable, deistic creator-god whose nature is forever beyond the understanding of our finite minds, and the next minute they'll be talking about Jesus of all things.
Oh, absolutely. The Intelligent Design folks are guilty of privileging the hypothesis for acting as if a proof of a Creator would be proof of Jesus. Nor is the argument unique to Christianity; I've heard Muslim and Hindu apologetics of much the same regard as the Paley watchmaker argument.
Nonetheless, there does exist a humble deistic position; one that does not assert that the arguer knows the mind or acts of God. Other than various classic sources affiliated with Freemasonry, such as Jefferson, I've also heard it from Quakers, Unitarian-Universalists, and Sufis.
Yes, this is what I believed for a while before I saw that Occam's razor showed that if a universe could exist entirely on its own without God, the hypothesis without a deity would be favored.
True. But you don't have to go all the way there in one talk. A shift from theism to deism is a step in the right direction.
Not necessarily. It can also be a shift away from receptiveness to evidence.
I haven't kept careful track of the paths taken by all the people I've known who've converted from theism to atheism (I sometimes wish I had,) but I have noted that it often comes as a result of taking their religions more seriously and seeing them as sets of beliefs with real factual implications, which should pay rent in anticipated experiences, and then realizing that they simply don't match up to reality. For some people, deism represents a retreat from ever having to think about the implications of their beliefs.