deism – n - Belief in the existence of a God on the evidence of reason and nature only, with rejection of supernatural revelation; belief in a God who created the world but has since remained indifferent to it.
I can't believe I haven't already used this word.
The earliest deists I'm aware of were the Epicureans, especially Lucretius, who presented the deist view of a materialistic universe in his De Rerum Natura (variously translated as On the Nature of Things, On the Nature of the Universe, and The Way Things Are). Dante consigned Lucretius to the sixth circle of hell.
Many Enlightenment thinkers, e.g., Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), were deists; many more were atheists or agnostics.
For an American, the claim that most of the Founders were deists should be of particular interest. It's probably true of Jefferson and Franklin, but breaks down on a closer examination: Washington and Madison were Episcopalians and Adams was a Congregationalist, to give just three prominent examples. The belief in the Founders' deism has gained currency as a support for the argument that the United States is not a Christian nation, although it's sadly truer now than it was in times past.
Interestingly, our first presidential sceptic was Abraham Lincoln; on the subject of religion, the Great Emancipator was the Great Dissembler.
