Ten years before becoming the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong applied at a local

Methodist church to lead a Boy Scout troop. Where the form asked for his religious affiliation,

Armstrong apparently wrote the word deist. What is deism exactly? The word comes from

the Latin word deus, meaning God. So literally, deism means

godism. It's the belief in a god who created the universe, but then like an absentee father,

has no ongoing involvement with it. This type of God has been described as the divine watchmaker,

the idea being that once a watchmaker makes a watch, he doesn't have to hang around for the watch

to keep ticking. He steps away and allows it to run itself. So dayism is the belief that God

originally made the world and human life, but has subsequently

adopted a hands-off approach to his creation.

There's no such thing as a personal relationship with the God of deism, because that's

just not the way he rolls.

Dayism was a philosophy that first arose in 17th and 18th century, England.

I know, you're welcome.

It grew out of so-called enlightenment thinking,

which preached the idea that human reason was sufficient to make sense of all things,

and was humanity's only hope if it wanted to grow to maturity.

Reason, coupled with science, would lead inevitably to progress and ultimately to freedom and

happiness. Deism was appealing to Enlightenment thinkers, for the same reason it's appealing to people

today. For a start, because deism admits

no such thing as special revelation, there's no need to hold to any embarrassing beliefs about the

reliability of the Bible. The Bible is merely a take it or leave it compendium of human wisdom,

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