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Deism

Deism is the philosophical belief that a higher being (like the Abrahamic God) created the world, but that the higher being did not control people's actions. Deism held that people should be guided by logic and reason instead of by organized religion, rejected supernatural events such as miracles, believed that God had established inviolable and unchangeable natural laws, that holy books such as the Bible and Quran were made by people and not by a God, and asserted that reason and natural observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a single creator. The movement became popular during the Enlightenment era in response to the abuse of power by organized religion. The American Revolutionary War and French Revolution were influenced by deism, but deism declined as the result of pro-atheist writings by Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Charles Darwin, the spread of atheistic naturalism and materialism during the Industrial Revolution, and conservative criticisms that reason and rationalism could solve all problems.

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