In this dissertation I demonstrate that the political views and use of natural philosophy by deistsheretics who denied revelation, active providence, and the authority of priestsin early-modern England were not as subversive as past scholarship suggests. Like other erudite endeavours in the period, a deist conception of God was the foundation for their interpretation of contemporary natural philosophy and political writings. Though many scholars have noted that deists employed contemporary natural philosophy in many of their works, the way deists actually used these writings has not been explored in a comprehensive manner. Moreover, when many historians engage deism, they frequently stop at one deist in particular, John Toland. My dissertation reveals how theology informed deist natural philosophy which in turn was inseparably joined to their political works. The two goals of this study are to remove deists from the sidelines of intellectual debates in early-modern England and place them squarely in the centre alongside other political and natural philosophical authors and to demonstrate that deism cannot be reduced to or encapsulated in the person of John Toland.

In this dissertation I demonstrate that the political views and use of natural philosophy by deistsheretics who denied revelation, active providence, and the authority of priestsin early-modern England were not as subversive as past scholarship suggests. Like other erudite endeavours in the period, a deist conception of God was the foundation for their interpretation of contemporary natural philosophy and political writings. Though many scholars have noted that deists employed contemporary natural philosophy in many of their works, the way deists actually used these writings has not been explored in a comprehensive manner. Moreover, when many historians engage deism, they frequently stop at one deist in particular, John Toland. My dissertation reveals how theology informed deist natural philosophy which in turn was inseparably joined to their political works. The two goals of this study are to remove deists from the sidelines of intellectual debates in early-modern England and place them squarely in the centre alongside other political and natural philosophical authors and to demonstrate that deism cannot be reduced to or encapsulated in the person of John Toland.

Face à un monde qui ne tardera pas à mettre les lumières de la raison à la place de Dieu, alors que la prolifération des sectes dissidentes, que le déisme et la libre-pensée mènent chaque jour de nouvelles âmes sur la voie de l'hétérodoxie, voire de l'athéisme, Leibniz et Berkeley prennent la plume pour défendre la cause d'un Créateur attaqué de toutes parts. L'apologétique, qui se donne pour double objectif de prouver la vérité de là religion et de montrer que le Dieu du christianisme est digne d'amour, est une exigence de l'intelligence et du cœur, elle est ce qui permet de pouvoir croire en raison. Pour le philosophe, la défense de la religion fait nécessairement corps avec la compréhension générale du monde et de ses principes, tandis que la métaphysique ne doit pas contredire les visées apologétiques et les présupposés théologiques qui l'accompagnent. Il existe, chez Leibniz et Berkeley, un va-et-vient constant entre le dieu de la raison, créateur des substances et de l'univers, simple cause première, et le Dieu d'amour des Évangiles qu'il faut défendre contre les accusations faites à l'encontre de sa bonté. Étudier la manière dont l'apologétique et la métaphysique s'entremêlent dans un système philosophique, c'est interroger les rapports de la raison et de la religion pour savoir si l'apologétique peut être une propédeutique à la foi chrétienne ou si elle n'atteint jamais que la cause première des déistes. / In a world where God will soon be replaced by the lights of reason, where dissident sects are multiplying, and where deism and free thinking lead ever more souls on the path to heterodoxy and even atheism, Leibniz and Berkeley stand up to defend the cause of a creator attacked on every side. Apologetics, whose goals are both to prove the truth of religion and to show that the Christian God is worthy of love, require mind and heart, and allow to believe in reason. When philosophers defend religion, it is inevitably linked to a global understanding of the world and its principles, when on the other hand metaphysics should not refute apologetic designs and theological presupposition. Leibniz and Berkeley go back and forth between the god of reason, creator of the substances and the universe, simple root cause, and the loving God from the Gospels, who needs to be defended against the accusations against his goodness. To study how apologetics and metaphysics intertwine in a philosophical system is to question the relationship between reason and religion: can apologetics be a propaedeutic to the Christian faith, or does it only achieve the root cause of the deists?

This study examines the role of history in the writings of the English deists, a group of heterodox religious controversialists who were active from the last quarter of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century. Its main sources are the published works of the deists and their opponents, but it also draws, where possible, on manuscript sources. Not all of the deists were English (one was Irish and another was of Welsh extraction), but the term ‘English Deists’ has been used on the grounds that the majority of deists were English and that they published overwhelmingly in England and in English. It shows that the deists not only disagreed with their orthodox opponents about the content of sacred history, but also about the relationship between religious truth and historical evidence. Chapter 1 explains the entwining of theology and history in early Christianity, how the connection between them was understood by early modern Christians, and how developments in orthodox learning set the stage for the appearance of deism in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Each of the following three chapters is devoted to a different line of argument which the deists employed against orthodox belief. Chapter 2 examines the argument that certain propositions were meaningless, and therefore neither true nor false irrespective of any historical evidence which could be marshalled in their support, as it was used by John Toland and Anthony Collins. Chapter 3 traces the argument that the actions ascribed to God in sacred history might be unworthy of his goodness, beginning with Samuel Clarke’s first set of Boyle Lectures and then progressing through the writings of Thomas Chubb, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and William Warburton. Chapter 4 charts the decline of the category of certain knowledge in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the rise of probability theory, and the effect of these developments on the deists’ views about the reliability of historical evidence. Chapter 5 is a case-study, which reads Anthony Collins’s Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) in light of the findings of the earlier chapters. Finally, a coda provides a conspectus of the state of the debate in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, focusing on the work of four writers: Peter Annet, David Hume, Conyers Middleton, and Edward Gibbon.