deism the view that true religion is natural religion. Some self-styled Christian deists accepted revelation although they argued that its content is essentially the same as natural religion. Most deists dismissed revealed religion as a fiction. God wants his creatures to be happy and has ordained virtue as the means to it. Since God’s benevolence is disinterested, he will ensure that the knowledge needed for happiness is universally accessible. Salvation cannot, then, depend on special revelation. True religion is an expression of a universal human nature whose essence is reason and is the same in all times and places. Religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam originate in credulity, political tyranny, and priestcraft, which corrupt reason and overlay natural religion with impurities. Deism is largely a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phenomenon and was most prominent in England. Among the more important English deists were John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins (1676–1729), Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), and Thomas Chubb (1679–1747). Continental deists included Voltaire and Reimarus. Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) were prominent American deists. Orthodox writers in this period use ‘deism’ as a vague term of abuse. By the late eighteenth century, the term came to mean belief in an ‘absentee God’ who creates the world, ordains its laws, and then leaves it to its own devices. See also PHILOSOPHY OF RELI- GIO. W.J.Wa.