Deism’s self-regulating world made God conceptually dispensable

Evidence

In Catholic Christianity, knowledge resided in the wisdom of God and was exhibited in his creation, but the deists believed that God’s creation must be limited to the act of creation, the act of designing and installing a self-regulated world. Paul Kahn states the matter pointedly when he says that once the world is conceived in this manner, “then there is no reason to refer to God at all. If God is done with us, then we can be done with him. There is no need to think about the author as long as we have the text.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 187

Categorization

• XREF: The Kahn quote’s ‘author/text’ metaphor echoes the reader’s notes on how a completed design renders its designer moot — similar logic to arguments about institutions persisting after their founders’ logic is forgotten. — connects to: The clock metaphor’s autonomy forced theological debate over God’s intervention — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 851
• SEED: Angle: how a single conceptual move — God as clockmaker — quietly licensed the whole project of human mastery; the metaphysics behind secular domination.
• DEEPTHINKING: Kahn’s framing — ‘no need to think about the author as long as we have the text’ — compactly captures the withdrawal-of-divine-governance premise underpinning Western modernity; dense enough to sit with.