God the "Almighty Watchmaker"?

When I first heard the term Deism, I was taking a European History course that was taught in a dense-packed university lecture hall filled with about 800 students. Our class was learning about the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, and how their desires for new knowledge and wisdom brought about profound changes to Western society. One of these changes was a dramatic shift in long-established ideas about the existence and nature of God.

Deists derive the existence of God from observation, experience and reason, not from the sacred texts, miracles and divine revelations that form the foundation of "revealed" religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As a young college student, I had trouble embracing the Deistic idea of the "Watchmaker" God who created the universe, set it in motion by way of natural laws, and then withdrew from His creation. According to this view, God does not actively intervene in individual human lives or the natural world. To borrow an idea from Voltaire's Candide, God created the garden and the things that inhabit it, and then he left humans responsible for cultivating it according to reason, morality and individual conscience.

Fifteen years later, this view of a mechanistic, impersonal and supremely rational deity still leaves me cold. I agree that one can observe the many designs found in the natural world and from them, infer the existence of a Designer commonly known as "God." I agree that one does not need any special text or divine revelation to know that God exists. It is also likely that God does not intervene in elements of the natural world, such as the ocean tides and weather. But I do not believe that a rational and loving God would create beings as diverse and complex as humans, only to leave them without any guidance beyond what reason allows them to comprehend for themselves!

Reason is rendered completely useless in anxiety-filled moments of mental paralysis. Whenever we can no longer think our way to a solution for a problem, let us simply be still, suspend our thought process for a few moments, and surrender to what Jesus called "the Kingdom of God within." Whenever we leave our difficulties to God instead of ourselves, we discover new possibilities and experience life feeling renewed, confident and hopeful once again.