Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいます。
The one thing all his theistic critics got right was that Einstein was not one of them. He was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion that he was a theist. So, was he a deist, like Voltaire and Diderot? Or a pantheist, like Spinoza, whose philosophy he admired: 'I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings'?
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A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation.
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A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.
宗教用語が出てきますね。基本的な用語の様なのでこの際 "theist" と "deist" 覚えたいと思います。意味は引用個所の説明がありますが、元の言葉 "theism" と "deism" の意味を辞書で確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: theism: Belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.: Put more succinctly, theism is god-belief, and atheism is its absence.
deism: Belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. The term is used chiefly of an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind.
"theism" は全知全能の一神教で "deism" は世界は神が作ったがその後のことは神は関与していないと考えていますね。神道やアニミズムもこの範疇に入りそうだ。