hus, deism is the source of the commonly voiced concept that "God is in control."
To the deist, however, God is a remote God. While God may be a causal agent, He is not seen as a Father. In fact, He is not even seen as a Friend. God is an impersonal being who does not involve himself intimately in the affairs of man, nor is He really interested in looking at man up close. He created the universe, set it in motion, and then withdrew from the earthly realm, leaving man unable to know Him truly. In one description, this state of affairs is expressed thus: "Like a great watchmaker, he designed the intricacies and beauty of creation and then, having wound it up like a giant machine, he left it to run on its own without divine intervention" ("God the Father" 3).
Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas depart significantly from the deist view, yet they do not completely agree with one another either. Between deism and St. Augustine, a paradigm shift occurred. From the cut-and-dried deistic notion of God as a remote and essentially uncaring being was somehow derived a new view of Him as integral to man's life and the central figure in it. In the following sections, each philosopher will be profiled separately along with his contribution to the issues of religious thought.
St. Augustine of Hippo lived from 354 to 430 and is praised by Philip Schaff in the History of the Christian Church as "a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, dominating, like a pyramid, antiquity and the succeeding ages" (Portalié). Schaff asserts that "Compared with the great philosophers of past centuries and modern times, he is the equal of them all; among theologians he is undeniably the first, and such has been his influence that none of the Fathers, Scholastics, or Reformers has surpassed it" (Portalié). Augustine is known for his concept of original sin and his literal interpretation of the Bible, but h...