Theism

Theism is, in its broadest sense, the belief in the existence of at least one deity or supreme being. The word derives from the Greek theós, meaning "god" or "gods". It entered English in the seventeenth century, when the philosopher and theologian Ralph Cudworth used it in his 1678 book The True Intellectual System of the Universe to describe those who hold that a perfectly conscious, self-existing mind is the cause of all other things.

Because the term is so broad, it can cover the polytheistic religions of ancient Greece or Egypt, where many personal gods acted in the world, as well as the great monotheistic faiths. What these share is the idea that gods are personal, conscious beings capable of influencing nature without being wholly bound by its laws. In a narrower sense, theism refers to belief in a single God who is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good, who created the world, stands apart from it and actively governs it. This conception is associated with perfect being theology, and it differs from deism, which accepts a creator but denies divine intervention in the world and the authority of revelation.

Philosophers disagree about what it means to believe in God. Some treat theism as a mental state, a belief that can be held with varying degrees of confidence; others treat it as a proposition that is either true or false whether or not anyone believes it. Belief is distinct from faith, which often involves trust and personal commitment, and from mere desire or hope that God exists. Someone may wish a deity existed while judging its existence unlikely, and such a person would not count as a theist.

The current debate centers on whether these beliefs can be rationally justified. Classical arguments, including the cosmological, the ontological and those drawn from the design of the universe, remain under discussion. They are set against atheism, which rejects or does not accept the existence of gods, and agnosticism, which holds that such existence is unknown or unknowable. In contemporary surveys, belief in God as described in sacred scriptures varies considerably from country to country.