33. From God as Agent to God as Architect

With this episode we begin to look at the chapter 'The Impersonal Order'. As the exclusive authority of reason applied to the natural sciences starts to be applied to other fields, the communal image of God starts to shift. God is relegated to the sidelines with the Deist notion that he has set up the world and it is now left to humanity to make of it what we will.

Taylor claims that this movement was powered not only by reason, as some would posit, but an emerging distaste for 'old religion':

"The slide to Deism was not just the result of 'reason' and 'science', but reflected a deep-seated moral distaste for the old religion that sees God as an agent in history" (p. 274).

References:

-Pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: (270-275)