John Balguy - A letter to a Deist concerning the Beauty and Excellency of Moral Virtue, and the Support and Improvement which it receives from the Christian Religion
Many of the most influential philosophers of that time, like the Encyclopédistes, Voltaire or Reimarus, were secularists or promoted a deist view: In a nutshell, they proclaimed that nature was the only revelation God has ever made and thus the preoccupation with any other alleged revelation was superfluous.
In his youth, Diderot was originally a follower of Voltaire and his deist Anglomanie, but gradually moved away from this line of thought towards materialism and atheism, a move which was finally realised in 1747 in the philosophical debate in the second part of his La Promenade du sceptique (1747).
Antony Flew, an academic philosopher who promoted atheism for most of his adult life indicated that the arguments of Gerald Schroeder had influenced his decision to become a deist.
The phrase I die a deist, an honest worshiper of Allah, may point to his religious tolerance, and the fact that Christian Arabs in the Middle East use the word Allah for the Christian god, as does the Indonesian Bible.
The titles of Pnin's best-known poems, Man (1804) and God (1805), mirror Derzhavin's on purpose, as he sought to refute the great poet's idealism by taking up the Deist stance of Radishchev, Volney, and d'Holbach.
His great-grandfather, Rev Nicolas Tindal, was the translator and continuer of the History of England by Paul de Rapin — a seminal work in its day — and he was also the great great grandnephew of Dr Matthew Tindal, the deist and author of 'Christianity as Old as the Creation' (known as the 'deist's bible') and descendant of Thomas Clifford, 1st Baron Clifford of Chudleigh.