The term was used in 1859 by German philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft.
God in Deism, that is used in the United States Declaration of Independence: "...the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."
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).
Irreligion, which may include atheism, agnosticism, ignosticism, antireligion, skepticism, freethought, antitheism, apatheism, non-belief, secular humanism, and deism, varies in the different countries around the world.
Although many different aspects were discussed, concerns over the Deistic approach of a belief in a Creative Principle on the one hand and the Theistic approach of a belief in a Supreme Being on the other took such a precedence as to hinder other proceedings, and it was not until 1877 that through mediation of the Swiss Supreme Council a conciliatory position on the matter was reached.
As its full title makes clear, it is a conservative defence of orthodox Christian belief against deism, by means of an apparent paradox: the afterlife is not mentioned in terms in the Pentateuch (i.e. Torah – see Jewish eschatology#"The world to come"), making Mosaic Judaism distinctive among ancient religions; from which, Warburton argues, it is seen that Moses received a divine revelation.
Smith’s writing also spoke positively of deism, noting its practitioners were “of amiable characters, or sense, learning and morality,” and he argued that Universalism could serve as a bridge to connect the theological separation between deists and Christians.