Faith & RitualGreek → English
Theism
/ˈθiːɪzəm/noun
Belief in a god who created the world and remains involved in it.
The Greek roots
θεός
theós
god
Literally: “god-doctrine”
Follow a root:θεός24 words
The story of the word
Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, needed a name for the position he was defending against materialists and put θεός into the -ism frame in the 1670s. The word was born as one half of an argument, which is why it has never sat comfortably on its own. Its quarrel with deism came later: by the eighteenth century theism meant a god who intervenes, deism a god who wound the clock and walked away.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1670s
Same family
atheismmonotheismtheologyenthusiasmpantheon
In a sentence
The course spent one week on classical theism and three on the objections to it.