“Need I continue?”
Please do. It’s entertaining to see someone trying to turn Ethan Allen and his mentor Thomas Young into “apologists for the existence of God”.
Unless your idea of “God” is nature and reason alone, a position which Allen spends his book defending amidst his attacks on Moses, revealed religion, eternal punishment for sin, God speaking creation into existence, and anything else that his unaided reason alone couldn’t come up with.
I suspect that Allen would be surprised that anyone could miss his point since it’s right there in his title: “Reason: The Only Oracle of Man”. “Only” excludes everything other than reason, such as biblical revelation. But then he does surround his religion of nature proclamations with flowery, biblical sounding subordinate clauses, which apparently serves to fool the easily misled.
As for Thomas Paine whom you brought up... he, like Allen and Young, was a big fan of the Goddess Reason... his blast against biblical religion being his ‘The Age of Reason’... and after his brief sojourn in the American colonies he lit out for the land of Reason, Revolutionary France. Where he invented his own religion, Theophilanthropism... kind of an oddball New Agey cult that Oprah Winfrey might find agreeable.
Meaning that Ethan Allen and his mentor Thomas Young are indeed “apologists for the existence of God,” contrary to the very thing that you asserted, which was "There were also few prominent atheists. Ethan Allen is one who comes to mind. And thus you choose to oppose," and thus opposed the statement, "“No, none were atheists.”
I suspect that Allen would be surprised that anyone could miss his point since it’s right there in his title: “Reason: The Only Oracle of Man”. “Only” excludes everything other than reason, such as biblical revelation.
Which is consistent with deism which is indeed a belief in the existence of a supreme being, albeit a watchmaker God who thus is not the oracle for man, but the source of the reason that is. In contrast to deism is atheism - a distinction you yourself had made but which you impose upon the likes of Allen - which is disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods. Indeed, “Need I continue?”
And nor was i arguing that deism was Christian (it is not), which is a different argument. You simply cannot make deism to be Christian nor atheism to be deism no matter how much you may want to make the likes of Allen into atheist. It's that simple.
But I like some of your other posts that I have seen on this pro-God (not simply deist) forum. Grace and peace thru Jesus the Lord (http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/).
Unless your idea of “God” is nature and reason alone,
That is simply not what they are arguing, but that reason leads to the conclusion that there is a creator, to which nature testifies, but not being the creation, for the Creator is its cause. Since they believe that there is a Creator, but not as involved in actively guiding or interfering with man or some other aspects of the God of the Bible, thus they consider Biblical conceptions of him to be idolatry.
The laws of nature having subjected mankind to a state of absolute dependence on something out of it, and manifestly beyond themselves ...this sense of dependency, which results from experience and reasoning on the facts, which every day cannot fail to produce, has uniformly established the knowledge of our dependency to every individual of the species who are rational, which necessarily involves, or contains in it, the idea of a ruling power, or that there is a God, which ideas are synonymous.
The globe with its productions, the planets in their motions, and the starry heavens in their magnitudes, surprise our senses and confound our reason, in their munificent lessons of instruction concerning God, by means whereof, we are apt to be more or less lost in our ideas of the object of divine adoration, though at the same time every one is truly sensible that their being and preservation is from God.
the character of the true God has been much neglected, to the great detriment of truth, justice, and morality in the world that mankind can be uniform in their religious opinions, or worship God according to knowledge, except they can form a consistent arrangement of ideas of the Divine character.
From hence we are authorized from reason to conclude, that the vast system of causes and effects are thus necessarily connected , (speaking of the natural world only,) and the whole regularly and necessarily dependent on a self-existent cause: so that we are obliged to admit an independent cause ,
As far as we understand nature, we are become acquainted with the character of God, for the knowledge of nature is the revelation of God.
there could be no proportion, figure, or motion, without wisdom and power; wisdom to plan, and power to execute, and these are perfections, when applied to the works of nature, which signify the agency or superintendency of God...for motion implies a mover as much as creation does a creator.
And from hence arises our obligations to love and adore God, because he provides for, and is beneficent to us.
Equally absurd would it be for us to deny the providence of God, by "whom we live, move, and have oar being," because we cannot comprehend it.
as we learn from the works of nature an idea of the power and wisdom of God, so from our own rational nature we learn an idea of his moral perfections.
As creation was the result of eternal and infinite wisdom, justice, goodness, and truth, and effected by infinite power, it is like its great author, mysterious to us.
We are certain that God is a rational, wise, understanding Being, because he has in degree made us so, and his wisdom, power, and goodness is visible to us in his creation, and government of the world.
If creation is from God, it is not actually God. And thus Allen is a deist, not an atheist. I really should not have to show more.