Deism affirms that religious truth is known by reason rather than by revelation, that the existence and nature of God, and the basic principles of morality, can be discovered through the exercise of human reason and the observation of nature, without reliance on sacred books, prophets, or churches. Flourishing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, deism held that a rational religion open to all people in all times is more credible than one resting on particular claimed revelations, and it looked to the order of the natural world as evidence of a wise Creator.
Herbert's De Veritate (1624) set out what he called the "five common notions" he held to be inscribed in all human minds independent of any particular revelation: that a supreme deity exists, that this deity ought to be worshipped, that virtuous living is the chief part of worship, that vice and wrongdoing must be repented, and that reward and punishment follow in a life beyond this one. Herbert argued that because these five notions, in his view, recur across cultures and religions that never had contact with one another, they constitute the universal rational core of true religion, with everything beyond them, including the specific scriptures, miracles, and clergy of the particular revealed faiths, an accretion added later by human institutions rather than genuine divine communication.