Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who believes in the existence of a God; especially, one who believes in a God who sustains a personal relation to his creatures. In the former sense opposed to atheist, in the latter to deist.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun One who believes in the existence of a God; especially, one who believes in a personal God; -- opposed to atheist.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun One who believes in the existence of a god, goddess, gods and/or goddesses.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective of or relating to theism
  • noun one who believes in the existence of a god or gods

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek θεός ("god") + -ist.

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Examples

  • I used to be an atheist but then I realized that "a-theist" is still god centered.

    i got tagged 2008

  • And as I pointed out, your position effectively drains the terms "theistic evolutionist" and "creationist" of all meaning, such that every theist is both a "theistic evolutionist" and a "creationist" at the same time.

    Behe and Theistic Evolution 2007

  • And as I pointed out, your position effectively drains the terms "theistic evolutionist" and "creationist" of all meaning, such that every theist is both a "theistic evolutionist" and a "creationist" at the same time.

    Behe and Theistic Evolution 2007

  • And as I pointed out, your position effectively drains the terms "theistic evolutionist" and "creationist" of all meaning, such that every theist is both a "theistic evolutionist" and a "creationist" at the same time.

    Behe and Theistic Evolution 2007

  • Shouldn't He be just part of life and aligned with good whether someone identifies as theist or not?

    Yahoo! Answers: Latest Questions 2009

  • To be fair, I think the theist is confident, tolerant, sympathetic if and only if: he’s raped an altar boy, tortured to death a heretic, successfully waged war on an infidel nation.

    Difference Between Theists, Agnostics and Atheists | My[confined]Space 2009

  • Anyway, that would be a problem for the atheist’s position in this case, since the theist is happy to stop at a single (or finite-numbered, just as good) universe, since the next step is God.

    A Fine-Tuned Multiverse 2010

  • To summarize a long and heated debate, he sees himself as a "theist" -- a non-atheist -- but this doesn't translate as belief in God in the conventional sense.

    Wendi L. Adamek: The Nature Of Reality And The Long-Distance Relationship Wendi L. Adamek 2011

  • To summarize a long and heated debate, he sees himself as a "theist" -- a non-atheist -- but this doesn't translate as belief in God in the conventional sense.

    Wendi L. Adamek: The Nature Of Reality And The Long-Distance Relationship Wendi L. Adamek 2011

  • Clearly an atheist calling a theist stupid would be rather... stupid in itself wouldn't it?

    "Fundamentalist Atheists," Godwin's Law, and Blake's Law Steve Caldwell 2008

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