Friday, April 25, 2025

Pandeism and the Oxford English Dictionary

 This was originally posted on Everything2 in May 2021; I am today (in April 2025) copying to the Pandeism Blog as a backup should Everything2 go kaplooey in some undetermined future.


Welcome to a miscellaneous node of the Pandeism index!!



I hereby dedicate this node and all of its contents to the public domain. Any person may republish any portion, for any reason.

A decade ago I submitted to the famed Oxford English Dictionary the word, "Pandeism," with about a half-dozen references to writings using the word throughout history. The submission was rejected, deemed to not have enough documentation supporting that the word is -- well, a word.


And so I waited for ten years, curating additional uses. And this afternoon, I sent to the good old OED the following:


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This regards the family of words around the lemma, pandeism, with descendants pandeist, pandeists, pandeistic, pandeistical, and pandeistically, also including hyphenated forms of each (e.g., pan-deism), in theophilosophical discourse. The word may be defined as:


(ˈpændiːɪz(ə)m) [mod. f. Gr. παν- all + f. L. de-us god + -ism.]


The combination of pantheism and deism; and particularly the belief that the creator of the universe created the universe by wholly becoming the universe, ceasing to exist as a separate entity.



The earliest use found thus far of any term falling within this family occurs in 1787, in German:


1787 Gottfried Große Naturgeschichte: mit erläuternden Anmerkungen 323/165. Beym Plinius, den man, wo nicht Spinozisten, doch einen Pandeisten nennen konnte, ist Natur oder Gott kein von der Welt getrenntes oder abgesondertes Wesen. Seine Natur ist die ganze Schöpfung im Konkreto, und eben so scheint es mit seiner Gottheit beschaffen zu seyn. {English translation: In Pliny, whom one could call, if not a Spinozist, but perhaps a Pandeist, Nature is not a being divided off or separated from the world. His nature is the whole of creation, in concrete, and the same appears to be true also of his divinity.}



A cluster of uses is found beginning in the 1830s, one in English and three in Italian:


1834, Filippo Nannetti di Bibulano, in Giovanni Silvestri Sermons and Panegyrics of the Father Filippo Nani of Lojana, p. 286, Sermon XVIII: Miracles. A te, fatal Pandeista! le leggi della creata natura son contingenti e mutabili; non altro essendo in sostanza che moti e sviluppi di forze motrici. {English translation: To you, fatal Pandeist! the laws that create nature are contingent and mutable, not another being in substance with forces driven by motions and developments.}


1838, author unknown, Il legato di un vecchio ai giovani della sua patria (The Legacy of an Old Man to the Young People of his Country). La robusta immaginazione gli fe ravvisare gli effetti come causa, quindi deificando i fenomeni naturali divenne un Pandeista, un istitutore della Mitologia, un sacerdote, un Augure. {English translation: His robust imagination recognized the effects as a cause, then deifying natural phenomena, he became a Pandeist, an instructor of Mythology, a priest, an Augur.}


1838, Luigi Ferrarese, Memorie risguardanti la dottrina frenologica 164/16. ...profana i misteri, dichiarandoli in parte vacui di senso, ed in parte riducendoli a volgari allusioni, ed a prette metafore; costringe, come faceva osservare un dotto Critico, la rivelazione a cambiare il suo posto con quello del pensiero istintivo e dell' affermazione senza riflessione e colloca la ragione fuori della persona dell'uomo dichiarandolo un frammento di Dio, una spezie di pandeismo spirituale introducendo, assurdo per noi, ed al Supremo Ente ingiurioso, il quale reca onda grave alla libertà del medesimo, ec, ec. {English translation: ...he profanes the mysteries, declaring them partly devoid of meaning, and partly reducing them to vulgar allusions and pure metaphors; forces, as a learned Critic noted, the revelation to swap places with instinctive thought and assertion without reflection without and places reason outside man, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual pandeism, which is absurd to us and insulting to the Supreme Being, which gravely offends freedom itself, etc, etc.}



A parallel or related coinage as seen in 1838, in English:


1838, Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis: Or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations and Religions. p. 439. ISBN 1-56459-273-1. I am induced to think that this Pandeism was a doctrine, which had been received both by Buddhists and Brahmins.


The author's writings suggest access to previous coinage, and of the root terms from which other coinages appear to derive. Other examples (with meaning becoming more explicit as we move towards present day) include:



1896, Gustavo Uzielli, Ricerche intorno a Leonardo da Vinci ("Research into Leonardo da Vinci"), p. xxxv. Certo è che quel concetto forma una delle basi morali fondamentali di religiosi i cui segnaci sono oltre i due terzi della popolazione del globo, mentre è influenzato dall'indole speciale di ciascuna di esse, cioè da un idealismo sovrumano nel Cristianesimo, da un nichilismo antiumano nel buddismo, e da un pandeismo eclettico nell'incipiente ma progrediente Bramoismo indiano; e a queste credenze che ammettono il principio ideale della fratellanza universale, conviene aggiungere il naturalismo estetico scientifico greco-romano e moderno che inspira, in modo sostanziale, tutto l'insegnamento pubblico Europeo, e contro il quale protestarono sempre e molto logicamente gli ortodossi cristiani, da Paolo II papa a Giuseppe di Maistre. {English translation: It is certain that this concept forms a fundamental moral bases of religious whose cable markers are more than two-thirds of the world's population, while special influence on the capacities of each of them, by a superhuman idealism in Christianity, a nihilism antihuman in Buddhism, and an incipient but eclectic pandeism progressing in Bramanist Indian beliefs; and those who admit the principle ideal of universal brotherhood, it is worthwhile scientific naturalism aesthetic greek-roman and modern inhales, substantially, all the teaching European audience, and against which they protested always very logically and the Orthodox Christians, Pope Paul II to Joseph Maistre}.


1897, Rev. Henry Grattan Guinness, "Missionary Review", in John Harvey Kellogg's International Health and Temperance Association, The Medical Missionary, 1897, p. 126. To her, God is everything, and everything is God, and, therefore, everything may be adored. ... Her pan-deism is a pandemonium.


1898, J. St. J. Higgins, "Deistical Platitude Vamping and "Providence," The Freethinker, 17 July 1898, 461/832. A thing of shreds and patches,/Of legends, tales, and snatches; and for the cognate deistical or pan-deistical emanations of such quasi-theologians as (to take a contemporaneous example) your correspondent.


1906, Charles Norman Myers, "Man of Sorrows," Chattanooga Daily Times, September 24, 1906, p. 5. The man who in exultant faith said "I and the Father are one" was a Pandeist, a believer in the identification of the universe and all things contained therein with Deity.


1915, Louis S. Hardin, Sheffield Scientific School "The Chimerical Application of Machiavelli's Principles," p. 463. We hear men prophecy that this war means the death of Christianity and an era of Pandeism or perhaps even the destruction of all which we call modern civilization and culture.


1941, Charles Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism‎ 360/348. Just as AR is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created - this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations.


1963, Charles Anselm Bolton, "Beyond the Ecumenical: Pan-deism?" Christianity Today, 1963, p. 21. I first came upon this extension of ecumenism into pan-deism among some Roman Catholic scholars interested primarily in the “reunion of the churches”...


1964, Belle Privette, "New Ideologies Sweeping Campus," The Daily Tar Heel, November 17, 1964, p. 2. Vaguely related to Pantheism (or perhaps Pandeism), its proponents have been heard to assert that Jello is the basic substance of the Universe.


1967, Francis E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon 234/169. What appeared here, at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism (see theion) that is the legacy of the Milesians.


1971, Rousas John Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (1971 2007), Ch. VIII-7, p. 142. The position of Pope Paul came close to being a pan-Deism, and pan-Deism is the logical development of the virus of Hellenic thought.


1974, Bert Beverly Beach, Ecumenism: Boon Or Bane? (1974), p. 259 (quoting George H. Williams, Dimensions of Roman Catholic Ecumenism (1965), p. 31-32). It was felt that ecumenism was being contaminated by “pan-Deist” and syncretistic tendencies.


1989, Liam Rector, The Day I Was Older: On the Poetry of Donald Hall‎ 287/69 (reprinted in 1992 Hayden Carruth, Suicides and Jazzers 242/161). Perhaps we can say that the dominant cultural traits of any era are the diseases of the human spirit which must be accepted and transcended by the writers of that era if they are to succeed, eg Whitman's progressivism and optimism (with which he wrote the greatest elegy in American literature), Pope's rationalism and pan-deism (with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature), and Dante's Thomistic, not to say Gothic determinism (with which he wrote the greatest humane lyric of all time).


1995, Albuquerque Journal, "Marine's Ballad Honors Soldiers, Trappist Monks" November 11, 1995, B-10. He describes his current spiritual position as pandeism or pan-en-deism, something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit.


1997, Bob Burridge, Theology Proper - Lesson 4: The Decrees of God. If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion". That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism. … The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism.


1998, Van Andel, Education Institute K-12 Education: Perspectives on the Future 167/92. Everything is sectarianism with him, except what squares exactly with the notions of Universalists and those who have been absurdly called 'pan deists' and 'theo-philanthropists.


2003, Jon Gee, The Metaphysicians' Desk Reference: Including the Revised Formal System of Metaphysics 528/164 Yet still, should the demigod Pan come to bear, the result will be Pan-deism, the opening of Pandora's Box.


2005, Dan Schneider, Review of Stranger In A Strange Land (The Uncut Version), by Robert A. Heinlein, Hackwriters.com, https://www.hackwriters.com/strangerH.htm. He honestly believes in his own free will, which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, ‘Thou art God!’.


2006, Charles Brough, Untwisting the Social Sciences 260/220. *FREE THINKERS: all people whose beliefs regarding "spirits" are compatible with modern science. Deism, pandeism, agnosticism and atheism are compatible, while theism is not.


2007, Bruce Parry, quoted in Ed Caesar, "Bruce almighty; He really has been there and done that" Saturday Magazine 11 Aug., 2007. Now, I'd describe myself as pan-deist, reluctantly verging on atheist.


2008, John Lachs, Robert B. Talisse, American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia‎ 847/310. Some pragmatists (such as William James) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.


2008, Dr. Alan J. Lipman, The Impulsively Unreflective Duo In..."McCain Goes Negative!", Dr. Alan J. Lipman's Head of State: Political and Media Psychology, Saturday, October 04, 2008, http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/10/impulsively-unreflective-duo-inmccain.html. He is carrying flyers, masking tape; telephone wires are wrapped around his arms hanging in every way; a tattered copy of the book "Accusations of Fascism, Communism, Terrorism, Drug Use, Pedophilia, Islamism, Adultery, Pandeism, Cannibalism, Cubism, Miscegenation, and Spousal Abuse...for Dummies!" is rolled and stuffed in his left pocket, filled with bookmarks...


2009, Peter C. Rogers, Ultimate Truth, Book 1‎ 212/121. This is the key feature which distinguishes them from panentheists and pandeists. As such, although many religions may claim to hold pantheistic elements, they are more commonly panentheistic or pandeistic in nature. (lines duplicated without reference in 2010 Peter Kien-Hong Yu God Is, by Inference, One Dot: Paradigm Shift 196/110).


2009, Sean F. Johnston, The History of Science: A Beginner's Guide 292/90. In its most abstract form, deism may not attempt to describe the characteristics of such a non-interventionist creator, or even that the universe is identical with God (a variant known as pandeism).


2009, Dewayne A. Pattie, in No King But Caesar & The Return of The Melek Tsedek: A Biblical Study on Faith, Religion, and the Antichrist From the Covenant Perspective, September 29, 2009, p. 45. Just as the Pharisee thought he could come before God and present to Him his good works, the knowledge of good and evil literally became the doorway of pan-deism (that is, many ways to God).


2009, Tristram Hunt, The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels 442/44. What Engels took from this was an idea of modern Pantheism (or, rather, Pandeism) which dissolved the pietist ethos of religious alienation and, instead, merged divinity and humanity together. God and reason became one in the unfolding of freedom and progress.


2009, Philip B. Corbett, "Metaphor Trouble", The New York Times, https://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/metaphor-trouble/. Ex: prenuptial, pandeism, hyperextension, polyamory… These types of words come into the English language by combining a Greek and Latin word to form a new word.


2010, William C. Lane, "Leibniz's Best World Claim Restructured," American Philosophical Journal, January 2010, volume 47, issue 1, p. 76. In pandeism, God is no superintending, heavenly power, capable of hourly intervention into earthly affairs. No longer existing "above," God cannot intervene from above and cannot be blamed for failing to do so. Instead God bears all suffering, whether the fawn's or anyone else's.


2010, Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, Susan F. Marseken, Pandeism: Beliefs, Religious, Universe, Deism, Pantheism, Term (Language), Hierarchy, Philosophy 208/1


2010, Allan R. Fuller, Thought: The Only Reality, p. 79. Pandeism is another belief that states that God is identical to the universe, but God no longer exists in a way where He can be contacted; therefore, this theory can only be proven to exist by reason. Pandeism views the entire universe as being from God and now the universe is the entirety of God, but the universe at some point in time will fold back into one single being which is God Himself that created all. Pandeism raises the question as to why would God create a universe and then abandon it? As this relates to pantheism, it raises the question of how did the universe come about what is its aim and purpose?


2010, Ronald R. Zollinger, Mere Mormonism: Defense of Mormon Theology, p. 6. Pandeism. This is a kind of pantheism that incorporates a form of deism, holding that the universe is identical to God but also that God was previously a conscious and sentient force or entity that designed and created the universe.


2011, David Michael Wylie, Just Stewardship, p. 24. This is very different from pantheism and also very different from deism. Compare panentheism and pantheism, pandeism, panendeism. Read Acts 17:28.


2011, Matthew J. Drury, EDEN², p. 229. Were the revolutionary Pandeist concepts of the Third Testament just a bunch of lies invented by a monster? Could the synergy between deism and pantheism championed by Damarus be truly mythical, as Ammold Paramo had advocated?


2011, Alan H. Dawe, The God Franchise: A Theory of Everything, p. 48. Pandeism: This is the belief that God created the universe, is now one with it, and so, is no longer a separate conscious entity.


2011, Bradley Alan Skaggs, "Topic modeling for Wikipedia link disambiguation," University of Maryland, College Park, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, p. 23. (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) - a four volume treatise written by Dutch naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, and considered the first formal articulation of Pandeism.


2012, Donald L. Jackson, Religious Lies - Religious Truths: It's Time To Tell The Truth!, p. 175. Charles Hartshorne introduced his process theology in the 1940s, in which he examined, and discarded pantheism, deism and pandeism in favor of panentheism, finding that such a doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negative aspects.


2012, Henry Harrison Epps, Jr., End times Organizations, Doctrines and Beliefs, p. 220. The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy; particularly archaeoastronomy, astronomy, ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, psychology, and physics.


2012, Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being, p. 249. In his opinion, the fear that pandeism or the tendency to reduce faith into the external means by which it is obtained would eventually lead to the viewing of these means as having purely subjective, and also mutable, validity, was behind the Catholic church's emphasis on the objective truth of the symbols themselves in relation to the individual religious experience. 2013, Al Kresta, Dangers to the Faith: Recognizing Catholicism's 21st Century Opponents, p. 255. “New Age” cosmologies reject materialism, naturalism and physicalism. They are commonly pantheistic or pandeistic.


2013, Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughnm Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments, 5th Edition, p. 506, § 6.3, "Faith and Meaning: Believing the Unbelievable," §§ “Thought Probe: James and Pandeism.” The view that the universe is not only God but also a person is called "pandeism." Do you agree with James that viewing the universe as a person would help give meaning to your life?


2013, Michael S. Bruner, John Davenport, Jim Norwine, "An Evolving Worldview: Culture-Shift in University Students", in Jim Norwine, editor, A World After Climate Change and Culture-Shift (Springer, 2013), p. 46. For others, this “fullness” is present in more religious-oriented pantheistic or pandeistic belief systems with, in the latter case, the inclusion of God as the ever unfolding expression of a complex universe with an identifiable beginning but no teleological direction necessarily present.


2014, Peter Moore, Valhalla and the Fjord: A Spiritual Motorcycle Journey, p. 19. The site seems to exude some force, as if there is a multitude of souls in everything around you. I don't know if this is the philosophy of Pandeism or Pantheism, but in the tranquility of the moment, I don't care either.


2014, Corey S. Powell, "Defending Giordano Bruno: A Response from the Co-Writer of “Cosmos”," Discover, March 13, 2014. Bruno imagines all planets and stars having souls (part of what he means by them all having the same “composition”), and he uses his cosmology as a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology.


2014, Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives, p. 193. The New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy.


2015, Dr Michael Arnheim, The God Book, p. 72. Straddling as he does deism and pantheism, Einstein could possibly be classified as a believer in pandeism, a label indicating a hybrid blend of pantheism with deism, which was well described by Raphael Lataster in 2013.


2015, Douglas MacGowan, Mother Nature Network, What Is Deism?, May 21, 2015. Over time there have been other schools of thought formed under the umbrella of deism including Christian deism, belief in deistic principles coupled with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and Pandeism, a belief that God became the entire universe and no longer exists as a separate being.


2015, Colin Cavendish-Jones, "A Weakness for Arguing with Anybody: G. K. Chesterton and Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy Journal, Vol. 31, Autumn 2015, pp. 108-129, 126. He likens Meredith to Walt Whitman, praising both, though Whitman was a sceptic and a pandeist , and the frankness about his sexual inclinations in Leaves of Grass can scarcely have been congenial to Chesterton, who condemned Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality...


2016, Graham Ward, How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I, page 313. Attention to Christ and the Spirit delivers us from pantheism, pandeism, and process theology.


2016, Andrew Gregory, Anaximander: A Re-assessment, p. 100. While some construction using pan-, whether it be pantheism, pandeism or pankubernism describes Anaximander reasonably well, there is one further point to address here.


2016, Douglas M. Stokes, "To the Editor", The Journal of Parapsychology; Durham Vol. 80, Iss. 2, (Fall 2016): 265-270. These experiences may be factors (along with philosophical analyses) that led me to my current view that the universe is based in mind rather than matter and to my embrace of mentalistic philosophies such as idealism, panpsychism, pandeism, and panendeism.


2017, Thurman 'Lee' Hester, Jr., "Native American spirituality", in Graham Oppy, N.N. Trakakis, Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues - Volume 3, p. 46. However, something like pan-deism does to some extent capture the nature of God as I experience it.


2017, Sushma Sahajpal, "Hindu Dharma - Living on the Edge of Infinity", in Pandeism: An Anthology, p. 366. "The key thing with all these forms in Hinduism is a teaching found in Pandeism as well, that Divinity is everywhere, in everyone and everything.


2018, Antonin Tuynman, Is Reality a Simulation?, p. 8. This Anthology with contributions from Technoshamans, Physicalist scientists, Pantheists, Pandeists and Panpsychists will rock your mental foundations, haunt your convictions and put you through the epistemological wringer.


2018, Raphael Lataster, The Case Against Theism: Why the Evidence Disproves God’s Existence, p. 198. For the already-discussed considerations, and also when considering the relative robustness of pandeism, and the potential for fewer contradictions with the actual scenario as explained by current evidence, (4) also favours pandeistic god-models.


2019, Helge Kragh, "Max Weinstein: Physics, Philosophy, Pandeism," https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11299. This is a brief introduction to the life and ideas of the Lithuanian-German physicist, philosopher and religious thinker Max B. Weinstein, who is today best known for his thoughts concerning so-called pandeism.


2019, Michael Newton Keas, Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion, p. 150. He reported that Bruno, in a few of his books, “imagines all planets and stars having souls” and “uses his cosmology as a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology.” Pandeism is a variation of pantheism in which the creator becomes the cosmos.


2019, Hedda Hassel Mørch, "Beyond Physicalism: Philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch defends the idea that consciousness pervades the cosmos", John Horgan, Scientific American, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/beyond-physicalism/. There is a religious view I find interesting, which is pandeism: the view that God used to exist, and be the only thing that existed, and then transformed himself into the universe, and so no longer exists.


2019, James B. Glattfelder, Information—Consciousness—Reality: How a New Understanding of the Universe Can Help Answer Age-Old Questions of Existence, p. 534. For instance, in Hinduism, the notion of lila is akin to the concept of pandeism.


2019, Ralph Lewis, "The Varieties of Mystical Experience," Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/201912/the-varieties-mystical-experience. His own beliefs appear to have been closest to pantheism or pandeism (an amalgam of pantheism and deism).


2019, Wook-Dong Kim, Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: Five Readings, p. 120. Scrutiny of Zorba the Greek reveals, however, that Kazantzakis’s ecological view sometimes goes beyond traditional pantheism (All is God) toward either panentheism (All is in God), first coined by the Austrian philosopher Karl Kraus to explain the kind of pantheism expounded by Baruch Spinoza, or pandeism (God is ubiquitous but does not interfere in the operation of the world), as explored by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.


2020, "Deism", Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Deism/Deists-in-other-countries#ref1042352 Further, such modern variants as “pandeism,” which attempted to unite aspects of Deism with pantheism, held that through the act of creation God became the universe. ... The American logician and process philosopher Charles Hartshorne considered Deism, pandeism, and pantheism as reasonable doctrines of the nature of God; however, he rejected all of these in favour of panentheism, the belief that God is present in the universe while being greater than it.


2020, Joey Kim, "Perspectives of a Wandering Sexual Artist," in Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself, p. 43. I can resonate with Pandeism, a philosophy which takes a different approach but still hits on certain of the more positive themes claimed by religions, like acting lovingly towards others.


2020, Md. Monirul Islam, Oriental Wells: The Early Romantic Poets and Their Eastern Musebooks, p. 217. It is customary to read Wordsworth's pantheism, which has also been termed as pandeism or panentheism, with reference to Neoplatonism and the philosophy of Spinoza or Karl Krause (1781–1832).


2020, Harold Bloom, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death, Yale University Press, p. 373. When he died the laureate declared himself agnostic and pan-deist and at one with the great heretics Giordano Bruno (who was a Hermetist and burned alive by the Church) and Baruch Spinoza (who was excommunicated by the Jews).


2020, Ivan Phillips, Once Upon a Time Lord: The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who, p. 232. A cosmogonic myth, almost pandeistic in its implications, this posits a life form that is arguably one of the most conceptually interesting and imaginative in the show's history.


2020, Michael P. Remler, The Mechanisms, Metaphysics, and History of Consciousness in the World, p. 50. The real significance of the symbiosis becomes evident if one considers the radical pan-psych position that every piece of matter has a “psych” property or pan-deist position that some “Consciousness” interacts with all matter.


2020, Max B. Weinstein, World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature, Deborah Moss, trans., p. 121. It is thus incorrect to equate the conceptions of the Chinese with those of primitive peoples; they really belong much more to Pandeism than to Pananimism – to a dualistic form of it, to be precise.


2020, Angela Volkov, "Artificial Intelligence: A Vengeful or Benevolent God?", Medium, (October 14, 2020), https://medium.com/predict/artificial-intelligence-a-vengeful-or-benevolent-god-555d8b7b7d33. The best we can hope for is that AI allows us to merge with it, giving rise to a Pandeism of sorts, wherein creator and creation meld into one.


2021, Sherman O'Brien, The Lonely Mind of God, p. 121. The result of combining pantheism with deism is pandeism, where a universe emerges, less as a result of creation than as God choosing to embody or become it.


2021, Sal Restivo, Society and the Death of God, p. 123. In the pandeism argument, an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God creates the universe and in the process becomes the universe and loses his powers to intervene in human affairs.




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Since sending that on, I've compiled even more, some new, some not quite so new but newly found....


Paul Zarzyski, ''51: 30 poems, 20 lyrics, 1 self-interview'' (2011), p. 243-244. Agnosticism, however, doesn’t define my stance, which, if pressed, I’d say is a cross between pantheism and deism—Pandeism.


Randolph M. Howes, ''That Proof of God Thingy: A Novel'' (2012), p. 78. This argument was expounded upon by Scott Adams in the book, God's Debris, which put forth a form of Pandeism as its fundamental theological model.


Andy Ross, ''Philosopher: A Memoir'' (2012), p. 445: More properly, my panpsychism has its ideological correlate in pandeism, not pantheism.


Joseph Heath, ''Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives'' (2014), p. 193: New Age movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, pandeism and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy.


Jea Sophia Oh, ‎Marilynn Lawrence, ''Nature's Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism'' (2017), p. 156. Hartshorne prefers to use the term “transcendental deism” in opposition to pantheism (or what he calls “pandeism”).


Leigh Weber, ''Western Political Thought'' (ED-Tech Press, 2021), p. 37, ISBN-10 : 1788824156. In Refutation of All Heresies Hippolytus says: “What the blasphemous folly is of Noetus, and that he devoted himself to the tenets of Heraclitus the Obscure, not to those of Christ.” Hippolytus then goes on to present the inscrutable DK B67: “God (theos) is day and night, winter and summer, but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savor of each.” The fragment seems to support pantheism if taken literally. German physicist and philosopher Max Bernard Weinstein classed these views with pandeism. Justin Beaumont, ''The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity'' (Routledge 2018), p. 83, ISBN-10 : 0367732645. I refer here to monodeism as the default standard concept of deism, distinct from polydeism, pandeism, and spiritual deism.


Lisa Case, Between the Sabbats: The Magick and Mystery of the Interpora (2019), p. 50. The last but not least view is Pandeism, which maintains that God or the Creator became the universe and all that we know and hence, does not interfere or interact with us or the universe, save to simply be a silent part of it.


Anthony Stultz, The Three Principles of Oneness: How Embodying the Cosmic Perspective Can Liberate Your Life (2019), p. 170. Pandeism is a most interesting concept and is a theological doctrine that arose in the eighteenth century and holds that the creator deity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate conscious entity. Collin Booker, English Literature: Eighteenth Century and the Romantic Age (2019), p. 62. Hayden Carruth wrote that it was "Pope's rationalism and pan-deism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature."


Steve Madison, Logos: Logical Religion Unleashed (2020), p. 69. We welcome atheists, heretics, blasphemers, unbelievers, apostates, deists, pandeists, pantheists, panentheists, freethinkers, panpsychists, metaphysicians – anyone who is interested in answering the deep questions of existence with recourse to a priori reason and logic alone.


Cometan, The Institutional Dictionary of Astronism (2021), p. 581. Pandeistic divinology: a divinological position postulating that The Divine created The Universe, but then subsumed into The Universe, after which it ceased to exist as a distinct entity; pandeism is presently seeing some support among early Astroists.


Henry Arnold Davis, Gambling With Your Soul: What Is Your Best Bet? (2021), p. 106. The beliefs of individual Unitarian Universalists range widely, including atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, pandeism, deism, humanism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism, syncretism, Omnism, Neopaganism and the teachings of the Bahá'í Faith.


Rakesh Anand, Is God in Coma? (2021), p. 13. Anyways, I don't want to waste my time here in writing about of the gender, nature, color, number or different conceptions about Gods, such as: Dystheism, Henotheism, Monotheism, Pandeism, Pantheism, Polytheism, and so on.


Brent Price, D.Min., Be Prepared Evangelism: The Personal Evangelism Game Changer (2022), p. 137: A very contemporary deceptive religious concept that targets uninformed and unsaved people is a type of religious belief called Pandeism.


Tariq Goddard, The Repeater Book of Heroism (2022), p. 25: But Bruno was not quite an atheist or pantheist. He most likely followed an apophatic creed (via negativa), making him more of a pandeist.


Ross Thompson, Ten Ways to Weave the World: Matter, Mind, and God, Volume 2: Embodying Mind (2023), p. 30: As its name implies, pandeism is seen as a middle path between pantheism and deism.


Guillermo Kerber, “Panentheism in Christian Ecotheology,” in Luca Valera, ed., Pantheism and Ecology: Cosmological, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives (2023), p. 219-220: His doctrine has been later labeled as “pandeism” or even “pantheism” and criticized because he didn’t acknowledge the ontological difference between God and creation.


Daniel Cardó and Uwe Michael Lang, ''The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger'', (2023), p. 266: Against Bruno, Ratzinger is critical of what other commentators have described as his pandeism.


PGB Galleries, Rare Books & Manuscripts: A PBA Platinum Auction, 2024 (2024), p. 34: Exceptional copy of the author's masterwork, articulating his thesis that there was once a universal religion (which he terms "Pandeism") which morphed into the major world religions, including the Abrahamic faiths and Hinduism and Buddhism.


Travis Dumsday, ''Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual'' (2024), ASIN: B0D6NPK7F4, p. 98: Likewise, that feature distinguishes panspiritism from pandeism, since, according to the latter, the physical cosmos emerges (by a process of becoming) out of an ontologically prior divine conscious subject. On pandeism, God became the universe at the big bang, and the resultant cosmos may (depending on the version of pandeism on offer) inherit some or all of His divine characteristics.


Martin D. Johnson, ''The Atheist's Survival Guide'' (2024), ISBN: 979-8-218-48431-6, p. 89: Instead of embracing traditional concepts of a humanlike deity involved in the creation and moral governance of the universe, they often perceive divinity as an embodiment of universal laws, a perspective that veers toward pantheism or pandeism rather than classical deism.


Kaziwa Salih, ''Genocide Culture: Cultural Habitus, Ethnic Engineering and Religious Doxa'' (Routledge, 2024), ISBN: 978-1032312583, p. 139: This means that the modern version of deism is pan-deism, a combination of both pantheism (the universe as a manifestation of God) and deism.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

The Four Ages of Media

Throughout history, the way we share and consume information has undergone profound transformations, each defined by a dominant medium of communication. These shifts, spanning centuries, decades, and perhaps an eternity, are not merely technological advancements—they reflect the evolving dynamics of human connection, creativity, and control over knowledge. The Four Ages of Media illuminate our journey through print, electronic, digital, and now, artificial media.


The Age of Print Media: The Written Word Rules the World

For centuries, print media reigned supreme. From Gutenberg’s press to the towering presses of modern newspapers, print democratized knowledge and reshaped civilizations. Books, newspapers, and pamphlets fueled revolutions (both intellectual and political), preserved culture, and built bridges between generations. Print media’s longevity lay in its permanence—words inked on a page endure, tethered to the physical world.

The Age of Print was one of deliberate thought. Writers crafted ideas carefully, editors scrutinized every word, and readers engaged deeply with texts. The act of reading was a linear journey, one where information unfolded gradually, allowing reflection and understanding. Print media fostered institutions of learning and expanded the boundaries of human thought—it was the Age of Enlightenment’s backbone, after all. But its reach was inherently limited by geography, literacy, and economics.


The Age of Electronic Media: The Rise of Airwaves

In the early 20th century, the flicker of radio dials and the hum of cathode-ray tubes heralded the next great transformation. The Age of Electronic Media emerged, driven by the immediacy of sound and moving images. For decades, radio and television dominated the landscape, bringing stories, news, and entertainment into living rooms around the world.

Where print media demanded active engagement, electronic media shifted the audience toward passive consumption. Radio brought voices and music, collapsing distance into the intimate proximity of sound. Television added the visceral power of imagery, creating a shared cultural tapestry—one nightly broadcast at a time. Electronic media’s strength lay in its reach and immediacy. A presidential speech, a moon landing, a breaking news bulletin—all could be shared with millions in real time.

Neil Postman’s seminal book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), offered a scathing critique of this era. Postman argued that television, as a medium, fundamentally altered the way society processed information. Unlike print, which encouraged rational discourse and critical thinking, television prioritized entertainment over substance. Complex ideas were reduced to sound bites, and serious discourse was diluted by the demands of visual spectacle. Postman’s warning was clear: when a culture values amusement over depth, it risks losing its capacity for meaningful dialogue and informed decision-making. This critique remains a vital lens through which to view the transition from print to electronic media.


The Age of Digital Media: The Internet’s Infinite Canvas

By the late 20th century, the flicker of screens shifted again—this time to computer monitors. The Age of Digital Media burst forth, powered by the internet’s boundless possibilities. For decades, computers and the web transformed the landscape of communication, introducing new paradigms of interaction, creativity, and knowledge-sharing.

Unlike its predecessors, digital media empowered users to become creators. Blogs, social media, video platforms, and podcasts democratized storytelling and shattered the gatekeeping of prior ages. Information became instantaneous, searchable, and hyperconnected. The digital age blurred the lines between creators and consumers, fostering participatory cultures and niche communities.

However, this era brought challenges as well. The velocity of information dissemination has outpaced truth and reflection. Echo chambers, misinformation, and the monetization of attention emerged as byproducts of this interconnected world. Postman’s critique of television as an entertainment-first medium found echoes in the digital age—though the internet allowed for instances of deeper engagement, its design often prioritized clicks, virality, and superficial interactions. Yet, the Age of Digital Media reshaped societies more profoundly than any medium before it, alternately empowering and entrapping individuals and decentralizing knowledge on a scale never seen before.


The Age of Artificial Media: A New Dawn

And now, we stand at the precipice of the Fourth Age—the Age of Artificial Media. This is the age of AI-generated content, where algorithms compose music, craft stories, paint pictures, and generate video. Unlike prior ages, artificial media creates rather than transmits; it synthesizes rather than curates. In this age, media is no longer solely the product of human creativity but the collaboration between human intent and machine intelligence.

The implications are profound. AI can personalize content on an unprecedented scale, tailoring media to individual preferences and needs. News articles generated in seconds, novels crafted from simple prompts, or videos designed to cater to niche tastes—artificial media promises infinite variety and accessibility. It holds, as well, the potential to preserve and expand human creativity, augmenting artists and thinkers with tools that amplify their imagination.

Yet, this age raises fundamental questions about authenticity, ownership, and control. Who owns AI-generated content? How do we define originality in a world where machines remix existing works at lightning speed? And what does it mean for humanity if machines—once mere tools—begin to shape culture autonomously? Perhaps most concerning is the erosion of our ability to distinguish real from artificial. As AI-generated images and videos become indistinguishable from reality, the visual evidence that once anchored our understanding of truth becomes suspect. In a world where seeing is no longer believing, trust in media—and perhaps even in our perceptions—faces an unprecedented crisis.


The Arc of Media History

The Four Ages of Media reflect humanity’s ever-expanding capacity to communicate and create. Each age builds upon the last, adding layers of complexity and accessibility. Print media laid the foundation for durable knowledge. Electronic media expanded reach and immediacy. Digital media democratized creation and connected the globe. Artificial media now stands poised to redefine the very nature of creativity itself.

Where this Fourth Age will take us remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: each transformation in media reflects not just technological change, but the evolution of human society and its boundless desire to connect, share, and understand.

We are the storytellers, the creators, and now the collaborators with machines in this new chapter of humanity’s narrative. The question we must ask is not only what artificial media can create, but how it can deepen our shared experience of being human—for all time.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Seen today via YouTube -- Understanding Pandeism: A Unique Philosophical Perspective

This vid, seen today on YouTube, is overall a wonderfully clear explanation of Pandeism, capturing its essence beautifully!! But a nuance worth adding is that insofar as miracles are, in fact, claimed to occur, Pandeism accounts for them through the divine nature embedded in our Universe itself as an underlying force that people may unwittingly tap into. Additionally missing is the profound purpose behind our Creator becoming our Universe -- to understand and experience the vast array of experiences which unfold within it, and amongst discrete lives in being therein. This purposeful journey of discovery and connection is a cornerstone of much pandeistic thought. Blessings!!

Saturday, December 07, 2024

Beauty

'Beauty' is a puzzle. Though it is often framed as being a highly individualistic, 'in the eye of the beholder' sort of impression, experience certainly teaches that there are beauty standards -- things deemed desirable by any given general population. So then, what subtle forces contrive to dictate our deepest emotional reactions to a face, a flower, a painting, a sunset? Why is it that when we meet two people of indistinguishable personality, one may strike a spark in our hearts while the other simply does not register in that way, perhaps simply because of the shape of a chin or the width between the eyes? There are theories for all of these things -- that we have, perhaps, evolved an inclination towards being attracted to those traits or trails which best suit the survival of the species. Our bent, it is proposed, is towards finding lush green spaces beautiful for example because those are likely sources of food (though many would find as much beauty in cracked desert plains and solitary frozen ice floes).

But with respect to the sort of facial beauty which yields a physical, sexual attraction, the road may fall rather more narrowly. Here, the researchers speculate, attraction is all about a nagging desire to reproduce, and to do so in the way which will generate the most advantaged offspring. So here is where it gets interesting. After all, what exactly are the physical features most likely to yield offspring who will live to adulthood and outcompete their acquaintances in the reproduction contest? Why ought an oddly shaped nose or too much of a chin be off-putting in terms of the whole 'survival of the fittest' racket. Well it turns out that what makes somebody attractive tends to be their.... averageness.

Averageness and symmetry, indeed, go hand in hand on that score. Or, to be more exact, what tends to cause somebody to be deemed unattractive is their deviation from averageness and symmetry. Now this tends to be surprising because we often think of 'average' as a synonym for 'plain, but what is average and what is plain are not so aligned as one might think. There's an historical story here intertwined in the history of evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin, you see, was not the only scientifically minded member of family in his generation. Oh, you might think of his grandfather, good old Erasmus Darwin, but Charles had a cousin as well -- Francis Galton -- who invented 'composite photography' (that is, the laying of photographic images over one another to demonstrate a final image averaging the features of the initial ones). And in 1883, Galton set out to employ this technique in what he thought would be a crime-fighting endeavour. Specifically, Galton supposed that by taking many images of criminals and overlapping them, he could ultimately produce the image of the 'average criminal.' This, in turn, he thought would aid society in finding those with criminal features and identifying them before they engaged in nefarious deeds (all of this being in the age of phrenology, when it was believed that the bumps and knots of a person's skull provided details about their personality and characteristic tendencies). But as Galton put together more and more of these faces, he discovered the composite result to be not somebody looking more and more 'criminal,' but more and more conventionally attractive. And, indeed, further experimentation by Galton and by generations of later experimenters has repeatedly confirmed this, that if a random grouping of a few dozen or more randomly picked people from the population are image-composited, the 'average' person's face turn out a beauty.

The simple explanation of all this is that each face deviates from the average in some aspect or another, but most every faces deviates in a different way; and so, as more and more faces are composited together, any especial deviation displayed by one will be subdued by comparison to the others, which are free of that deviation. So, if one face has a very long nose, one too wide a brow, and one sunken cheekbones, the two faces with average noses will subdue the long nose, the two with average brows will subdue the wide brow, and the two with sharper cheekbones will subdue the sunken example. And indeed it goes beyond that, for a dozen faces with too-long noses composited with a dozen faces with too-short noses will yield one face with that perfectly average nose (and approaching perfect symmetry as well, for the same reasons). And in the same breath, since wrinkles and other signs of aging are not equally distributed amongst the aged, a composite of many people (even of many old people) will subdue all of these features, and end up looking youthful, smooth-skinned and vibrant. (Note that this effect is restricted by gender; mixing of genders yields androgynous faces, which are themselves a deviation from gender norms, and have generally been deemed unattractive by those surveyed).

So having gotten to that point, the question returns, what is the advantage of being most attracted to the person with the most average of faces? Well, it is always possible that any deviation from the average evidences a defect, a parting from the healthy biological norm. And so, though adhering to average faces causes the reproducing person to pass upon potentially beneficial evolutionary changes, it does so in the cause of keeping to the safest position, that of reproducing with the person least likely (based on outward appearance) to carry some harmful genetic quirk. And, just to provide an illustration to this principle, I went to faceresearch.org and generated some 'average' faces (try it yourself -- pick the twenty faces from one gender which you would find least attractive, and then see how those unattractive faces average out); and then uploaded those average specimens to morphthing.com, a site which allows you to create composite images of celebrities (and upload your own), and morphed dozens of Hollywood starlets and women similarly considered famously beautiful, and then morphed that into the other 'average' faces; then I put this in Photoshop and tinted the whole thing green for no especial reason, and got this face, for your consideration.

One of the startling discoveries man has made is that in taking a wide variety of faces -- all sorts of faces, the plain and typical and unremarkable, the quirky and unusual and memorable -- and 'morphing' them together to average out their features yields what people generally recognize as a strikingly attractive face. This is perhaps in part a consequence of the averaging out of asymmetry and the gradual elimination over every generation of morphing of every distinctive blemish, every outlier feature.


Consider this woman.  She does not exist. She is instead a carefully constructed average of sixty-four different actresses and models and other famously "attractive" women. Black, White, Asian, Latina, all went into the mix. Confessedly, none of them was green (that element was simply added to further remove the generated image from common notions of "race").

Monday, April 15, 2024

Embrace the Light

This is a new realm of experience for me -- and many others like me. There are now AI websites which allow you to generate music that, with a modicum of tweaking, sounds radio-ready. With one called Udio.com, I made the song below -- outside of any genre I have worked in before (and indeed, I played around with several before hitting upon the central structure of this one, and building out from there)

It it, in a word, transformative. Not the song, especially, but the technology behind it, and more impactfully perhaps, the experience of having no musical skills beyond being able to pluck a few notes, and yet being able to instantiate something like this. And remember, we are at the very beginning of this journey. We are Marconi's first fiddling with radio waves compared to where we will be just a few years from now.

Along the way, enjoy the music!!

#AI #Music #AIArt #AIMusic #TheFutureIsNow

Thursday, March 09, 2023

Record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page, redux

Some three years ago I blogged about record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism -- observing then that the page had hit an all-time high in daily page views at 1,227 (part of a pattern in which several of the highest-viewed days were scattered over a surrounding period of weeks). That spike was a mystery, the previous record of 901 views having been attributable to Pandeism being mentioned in an article in Scientific American.

Well, all that is now water under the bridge insofar as record page view days go.

For on February 26, 2023, a new page views record of 2,231 nearly doubled the old record, and was followed by a day of 1,483 views (itself exceeding the record set in 2020), followed by a day of 1,162 (with this whole run being preceded by a day of 906 views).


Well it seems that all of this is because of cartoonist Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays on Twitter) making news (in a very negative way, unfortunately).


You see, one of Adams' more archaic claims to fame is having written the book God's Debris (actually a quite incisive work which I still put forth as recommend reading) describing a school of Pandeism as its worldview. Interestingly, a key point of Pandeism -- that we are all equally fragments of our Creator, and how we treat our fellows is how we contribute to creating the experience of our Creator -- ought to strongly motivate seeking to help all humans to overcome whatever barriers separate us, for the  common achievement of greater joy in our lives.

Now then, I wouldn't especially want the hundreds-of-years-old theological theory of Pandeism to be drawing attention solely due to an association with a person who's in the news for all the wrong reasons. But.... if even a handful of Wikipedia visitors are enlightened by it, well, you know the old saw, The Universe Works in Mysterious Ways. Perhaps one of those mysterious ways is to make a current celebrity act in such a way that they unintentionally draw attention to a theory they espoused in the past perhaps much more beautiful than what they espouse in the present.

Pandeism has steadily been gaining renewed interest for the past decade, so anything which informs people that the idea exists is doing them a service, perhaps offering a light to come out of shadowy events.