Pandeism -- the introductory vid

For those who have missed it, this is an overview of the theological theory of pandeism, a combination of pantheism and deism concluding that the Deus (i.e. God) became the Universe in order to experience it.

Confirmatory power of the pandeistic model

There is great misunderstanding about what exactly the pandeistic model is, or why it offers so great a confirmatory power. Simply put, the pandeistic model determines which explanations can possibly account for observed physical and metaphysical phenomena, and then boils them down to the one explanation that requires the fewest assumptions in fulfilling this explanatory need. If a religion were to confirmably present an observation that could not be accounted for by the pandeistic model, but instead required adoption of an additional assumption, logic would indeed demand that this assumption be adopted; but every single observation must be weighed to determine whether it demands the adoption of additional assumptions, and every assumption must be weighed for determination of whether any simpler model accounts for the things it would assume....

Atheists label pandeism as theism, and theists label it as atheism; and yet, pandeism fully accounts for the things atheists believe as well; indeed, it would be folly to exclude atheism from the pandeistic model of examination, for atheism does not actually explain anything so much as assert that the explanation, though unknown, is not or can not be theological -- this is what divides the starkness of atheism from the explanatory power of the pandeistic model.

Pandeism vs Theism: Our Destiny is in the Stars!!

This video explains why it must be so, that our destiny is in the stars!!



As the dawn of the 2010 decade approached, science quietly delivered a message that will build in realization until it reverberates with a boom forever into the future. Mankind's ability to identify planets around distant stars has evolved to a new height, to the point of being able to identify Earth-sized orbs in orbits that would make them amenable to carrying liquid water -- thus imbuing them with the potential to develop life, or at the least to be made habitable for humans. This scientific find gives us hope that we may literally reach for the stars, but it brings profound and awesome religious implications as well.

There are those out there in certain faiths who eagerly await not the day of our expansion into new worlds, but the end of this world. End-timers exist in several religions; in the Abrahamic faiths they tend to believe that the world is around 6,000 years old and, at the same time, that a thousand years is like a day to their God -- all straight from their books. So, doesn't it seem odd that after billions of infinities waiting around and doing nothing, such a God would suddenly up and create the Universe, have the whole thing exist for an eyeblink in the great span of things -- and then just as suddenly have an Armageddon and go back to the humdrum of no Universe for billions of infinities (even if thereafter surrounded by fawning souls bereft of any desire but to fawn)? And yet, these end-timers have been insisting that the end is coming right up on us (although to be fair, they've been insisting that daily and twice on Sundays for thousands of years now)....

With our technological developments and the recent discovery of other possibly habitable worlds with water on them and everything, we're really just starting to get interesting. I mean, if I was the sort of person who believed in piecemeal-purposed creation, I'd have a hard time thinking that any God created habitable planets which, at least according to theoretical physics, we could very much reach and populate, and yet this same God intended to end our days before we did what those worlds are designed to have us do. If we were expected to fail before being able to reach those worlds, such a Creator would know that in advance, and wouldn't bother to create those other habitable worlds -- which we might otherwise get to in a few hundred, at most a few thousand years (another eyeblink to such a being). The whole idea of it is like someone spending a fortune to buy a bunch of toys, to give to their children as a reward for not eating from the plate of candy which was placed in front of them and left unattended.

Now, even if for the sake of argument the scriptural accounts hoisted by the end-timers were true accounts of Creation, it makes no sense that such a Creator would end things now, at a time that would for that being be moments after Creation. That would be like lining up world class marathon runners to run a fifty-millimeter dash. Since physics itself keeps telling us of a Universe that is billions rather than thousands of years old, shouldn't we be looking towards a future that is also billions of years to come, instead of ending in thousands of years, or hundreds, or next Tuesday?

So it must be. We are meant to reach those other habitable worlds out there, just now coming onto our horizon; and because of this, the next few thousand years of human development will be particularly interesting to observe and even be a part of. Even the end-timers should now, finally, acknowledge that those lights in the sky are not angels or lesser gods or holes in a great dome, but are instead stars orbited by (detectable!!) planets, which if deity-made Creation is true, we must be intended to occupy!!

Pandeism, Theism, and Atheism: a simple sort of complexity

The fine-tuned Universe argument supports both pandeism and theism, as opposed to atheism, but the fact that the laws of the Universe are simple enough for intelligent life to manipulate them, and thus surpass their current state, disproves theism and proves only pandeism.

The Burden of Proof as applied to Pandeism

Pandeism fully accounts for all phenomena, physical and spiritual, with the least amount of presumptions required. And so, any system proposing a Creator with additional capacities, such as the ability to create new energy from nothing, or to be infinite in any dimension, bears the burden of first affirmatively disproving pandeism.

Pandeism vs Creationism: Evolution IS Intelligent Design

This video explains that pandeism accepts evolution as true because evolution itself is the ultimate "intelligent design":

Pandeism and the Free Will Paradox

This video explains why the concept of "free will" is inconsistent with the idea of an absolutely omnipotent and absolutely omniscient Creator, but is instead consistent with the pandeistic model of a Creator. In fact the pandeistic Creator would not be at all served by absolute omniscience, for then there would be nothing to learn from the Creation of our Universe, and no reason to create -- and so, we would not be here!!

Pan-Deism....?

(Copied from Everything2 with permission)

Wait a minute, you are surely saying, we already have a fantastic and brilliant node about pandeism -- at pandeism!!@!; what beckons a whole separate node on the same thing but just with a hyphen? Ah, but what a difference a hyphen makes!! In searching upwards from the most ancient sources on the subject to modern day, one finds that at sundry historical points, writers have inclined to use "pan-deism" (or perhaps Pan-Deism, depending on how they feel about capitalisation) to mean something strikingly different from the modern meaning of "pandeism."



Here are the examples (and annotations!!)....



••••

"India worships three hundred millions of divinities. To her, God is everything, and everything is God, and, therefore, everything may be adored. Snakes and monsters are her special divinities. Her pan-deism is a pandemonium."

-- Source: Reverend Henry Grattan Guinness, in Missionary Review, in John Harvey Kellogg's International Health and Temperance Association, The Medical Missionary, 1897, page 126.
(The earliest example, here, could carry either sense!! Hinduism, long one of the prime religions of India, has been observed to have sects espousing pandeistic conceptions.)

••••

"In certain passages of the OT the concept of Babylon emerges into an archetypal figure for the proud, God-defying forces of this world (Isa 13-14; 21.1-10; 47: Jer 50-51). In the NT it is even more clearly a type of pan-deism formed from a synthesis of Christianity and paganism; this is indicated symbolically in the description of the woman riding on the Beast (Rev 17:1 ff.)."

-- Source: Charles F. Pfeiffer, Howard Frederic Vos, and John Rea, in The Wycliffe Bible Encyclopedia, 1975, page 190.

(It's been frequently pointed out to me that Christianity has long
since become this synthesis, what with all the pagan celebrations,
practices, even whole doctrines being brought up into it right from its
early centuries, and into modern times.)

••••

"If the Bible is only human lore, and not divine truth, then we have no real answer to those who say, 'Let's pick the best out of all religions and blend it all into Pan-deism - one world religion with one god made out of many.'"

-- Source: J. Sidlow Baxter, Our Bible: The Most Critical Issue, 1991.

(Oh, let's!! There is a sense in which pandeism is said to combine the
most defensible and rational truths that can be reduced out of all
faiths....)

••••

"Should the demigod Pan come to bear, the result will be Pan-deism, the opening of Pandora's Box."

-- Source: John Gee, in The Metaphysicians' Desk Reference 2003, page 164.

(Um.... ok. Not exactly sure what this guy is going for -- something cleverly hidden in the wordplay? Or just alliteration for its own benefit?)

••••

"Perhaps as a response to the years of repression under the old regime, they embraced the pan-deism
of the ancient world, with its numerous gods and lesser deities. They
were proponents of sexual freedom as well, even going so far as to hold
public orgies until halted by the local government."

-- Source: R. J. Leahy, in Tigra‎, 2006, page 54.

(Orgies?
Hey, sure!! Numerous gods? No, not really. But consider Hinduism again,
which presents numerous gods as a mask for one true underlying force.)

••••

"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)."

-- Source: 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.

(And oughtn't there be "many ways" to such an entity as that of which they speak!?)

••••

And so, as a rule, hyphenated pan-deism begs something else, not the
true blue view of "pandeism." But, a rule being laid out we are now
tasked with highlighting the exceptions!!



One occurs where Professor Francis E. Peters, in Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon 1967, page 169, inscribes, "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." And there we know he
speaks of the more familiar pandeism (and how do we know this? Because
it rightly captures the spirit of that ancient Milesian worldview).
Where poet and critic Liam Rector, in The Day I Was Older: on the poetry of Donald Hall‎, 1989, page 69, propounds that it was "Pope's rationalism and pan-deism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature" for it reflects Alexander Pope's philosophy, summed up in An Essay on Man: "All are but parts of one stupendous whole / Whose body nature is, and God the soul" (forecasting, mayhap, a later artist's affirmation that "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.")



And again, William Harbutt Dawson, writes in his biographic epistle, Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time,
1904, republished 1977, page 256, that "whatever the deity which
satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion
which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism."
Now, one might assume, as the editor of the 1977 edition suggests, that
that Dawson may have intended to write "bare Pan-Theism" rather than
"Pan-Deism". If one does not, then we are presented with a direct
comparison with Deism, for Dawson then observes: "As an ethical system
it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest
degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of René Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary."


But returning again to the uses that make and not break this rule, now
there are two ways you could think about this; one being that some
folks are none too educated in their collocation of words. Look at the
roots: pan, everything, deism, yes it does descend from the Latin for
"God" -- but it has preceded these quotations by centuries in a long
and greatly expounded distinct meaning all its own, of a particular
kind of faith standing apart from the theism that these folks try to
mash up. The right word would be omnithism.
Might even be that they mean to mislead -- pandeism is indeed as much
subject to misuse abuse as other words relating "off-the-beaten-path"
faiths. Like Moralistic therapeutic deism
(which is in point of fact no kind of "deism"), false usage, possibly
intentionally, demeans and diminishes the dimensions of its domain.



But a greater point is about the true meaning of pandeism, which accounts for and provides a tasty, logic-satisfying underlying explanation for all perceived religious phenomena accorded to all
faiths (visions, revelations, miracles, deep-seated feelings, etc); and
so, if pandeism is true, then this use of "pan-deism" it is true in the
sense that all of the phenomena of all faiths are traceable to the underlying pandeistic nature of our Universe.

The problem of the unevangelised

This video explains why the problem of the unevangelised disproves any theism proposing a loving or omnipotent God, but presents no barrier to pandeism.