Pandeism, Catholicism, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church

As the next book from the Pandeism Anthology series, Pandeism: An Anthology of the Creative Mind, will come out in August 2019, we are reflecting on a unique aspect of this series -- that we invite people of differing and even anti-pandeistic views to publish their views in our collections. Our first Anthology covered perspectives including Hinduism, Islam, Biblical Unitarian Universalism, and Atheism. Our second has pieces from perspectives including Judaism and Stoicism.

One topic which we intend to cover in a future writing is the interesting relationship between Pandeism and Catholicism. The position of the Church as to Pandeism is addressed to a degree in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a work intended to be comprehensive, as such things go, in presenting the positions of the Roman Catholic Church on issues needing addressing. Within it, Part 1, Section 2, Chapter 1, Article I, addresses a certain set of philosophies thusly:

285 Since the beginning the Christian faith has been challenged by responses to the question of origins that differ from its own. Ancient religions and cultures produced many myths concerning origins. Some philosophers have said that everything is God, that the world is God, or that the development of the world is the development of God (Pantheism). Others have said that the world is a necessary emanation arising from God and returning to him. Still others have affirmed the existence of two eternal principles, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, locked, in permanent conflict (Dualism, Manichaeism). According to some of these conceptions, the world (at least the physical world) is evil, the product of a fall, and is thus to be rejected or left behind (Gnosticism). Some admit that the world was made by God, but as by a watch-maker who, once he has made a watch, abandons it to itself (Deism). Finally, others reject any transcendent origin for the world, but see it as merely the interplay of matter that has always existed (Materialism). All these attempts bear witness to the permanence and universality of the question of origins. This inquiry is distinctively human.

Now I do grant that there are a great many metatheoretical theological variations out there, so it might seem unfair to ask that this Catechism cover all of them. But in higher circles of theological thought, both Panentheism and Pandeism are long-standing enough (both coined in Germany by the mid-1800s) and well-enough known that they at least merit passing mention in a work intended or supposed to be comprehensive as to Catholic thought. But perhaps, just as the reference to the 'myths' of those "ancient religions and cultures" is likely intended to encompass Polytheism without needing mention it by name, perhaps it is assumed that other theologies not mentioned by name are encompassed by those that are. There is, after all, commentary upon the notion that "the development of the world is the development of God" parenthesized as Pantheism (one element of Pandeism), though Pantheism alone does not encompass all formulations of this conception. And there is commentary upon Deism (the other element of Pandeism), though many species of Deist would take issue with the summary as eliding the deistic property of a deity discernible by reasoned examination of our Universe, such that even those never privy to one of the claimed divine revelations could discover this possibility.

Panentheism, interestingly, may have gone unaddressed for another reason altogether -- that being that there is often reason to correlate Catholic doctrine with Panentheism more than with pure Theism, as Panentheism pairs the theistic aspects of an overseeing, intervening deity with the pantheistic properties of everything within the Universe itself being "within God." Such assertions have not gone without controversy, as there are those within the Church who dismiss elements of Panentheism, and at the same time fret and grumble when others within the Church embrace those elements and deem them doctrinally sound. But this dissension is mild compared to those "renegade" elements of the Church who decry the movement of the larger body as a shift towards Pandeism itself, and go so far as to accuse Pope Francis of being a secret (or not-so-secret) Pandeist in his own right.

But this modern quandary had escaped mention in the Catechism itself. In fact, the Catechism's dismissal of the parts of Pandeism without considering the whole eerily mirrors that of Richard Dawkins, who otherwise stands quite opposite the Catholic Church in its conclusions. Dawkins put it somewhat more abruptly, even, contending that "Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism." Reading the Church's summaries of these philosophies, it is hard to imagine that the Catechism's authors would at all disagree with Dawkins' characterizations on this score, and would quite likely agree with whatever characterization Dawkins might arrive at as to Pandeism as well.

A Pandeist response to Sacerdotus

Recently I came upon a rather old blog post from one Sacerdotus, titled From Atheist to Catholic, huh? How that happen?!? The post delineates the author's claim of dabbling in various beliefs (and nonbeliefs) until converting to Catholicism-- seemingly largely on the strength of an incidence where a woman mysteriously referred to him as "father" whilst they happened to be in the vicinity of a Catholic Church, and thereafter the author's feeling of peace upon worshiping therein.

To Sacerdotus I reply: It is unclear from your description whether you even considered Pandeism (if not, fair enough, it is esoteric enough a theological model that it takes some searching to even come to it), or, if you have considered it, that you have given it a fair shake. Let me point to two aspects of Catholicism -- the cover-ups of child-molesting pedophile priests, and the quixotic condemnation of the homosexuality of consenting adults. It is clear that the hiding and shuffling about and protecting of child molesters was orchestrated from the heights of the institution, and from the very same heights from which unscientific and untenable homophobia has spewed. This bespeaks corruption from crust to core, hardly characteristic of an institution bearing an underlying truth. Indeed, quite the opposite of it.


But let us compare the philosophy of Pandeism. All things are part of and within our Creator, which has wholly becomes our Universe, a Universe designed to give rise to intelligent life, most probably so that our Creator can experience from the vantage point of such life, and learn what it is like to live so. Now, this fully accounts for the lives of all the towering figures of theological history, of Arjuna and Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, Gandhi. For all are themselves part of our Creator, and some surely may have had some special talent for touching upon a fragment of its incomprehensible underlying presence, and take from that some modicum of truth, some snippet which was but a molecule of it, and yet was overwhelming to any human mind.

And so Pandeism fully accounts for all theologically significant experiences, for miracles, and things experienced by their limited human recipients as revelations and visions and prophecies, egrigores and spiritual encounters or emotions or notions. This fully accounts for your own "father" experience and your feelings in going to this especial church, a bow to the ego, a flash of energy from an underlying and nonintervening being not directed towards you, but created by you-- in your unknowing capacity as a fragment of our Universe's Creator.

And returning to the problems of Catholicism (even ignoring its enslavement of tens of thousands of Irish women in the Magdalene Laundries until only a few years ago, its science-defying discouragement of condom usage in nations with AIDS epidemics, and its politically shrewd but morally weak passivity during the Holocaust), it is simply not a universal truth. It is not something which a person born in a remote time or place could come to realize, absent some external intervention, and so most people who have lived and died on this Earth have done so without ever knowing enough of the religion to consider it.

Not so with Pandeism, which can be reached by logical contemplation no matter when or where the starting point, and which is hampered only by attachment to unreason (both on the part of the religious and the atheistic, who stake an absolute position where no absolutes can rightly be known).

And as to the problems mentioned before, Pandeism properly avoids any hierarchical structure, any of the sort of 'organized religion' which would even enable a body to become corrupted, to become a haven for pedophiles and an enabler of their crimes. And, understanding that all things are part of our Creator, and that each person has a duty to prevent those instances which are rationally discernible as causing suffering, Pandeism could have no irrational doctrine of homophobia. It is the very impossibility of such things within an understanding of pandeistic truth which sets it morally above any "organized" structure susceptible to corruption and to hijacking in favor of bigotry and biases.