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.
The concept of quantum foam has bubbled up in scientific circles for over half a century, ever since physicist John Wheeler figured that quantum mechanics, at the really really small scale, would yield a Universe where nothing was ever static, and instead bits of matter (or, at least, the fundamental particles constructing them) popped in and out of existence all the time. And this foamy sort of science has long inspired all sorts of ideas as to what sorts of things might arise in a Universe so made.
But the thing which seems to be overlooked in this examination is the question of what all that foam is topping off. Now there are many kinds of foam out there in the world -- foam from shampoo, the foam in foam rubber, sea foam, and what used to be called shaving foam (but for some inexplicable reason is now more popularly called shaving cream). But come now, everybody knows the best, most satisfying kind of foam there is, is the foam that rises atop a perfectly poured down the side at an angle glass of beer. The kind of foam which tickles your nose as you drink that first draught, the kind of foam which is crisp and sweet and slow to settle.
Beer is one of man's first inventions. The ancient Egyptian pyramid-builders were paid in beer. Beer is liquid gold, and liquid bread (and bread baked with beer has a most wondrous foaminess to it, too). Beer even figures into physics -- physicist Donald A. Glaser, for his Nobel Prize-winning invention of the bubble chamber, used beer to fill early proptotypes of the chamber (though he denied that beer inspired the invention).
An old quote floating about which has been attributed to Werner Heisenberg (apparently wrongfully), tells us that "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you." Now this has been interpreted to mean a lot of things ranging from "the more fully understood our Universe is, the more intricately designed it appears" to "you start seeing fantastic things once you get drunk enough." But if the glass is of the quantum beer from which the quantum foam fizzes forth, then surely it must mean, once you get down to the bottom of things, you find that there's something beneath the bottom, and that it's that we're all connected, all manifestations arising from a single oneness. Perhaps even like the oneness described in the evolutionary theological theory of Pandeism (pantheistic Deism). And an amber-hued, rich, tasty, all-loving oneness, at that!!
Quantum beer probably looks something like this....
Firstly, I note that, after my own heart, author Antonin Tuynman suffuses his work with poetry -- I have especially fallen in love with one titled “The Quagmire of ontological disambiguation” -- this is a poem I intend to pursue, even!!
But moving to the heart of the work, the fundamental thought underlying this rich volume is the possible nature of our Universe as a sort of self-aware cosmic computer -- in a way that scientifically (if not strictly technologically) completes the circle of Vedic thought. The savvy reader might well wonder, by the way, why I am beginning with what is actually the second book in a series. This is Kismet. Pure chance. An arbitrary function of this title happening to appeal to me (as a pandeistic thinker) before I saw any others.
The author speaks with an expansive and lively vocabulary and conceptual fluency of thoughts that reflect what has rattled around in my own mind for some while -- of philosophizing, of mastery arising from the will to become a master, of the remarkable premise that Consciousness itself arises from a self-sustaining feedback loop. He gamely coins the term Infinityism to frame the conceptual boundaries of the inconceivable, preferring to refer to God as “transfinite,” a term which he notes was yet undefined when the religions were casting their conceptions of the Divine. He identifies the many (and growing) routes by which we are ever-increasingly bound by expressions of a collective subconscious, which is itself but one aspect of an all-encompassing underlying consciousness. To those familiar with the post-Enlightenment idea of Pandeism, I need not spell out the significance of this line of thought to that theory.
Tuynman draws from a diverse array of philosophical forbears, from Hegel to Alfred North Whitehead to Buckminster Fuller to Terrance McKenna -- not all of whom are recognized as philosophers (he titles Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, for example, as "contemporary technoprophets"), but all of whom can be recognized as such when their observations are set in Tuynman's grand context. His analysis of the autopoietic is auto-poetic (just as his poetry is profoundly analytic). It feels as if he is consistently pulling the covers of reality back to reveal intuitively realized mechanisms of our Universe from the most modern concepts of science, and then tying these back, again and again, to some of the most ancient philosophical ideas. He does not blur the lines between these frames of thought; he demonstrates that the lines are an illusion, a construct dissolved simply by turning to observe from a different angle.
Like the courses of an excellent meal, getting deeper and deeper into this book makes you feel fuller and fuller of useful information, and yet it is tasty enough that though you finish feeling satisfied, yet knowing you could have another plate of the same again tomorrow.
[Of all the contributing authors whom I have communicated with over the course of this project, Dr. Robert G. Brown, Professor of Physics at Duke University, has always engaged me most thoroughly; I recently wrote to ask his opinion of the book, which has seen an author's edition circulated to the contributing authors in advance of publication. This was his response:]
I spent the last couple of hours reading the many
entries. I find that I disagree with
nearly all of the arguments (of course, being an empiricist:-) but nevertheless
found them reasonably entertaining. I
very much liked your "nested God" observation, which dovetails
perfectly into my own argument and example with a bitstring -- even if a being
exists that IS somehow sentient and omniscient of its Self and all of the
visible Cosmos, it cannot ever be certain that it is not embedded in a still
larger dimensionality, any more than six bits of a bit string can
"know" the true value of an 8 bit string it is embedded in.
Similar recursive arguments have been made before (Turtles
all the way down, or IIRC in Godel, Escher and Bach by Hofstadter) but these
arguments do fail to take into account that in order for a hypothetical deity
at some intermediate level to >>think<<, they require two things:
time to think IN (and an entire dynamical system capable of change, as thought
is a dynamic process) and entropy. The
latter >>requires<< that they be embedded in a larger, and unknown,
dimensionality.
But this breaks the recursion. In order for meaningful sentience to exist,
the sentient being requires a source of entropy. This is a provable statement in switch-based
computation (including neural models):
To put it another way, "thinking" produces entropy
at a very fundamental level, the level of the dynamical change within the
switching systems themselves, and this entropy is irreducible relative to the
thoughts encoded on the switching units.
In the case of our own sentience the entropy source/sink is obvious --
the unknown or imperfectly known state of everything that is NOT us. There is no reason to think that a
hypothetical God would be able to think, in meta-time, without a similar
entropy source, which provides the "directed randomness" we associate
with "free will" -- thinking thoughts that are not obviously Searlian
Chinese Room entities produced by a lookup table. But this means that true extensive omniscience
and sentience are mutually exclusive -- an omniscient structure has zero
entropy and hence cannot "think" in any useful sense of the term.
Hence if a very "large", "powerful" (in
deliberate quotes), Cosmos-scaled being DOES exist AND can think, it cannot be
omniscient because thinking is a process of ongoing discovery of previously
unknown thoughts. We are knowING right
now, we are not knowING all times. A
being for whom "now" exists cannot be omni-whatever and hence cannot
be God. For example, suppose that we are
actually not observing a real Universe at all with our senses, but rather we
are playing in a very, very fine-grained virtual reality simulation being
generated by a Game Computer that is, in turn, programmed or operated by an
Artist that is crafting every scene.
That Artist (or the Game Computer) are not God, any more than the
programmers of World of Warcraft are God(s).
They exist, think, design, plan, in an entropy-filled world one level
up. If you want to imagine a Game
Computer one level up that DIDN'T require engineering or a programmer but that
is providing my experience of reality as a simulation, well, that really takes
something unlikely (the existence of an apparent Universe in which I have
objective existence) and makes it EVEN LESS likely -- there is a Universe in
which a Game Computer has objective existence that is creating the ILLUSION of
a Universe in which I have objective existence.
And a programmer/designer of that computer less likely still. And a Universe -- that isn't a simulation
itself in which that programmer/designer can have thoughts in a nested set of
simulations, each less likely than the one one before.
IMO it makes little sense to postulate even the first level
of this recursion from the mere fact of our own sentient existences in what
appears to be an objectively real Universe that is NOT a simulation presented
to our senses by a still-more-complex computer.
So I do have a lot of difficulty with the assertion that a Creator god
existed and "became" the Universe -- when did this happen (in some
sort of time, because "becoming" is a dynamical process occurring in
time)? Where did it happen (in some sort
of space with information structure capable of supporting thoughts and decision
making and planning and all that)?
But now you have space, time, stuff capable of representing
a dynamically changing state, and you are stuck explaining what Created
>>that<<. If the answer is
"nothing", then space, time, and stuff -- all that we observe our own
Cosmos to be -- doesn't logically require a creator. If the answer is something, you shunt your
problems up a notch AND introduce your meta-God where you have to (using your
own argument) ascribe ever more complex properties to the one-notch up deity
and explain why it created a Universe in which pseudodeities created one-notch
down sub-Universes all the while thinking that THEY were the highest-level God
-- or not.
A lot simpler to just assert that the Universe is what it
is, no God (logically) necessary, no empirical evidence for a God, no
DIFFERENCE in how things are if an unnecessary and unobservable God is lurking
somewhere, so why bother with religion/God (pandeist or not) at all?
[At this juncture, I sent in response, the following:]
In short answer to your objection to the necessity of it, I
would respond that Pandeism is more of an if/then proposition.... if ours is
indeed an intelligently created Universe -- which surely can be assigned at
least a nonzero probability -- then Pandeism offers the best explanation as to
why it would exist.
[Dr. Brown replied:]
And there we definitely agree. But it is very difficult to imagine what
would constitute "evidence" for an intelligently created Universe,
and according to the way I define Universe, it would be literally logically
impossible because I cut off the nonsense involving recursive chains of
pre-Universes that aren't really Universes but are only (at most) space-time
continua IN a larger Universe by defining the word Universe to (correctly)
refer to the whole thing, NOT just the apparent Cosmos (spacetime) we find ourselves
in.
If one does that, one has no possibility of referring
intelligence and design back to a higher order, and one has no possibility of
"creation" as there is nowhere to be and notime to do preceding
Universe. That means that fundamentally,
the Universe itself is NOT the result of intelligent design, and if our Cosmos
is, it could only be because intelligence arose in the greater Universe without
any intelligent design.
Now you are up against Mr. Ockham. Why multiply (invisible) causes? No argument you can make for intelligent
design of the Cosmos will not equally well apply (at an even lower probability)
to a super-Universe containing the Cosmos and supposed intelligent
designer(s). The Anthropic Principle
presents us with a fait accompli either way, but believing in an intelligent
designer of Cosmi that spontaneously arose in a superset Universe we have
absolutely no evidence for leaves one with an enormous engineering problem (how
exactly do you design and build a Cosmos?) PLUS the problem of figuring out why
the designer -- faced with the same anthropic principle for its own
intelligence in whatever Cosmos it is standing in in order to do be doing the
job of designing and building -- is to be considered a "deity".
To me this is EXACTLY what you argued AGAINST in your
article in the anthology -- trying to determine what color suspenders the
hypothetical Creator wore when Creating our space-time using meta-physics in a
meta-cosmos that supported the spontaneous evolution of its meta-intelligence
WITHOUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN OR TUNING OF ITS COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANTS. Why bother with all of that? It is so very, very unlikely (given the
evidence of our senses and a bit of reason). Not impossible, no, but however
unlikely you think spontaneous evolution of intelligence, well-supported by
empirical evidence galore, is in THIS Cosmos, it is that unlikely squared --
literally -- to have taken place one level up.
There is plenty of time to "waste" belief in the
invisible when it becomes visible. In
the meantime, it just distracts us from building an ethical world with the
entire responsibility for doing so resting on OUR shoulders, because there is
no evidence whatsoever that we're going to get help from a deity, whether or
not one "exists" or is a "creator" or just another really
powerful transdimensional space alien with a hobby.
What can the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes possibly have to do with the theological theory of Pandeism? Well, really the question is, is this world consistent with Pandeism, and the answer: why wouldn't it be?
Unlike the magical world of Harry Potter and the alien-filled science fiction realms of Star Wars and of Star Trek, the world of Sherlock Holmes is utterly mundane. Like the earlier Scooby-Doomysteries, every mystery has as its resolution purely human activity -- and, indeed, even those cases brought to Holmes under the pretense of supernatural activity -- ghosts, curses, demonic possession -- are inevitably shown up as man-made manipulations of mind and matter. And so, to speak of the theological model underlying that world is to speak of a world with no especial metaphysical activity ongoing. We might just as well be speaking, then, of any such mundane world, of that of adventurers like Tom Sawyer, actioners like James Bond or Jason Bourne, the mundane mysteries of CSI and Law & Order, or any other sort of media in which things simply happen, without second thought, in accordance with the laws of physics and without any appearance of divine intervention or other metaphysical causation (or, at least, without any such appearance not ultimately debunked as being of human manufacture).
This is not to suggest that these sorts of media are absent of displays of religiosity, for they depict the real and present world, and naturally people in this world have religious beliefs, all sorts of them.
Religion, as she is depicted in the stories of Sherlock Holmes:
In the course of the Sherlock Holmes stories, there are references to Jews and Gypsies, Muslims, Hindus, and various denominations of Christians. Perhaps the most famous treatment of religion in the Sherlock Holmes canon is to be found in A Study in Scarlet, one of only four full-length Sherlock Holmes novels (the remainder of the literary contributions being short stories). It is eventually uncovered in the story that the mysterious deaths being investigated are of Mormons against whom the killer was taking revenge, for years before their community had kidnapped his love and murdered her father, forcing her into a marriage which resulted in her own death a short time later (the story attributes the girl's death to a broken heart, but implies that she was ill-treated by her forced husband, who ultimately seemed more interested in inheriting what had previously been her father's land). The treatment of Mormonism generally is of a dangerous cult which exercises rigid control over its members and condones lawlessness against outsiders, who are distrusted. Author Arthur Conan Doyle is claimed to have later privately apologized for this depiction, though this report is itself somewhat dubious.
But the general treatment afforded to religion by Sherlock Holmes and his compatriots is apathy. In one story, Holmes dismissed knowledge of astronomy as useless to his work; doubtless he would have so opined on theological questions. Holmes occasionally uses idioms incorporating religious terminology (as in, "my God" and "for God's sake," or suggesting that a doomed man is bound "to meet his maker"), and one story mentions Holmes as being on his way to a chapel (for reasons not specified). But on no occasion is Holmes shown to attend a purely religious service, utter a prayer, or explicitly voice a belief in any higher power. Indeed, in one of the earliest stories -- The Sign of the Four -- Holmes commends to compatriot John Watson a book titled The Martyrdom of Man by one Winwood Reade, which as it happens incorporates a secularist and materialist antireligious examination of world history, especially in depicting Jesus as delusional. And yet, Holmes calls this work "one of the most remarkable ever penned," which would in that day be tantamount to endorsing atheism, as much as if somebody modernly were to declare Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to be amongst the finest books ever written.
Sherlock Holmes contemplates the meaning of life:
But even Holmes waxes morosely philosophical from time to time, as depicted in the 1892 story, The Cardboard Box:
"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."
Similarly in The Retired Colourman, Holmes decries, "But is not all life pathetic and futile? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow -- misery." And in The Veiled Lodger Holmes declares, "The ways of Fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter then the world is a cruel jest." Such contemplations suggests at the same time a wish to find a larger purpose to our Universe, even while rejecting all the explanations which have been considered up to that time. Holmes is equally dismissive of supernatural explanations for mundane crimes, refusing to contemplate for example the proposition that The Hound of the Baskervilles is anything but a flesh-and-blood beast, rejecting the possibility of unearthly agency again in The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, and commenting in the late-written story, The Sussex Vampire, "But are we to give serious attention to such things? This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. This world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."
The television and film adaptations of Holmes' stories have tended to remain faithful to general irreligiosity of the character, or more likely to have ignored theological questions altogether. In the first Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes film, Holmes dismisses, and later disproves, an apparent miraculous resurrection from death; in Young Sherlock Holmes mystical explanations are similarly disproved as Holmes discovers hallucinogenic drugs to be responsible for seemingly supernatural experiences (and the villains are attempting to perform an ancient Egyptian ritual to boot); in the modernly-set BBC reimagining Sherlock, the character is if anything more scornful of religious beliefs and explanations.
Could the world of Sherlock Holmes occupy a Pandeistic Universe?
But all of this relates to what Holmes believes, perhaps to what Arthur Conan Doyle believes -- which is, in the larger scheme of no matter. Were Holmes depicted as a devout Christian or a devout Muslim, or a Jew or a Sikh, such depiction would not work to make real the religion believed. There may be a billion devout Christians in the world (Christians will claim there are more, but that requires some sleight of hand with who they would call 'devout') but that has never operated to convince Hindus, Jews, or Mormons of the truth of Christianity; and the same can be claimed of the comparable number of Muslims, or of Hindus, or most any denomination. That it is believed simply proves that it is believed, not even that it is rationally believable, much less true. So, whatever the religion of Sherlock Holmes or James Bond or any other figure existing in a nonsupernatural world, from Robin Hood to Rocky Balboa, the question remains whether the world which they inhabit isconsistent with a pandeistic Universe.
And the answer in all of these cases is indeed that it is. For, although Pandeism fully accounts for miracles and other apparently metaphysical or supernatural events, and so would account for the magic of Harry Potter's world, the Jedi powers exhibited in the world of Star Wars, and the superpowered and telepathic aliens often encountered in Star Trek, none of these sorts of things arerequired in Pandeism. They are simply accounted for, if they exist.
It is entirely possible to conceive of a world -- indeed, of this world -- where no miracles, no telepaths, no supernatural events of any sort exist, where all reports ever made of such are theconsequence of coincidence, mistake, hallucination, imagination, or deception, and yet where the fundamental explanation for the existence of our Universe, at all, is pandeistic Creation. Even if all other religions are disqualified in such a world, where all of their reported miracles and wonders and fancies are by default simply false, Pandeism may yet be true.
In the final analysis (and in the world of Sherlock Holmes, there always is a final analysis), it is even somewhat surprising that Sherlock Holmes, to whatever degree he speculates on religious questions, has not come to contemplate at least Deism (which was well known in his day), if not the more obscure Pandeism, or some comparable variation of Pantheism. But, then, if the orbits of the planets are of no matter to Holmes, perhaps these even greater orbits would be of even less interest.
I realize I ought to be blogging more on Pandeism, as there is so, so much to discuss about it!! I tend to slowly wend my way through big pieces, but I'm going to try to keep up more here on a day-to-day basis.
Today I'd like to shout out to other Pandeists, and others who, whether themselves Pandeist or no, have made interesting strides in the study of Pandeism. First up, Nick Tafacory has consistently posted interesting ideas on Pandeism on his own (better kept-up) blog, Conflicting Thoughts. These include, to be specific:
The last one of those happens to contain links to scans of seven pages of handwritten notes -- I've been promising to provide my thoughts on those, especially with respect to many questions raised which are deserving of answers, and will have them!!
I have, as well, been privileged to meet Personified Music, a new YouTube friend (naturally through the Official YouTube PanDeism Channel. Personified Music wrote to me (and has kindly permitted me to reproduce) the following:
Hi fellow pandeist! Hello! I've been seeking someone who had the same beliefs as me! At last someone who understands the true nature! Since you seem to have a great grasp of logic, I'd like for you to examine my argument in favor of this belief. 1) The universe has a creator - Premise 1: The universe is finite Considering that the Big Bang is considered to be the beginning of time, this universe is finite - Premise 2: All finite things have a beginning and an end Basic definitions: Infinite means without beginning or end. Finite is the opposite of that. - Premise 3: Finite things must be created To begin, one must have a cause, and that cause must be initiated by something. - CONCLUSION 1: The universe was created 2) To create the universe, one must be omnipotent. - Premise 1: All things that exist must be perceivable in space If not perceived, one cannot be comprised of matter. If not comprised of matter, one cannot exist. - Premise 2: Through premise 1, we discover that the universe and all its contents is everything, as it is the only thing perceivable in space and time, - Premise 3: To create everything, one most be able to do everything. Explains itself - CONCLUSION 2: That creator is omnipotent 3) To be omnipotent, one must be omnipresent. - Premise A1: To be omnipotent, one must be able to execute every action - Premise A2: Instantaneosity (to do something instantly) is an action - Premise A3: To execute something instantaneously, one must be the action in itself, as being next to something, or even its immediate vicinity would require a given amount of time - Premise B1: Matter occupies space - Premise B2: To be omnipresent, one must occupy all space. - CONCLUSION 3: To be omnipresent, one must be the matter Summary: - CONCLUSION 1: The universe was created - CONCLUSION 2: That creator must be omnipotent - CONCLUSION 3A: To be omnipotent, one must be omnipresent - CONCLUSION 3B: To be omnipresent, one must be matter. FINAL CONCLUSION: God is the universe
This is an interesting and fruitful series of propositions. I would be cautious to discern relative omnipotence (the ability to do anything which can be done) from the absolute omnipotence proposed by some theists (the ability to do anything, including logically impossible things). But, indeed, the comment relating omnipotence and omnipresence brings to my mind the proposition of Duke University PhD Physicist Robert G. Brown in A Theorem Concerning God, and especially in the core of that work, The Pandeist Theorem -- recommended reading for all!!
One of the complaints leveled against Pandeism by theists is that it does not provide for a sufficiently 'special place' for man. There is, after all, an idea in many faiths which intensely appeals to man's sense of self-importance that our Universe owes us a religious truth which makes us feel good about ourselves, even if it must in so doing counter science and render false the proof provided by our senses. Indeed, in many faith systems the presence of such a central place for man is a selling point, so much so that these religions can only bitterly and grudgingly release notions such as the Earth sitting at the center of our Universe, much less sitting at the center of our Solar System with the Sun and planets making perfect circles around it.
For those keen to make the error of confusing Pandeism with mere Pantheism, it is supposed as well that since our Creator has become our Universe, and exists within all things in our Universe, from the hearts of stars and interstellar clouds of gas to bacteria and fungi, that man is no more important in the pandeistic scheme than a tree or a rock of comparable size. This perceived circumstance is only magnified by the absence in Pandeism of a theological need to deny man's descent from more primitive life forms through evolution by natural selection, taken by many religions as another insult to the central importance of man in our Universe. But in fact, the very nature of our Universe reveals these concerns to be simply a misapprehension.
As has been noted before, our Universe has been set forth with a number of characteristics which would only make sense in the context of intelligent life coming to exist and being able to observe them, and to advance itself through them. The existence of temporal fortuity of our observable Universe, for example, is something which only makes sense in the context of observers capable of comprehending the age of our Universe and its implications for their existence within it. The habitability of planets conceptually within our technological reach similarly indicates not simply that life ought to arise within our Universe, but that such life will develop the capacity for interstellar travel resulting in interaction between inhabitants originating in different worlds (and, indeed, that such travel must be physically possible within the constraints of our governing dynamics).
And so it becomes apparent that our Universe may well be designed to suit the origination of intelligent life. Not 'man' necessarily, but certainly 'man' as an example, and so something more than incidentally. And in Pandeism this makes sense because our Creator has become our Universe for precisely the purpose of experiencing existence through it. It is doubly important to make this distinction clear, for it is the subject of frequent confusion and occasional obfuscation -- Pandeism does not propose, as some misunderstand, that our Creator set forth our Universe with the expectation that some other intelligent life would arise especially, with man being an unintended side effect of the Creation of that other form. Instead, Pandeism proposes that our Creator set forth a Universe with governing dynamics of matter and energy which were attuned to intelligent life arising somewhere, and possibly in many places. We simply happen to be one example of such life, and so while the nature of a pandeistic Universe is one where our Creator can not have known exactly what would come about where, man is precisely the sort of thing which is intended to come about through the correct operation of those governing dynamics.
And why is man more important than trees and rocks? Because the entire existence of our Universe would serve no better purpose than to inform our Creator of what it is to exist as something other than itself, and in that capacity, thinking, self-reflective beings such as ourselves are indeed generators of a far greater range of perspective than anything, living or dead, which does less in the realm of contemplation. But it not be imagined that we are, as the older religions would like to imagine, a finished product. We are not at the end of our evolutionary journey, but at the beginning, and what an ending such a beginning promises to bring to those able to grasp hold of it!!
In 2007, astrophysicists Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer published The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology, wherein they made certain remarkable projections about far future cosmology. Chief among these were the observations that the radiation remnants of the Big Bang were slowly evaporating, and that at the same time, the process of generation of new stars was working towards obscuring the initial chemical composition markers of our Universe. Most remarkably of all, they proposed that the The expansion of the universe is speeding up|expansion of our Universe was possibly accelerating, and that such would continue to the point where the rate of expansion of distances between galaxies would outpace the speed of light itself!!
Observe that, though the speed of light is an absolute limit, faster-than-light expansion is permissible in physics because it does not describe the speed at which anything actually 'travels,' the increasing distance between galaxies resulting from the increasing size of space itself, and not anything happening 'in' space. And so, concluded the paper, astronomers coming to the fore a few trillion years in the future would find no signal that a Big Bang had ever happened, either through telltale Cosmic Microwave Background, or through the chemical signature of our Universe pointing to such an event, or even through the observation of cosmic expansion visible in the continuing movement of all galaxies (or galactic clusters) away from every other.
In fact, once expansion of our Universe overtakes the speed of light, and the last light emitted leading up to that moment passes by the reaches of our world, all of our Universe from beyond our own galactic neighbourhood will disappear. Undetectable, it will be as though it never was. And the astronomer born in such a time will have no reason to imagine that anything ever did exist beyond the borders of our own galaxy (and perhaps one or two close companion galaxies tied to a common centre of mass, though it is predictable that in sufficient time, all galaxies locally attracted in this manner will collide and merge into one). They will live in what the authors describe as an 'Island Universe,' wherein they shall forever remain "It's the End of the World as We Know It|fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe, including the existence of the highly dominant vacuum energy, When we have reached the end of time and light|the existence of the CMB, and the primordial origin of light elements."
An Element of the Pandeistic:
Now, though Krauss is an outspoken critic of the idea of Intelligent Design (and perhaps rightfully so in respect to the ham-handed wholesale-plopped down life forms model of that theory), let us consider this circumstance in the light of the pandeistic model. Pandeism propose that ours is a created Universe, and that Creator became our Universe -- and, naturally, not just any sort of Universe, but one possessed of careful balances of fundamental constants, governing dynamics designed to bring about complexity. Such complexity would, in turn, eventually yield self-replicating molecular structures -- the building blocks of life itself. And life, once brought into existence, seems to find a way to continue in existence, including adapting copying errors -- mutations -- to its advantage by promoting those which are advantageous, a process which is inclined to bring about more and more intelligent beings.
But another aspect of our Universe which would be of vital importance to such a designer would be the capacity of intelligent life to go beyond this slow and steady natural process, and instead use that intelligence to 'crack the codes' of our Universe. Intelligence, once achieved, must be usable to figure out how and why electrons and atoms and DNA ribbons work as they do, and to use that knowledge to self accelerate. By this, we mean that intelligent life ought to be able to accomplish things like building machines capable of performing quick and massive calculations, and crafting substances capable of fighting disease. Eventually, such knowledge will rise to the point where the calculating devices may be integrated directly into our brains, and where the new disease fighting methods will be addended directly into our immune systems, possibly even through DNA modifications permanently affixing them to our species. But, more than that, Pandeism predicts that we ought to be able to crack the code of the origin of our Universe, to come into possession of the ability to detect the proofs of its age and state before those become obscured from perception by time and space.
Now then, it is possible to conceive a Universe wherein certain chemical reactions necessary to our evolution progress three-hundred times slower than our experience; in such a Universe, intelligent life might arise in four trillion years, instead of the 13.5 billion years which passed before this happened (that we know of) on Earth. A civilization arising in that era would see no signs that our Universe had a singular point of origin, a particular age, or even that it existed at all outside of our galaxy and perhaps one or two others positioned nearby. Atheism offers no explanation of why this ought not to be the case; and for theistic faiths, our current circumstance is positively anathema to such a Universe. For the theist who believes in a special and wholesale Creation of life on Earth especially, out of all the Universe -- and in young earth creationist
|a Creation of a relatively recent duration -- there is simply no reason that the nature of our Universe ought to be able to contradict their theistic account. There is no reason that massive stellar gravitational wells ought to have bent and tugged the light of stars billions of years distant into our view, no reason for us to be able to observe cosmic background radiation or distant stars midway through multi-billion year stages of development. Indeed, no reason at all for us to not exist in an 'Island Universe.'
Extrapolation:
I grant that, in light of this it remains conceivable that at some past point, perhaps mere millions of years after its birth, our Universe was at the centre of other companions, other Universes which quickly faded from our ability to detect or even contemplate them. Such other entities may have become invisible to us in the same way that the galaxies we current observe might become invisible to cosmologists of a far-distant future. But if so, then at least our capacity to gauge the ultimately transient nature of our own cosmic observations ought to inform us of the possibilities to be modelled, if not actually observed. And it remains with us, in our generations of advancement yet to come, to leave such signals as may be found by far flung future inhabitants of our galaxy, informing them of that which they are no longer able to observe. Indeed, such ought to be the responsibility of intelligent life arising in any galaxy, once this potentiality comes within the grasp of their knowledge. And so, in addition to the fortuitous circumstances of properties of matter and energy which suggest our Universe to be one designed to bring about life through a random-wandering billions-of-years process, we may now add temporal fortuity. For ours is a Universe wherein the capacity of intelligent life to gauge its own cosmic pedigree indeed balances upon the edge of a knife, thanks to the speed of evolution so far outstripping the speed of expansion of our Universe.
Astronomy has always had a role to play in theological discourse. From the time of the earliest records of the ancients, it was supposed that the lights in the night sky represented mystical forces. And, once it was understood that there were distinct forms of objects beyond our horizon, elaborate systems were imagined to explain their significance, and their supposed influence on human affairs.
Ptolemy of Alexandria devised a model of the sun and planets which placed the Earth at the center of our Universe, orbited by the Moon, then Mercury and Venus, then the sun and the rest of the known planets: Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of this, in the Ptolomeic model, was surrounded by a moving sphere of fixed stars. We now know that Ptolomy's model was wrong, but not for any lack of intellect on Ptolomy's part. Instead, it was a well-thought out model that largely accounted for what could be observed in that age, and with the prevailing theological supposition, of our Earth sitting at the center of our Universe.
Nicolaus Copernicus pioneered the next great leap in astronomical knowledge. Copernicus published his heliocentric theory, placing the Sun at the center of our Universe, shortly before his death. This was necessary due to the prevailing religious sentiments of the time. Although we now know the heliocentric model to be true, the monolithic Christianity of the era required the Earth to be at the center of the Universe, and so, truth was suppressed in the name of religion.
Following the work of Copernicus, Galileo Galilei determined, as well, that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the central point for the planets. His work was based on the most practical level of research, improving the design of telescopes and then observing the sun, moon, and planets through them, and reporting his observations. For his discoveries, he was condemned by the Church, which famously declared the theory that the Earth orbits the sun to be "false and contrary to Scripture." But, it is not so widely remembered that he was equally condemned for discovering spots on the sun, craters on the moon, other moons circling other planets, and that the planets themselves were not perfect orbs, as the church required. Under threat of of torture by religious officials, Galileo recanted -- but, naturally, recanting what is a true has never worked to make it untrue.
Johannes Kepler, lived in the same era as Galileo, but in a place less dominated by religious oppression. Working in the observatory of another great astronomer, Tycho Brahe, Kepler sought to solve the riddle of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars -- that is, the tendency of Mars to sometimes appear to move backwards in its orbit. In doing so, Kepler hit upon another great discovery, that the planets did not orbit the Sun at a uniform speed, or in perfect circles, or with the Sun at the exact center, as the religious leaders required. The planets instead orbited in a-centric ellipses, with orbital speed changing in conjunction with the distance from the Sun, which was simply a focal point, and not at the exact center of their orbit.
Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity was initially set forth in great measure to explain the means by which bodies in orbit were maintained in that way. It paved the way for the theological theory of deism by demonstrating that the constant hand of the Creator was not at all needed to explain the motions of the planets, but that celestial bodies could instead be maintained in their angular momentum entirely by the clockwork operation of celestial mechanics.
It was astronomers who, centuries later, insured the upending of Newtonian physics when they confirmed Einstein's theory of relativity by observing the predicted gravitational lensing of light passing distant stars. It was astronomers who gave us the key to the age of our Universe. Edwin Hubble discovered that ours was not the only galaxy, and by examining the redshift of other galaxies moving in relation to our own, that the Universe was expanding. It is somewhat remarkable in itself that up until 1925, it was not known that a single other galaxy existed, and after that date, that countless numbers of them did.
Hubble's discovery of universal expansion was disturbing to those who, for both scientific and theological reasons, believed the Universe to have existed forever, in much the same state. Astronomer Fred Hoyle was among those who developed the steady state theory, which proposed that the expansion of our Universe was fueled by a constant infusion of new material from some central point, so that it had always appeared, and would always appear, much as it does today. But this theory was disproved with the discovery of very old quasars and similar very old and very distant structures, which are not found in the neighborhood of younger galaxies which are farther along from the point of the initial expansion. It is somewhat ironic today that the Big Bang proponents were largely religious, championing the theory in part for its assignment of a point of origin to the Universe which accorded with Creation mythology, while the steady state proponents tended to be atheistic.
Once the Big Bang theory was confirmed, this knowledge, refined over time, allowed man to at last pinpoint the age of our Universe to approximately thirteen billion seven hundred and thirty million years. Later astronomers like Carl Sagan, Paul Davies, and Timothy Ferris would continue to do more and more to not only advance our understanding of our Universe, and the continuum of physics governing objects within it, but to profoundly effect the validity of theological models as well, making it impossible to rationally believe in a Creator for whom human beings were at the center of our Universe.
As astronomical discoveries have taken us farther and farther away from our initial imagined posture in the center of our Universe, theological systems have reacted in different ways. Some have simply shifted the vanity and self-centeredness that led us to believe ourselves to be the center of a perfectly ordered Universe away from the astronomical realm, insisting that even as we are seen to occupy an insignificant position in space, we remain the object of adoration for the Creator of that vast space, so richly occupied in places beyond our very imagination. Other theological models have strengthened in their grasp of a theology in line with astronomical reality. Pandeism is one such theory, demanding that any theological explanation must accord with the nature of our observed Universe. And so, the astronomers, in their generations of work advancing our understanding of our place within our Universe, have provided an inspiration to pandeism, and to all theological theories recognizing the grandness of a Universe in which we are so privileged to play even the most minute role.
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.
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.
Studying Pandeism naturally leads eventually to studying the tenets of both theistic faiths (such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), and non-theistic faiths( such as Buddhism and Hinduism).... all of these share some very similar attributes which, interestingly, are best explained by a pandeistic Universe.... for example, all different faiths report miracles and visions of God.... Buddhism/Hinduism report visions of nirvana, from which the world is seen as an illusion, although that can also be understood as seeing the world for the mere collection of God-particles that it must be.... if there were only one true "God" then such miracles and visions should be confined to one faith -- and all of the different faiths can not be correct, because they contradict each other and present incompatible rules and visions....
We are left to ponder a spiritual force in the Universe which is apparently accessible to people from all over with a common denominator of an externalized faith, or some belief system with a spiritual aspect something to substitute for it.... Paul Davies and Karen Armstrong both report some instances in which even some atheists tell of moments which, but for their rejection of theistic-type Gods, they would be tempted to call miraculous!!
The Illusion of Religion:
I think all religions are sort of illusory.... lets say a Christian and a Muslim and a Jew each pray for a loved one to heal from an illness, and in each case their prayer is "answered".... does that mean that NT Bible-God, Koran-God, and OT Bible-God are all real? More likely it means that each person doing the praying is actually themselves manipulating the world around them through the power of their own faith.... of course, more likely than that is that the loved one just happened to get better on their own, since most sick people will be prayed for by someone, and some of them will get better....
I think that Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and many other figures accorded mystical power simply had a talent for reaching and manipulating the underlying spiritual force of which the Universe is composed. I don't believe that this ability is necessarily open to everyone, at least not on the same level, just as not everyone who wants to play in the NBA or master physics will ever have the talent to do so, but every once in a long while you get a Michael Jordan or a Stephen Hawking.... it is easy to see how someone with an exceptional talent in touching the presence of God within us might mistake that for God endorsing their views and biases.... it is even easier to see how someone with that talent and a glimpse of a true understanding of the nature of a pandeistic Universe might have great difficulty explaining this concept to others who lacked that vision, but were used to the concept of anthropomorphized tribal gods.... in fact it is more likely the followers who misunderstand the message and put their own biases into its retelling!!
No Religion Offers the "one true path":
So, I don't think any religion is a true path to God, because each of them tries to cordon God off and project the biases of its adherents onto God.... right-wingers are squeemish about gays, so they envision a God who hates gays.... used to be the same with interracial marriage, the people who didn't like it said God was against it!!
Truth is, the Pandeist God (which is after all logically the most likely model of the nature of God) couldn't care less about gays or interracial marriage or any of that.... why would it? It no longer even exists as God!! Here we are, literally occupying the crust of a dustmote in the Universe, probably one of millions of planets where life exists, probably not more than 2/3 of the way towards evolving to the point where we'd be of any use to God, and 80+% of us think God cares what we eat, what we wear, or whether we work on one of the days that we ourselves have artificially segregated into a seven-day block....
In fact I think that atheists are mostly right -- after all, what is it that atheists are rejecting? 99% of it is Bible-God type stuff: accounts of God's jealousy, anger, blood libel, destruction, and inability to deal with things in a subtle manner; accounts of nature and physics that don't stand up in the face of science and reason.... in other words, most of what atheists are rejecting is unreasonable stuff which should be rejected by any person applying logic and reason to understanding the experience of the world!!
Why Pandeism is the logical end of the inquiry:
Now, I'm not saying that atheists are really pandeists at heart, and will one day wake up and discover "the error of their ways" -- this is as insulting a position as saying that there are "no atheists in foxholes".... there are unanswered questions in the Universe, and atheists, deists, pandeists, pantheists, even panentheists and theists are trying to answer that question using some level of reason.... theists and panentheists too easily get caught up in the impossible task of using reason to justify unreasonable scripture; deists offer a reasonable God, but no explanation why God would create the Universe but not interfere thereafter; pantheists offer a reasonable Universe, but no explanation as to why it came into being.... Pantheism was developed prior to knowledge of evolution or the Big Bang, and so tried to account for a constant Universe, not one with a beginning.... I should mention Panendeism also, which presumes a God that created the Universe as part of itself, but (for no purpose that I can fathom) also leaves part of God separate from -- but not interfering with -- the Universe....
This leaves atheism and Pandeism, both of which address the faults of the other systems, both of which explain the origin of the Universe in terms of logic and probability.... between Bible-God (or a Bible-type God) and atheism, it is clearly more reasonable to choose atheism, and this is as much of a choice as many people think they have.... but to those who understand the immense improbability of a Universe coming into existence at all, much less one that supports life and allows me to post blogs on the topic -- between Pandeism and atheism, it is reasonable to choose Pandeism, and so I choose Pandeism!!
A friend asked why God bothered to spend the extra effort required to make galaxies of stars and planets, which we may never visit -- indeed, which we may never even see!! Here PanDeism provides an answer where other faiths are stunted by their belief that we'll meet our collective end bound upon this mossy rock....
If you've read my blogs to this point, you will doubtless have seen how examination of the Universe through a series of logical steps suggests that God became the Universe in order to share in the experience of life therein.... remember, now, that God basically blew itself up (albeit temporarily) in the Big Bang that started it all, so God is thereafter not around to guide life into existence, and must count on that happening on its own according to the laws of physics written into the Universe at the Creation.... therefore, PanDeism finds, the Universe is designed by its natural laws to facilitate abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection leading to the development of self-reflective intelligent life (and probably life with an even higher form of awareness to which we have simply not yet evolved)....
Really, then, there are two distinct driving factors behind the scope of the Creation: First, God sought to create a Universe that would maximize the instances of intelligent life developing without need of further intervention from God.... the bigger the Universe, the more places in which this might occur.... so it is bound to be the case that life exists in other solar systems, perhaps in this galaxy, perhaps in others, but life that is equally likely to travel to other stars.... and moreso, the Universe is made in the way that it had to be in order to maximize the possibility of intelligent life arising; therefore, the distances between the stars and the galaxies are just a side-effect of the laws of physics needed to achieve the first purpose.... sort of like making a pile of dirty pots and pans and dishes and utensils is not the goal when you set out to bake a cake for your friends to enjoy, but between the mixing and the baking and the eating, that's what you are going to end up with....
Second, in order for God to gain the maximum benefit of sharing in this experience, life must blossom and spread throughout a large portion of the Universe.... hence, a big Universe full of wonder and beauty gives its inhabitants many opportunities to discover and feel awed at the sight of things within the Universe, feelings which God shares with us.... and perhaps fewer things will inspire more wonder than the meeting of two civilizations, each an alien to the other, hopefully in a spirit of peace....
Though this may not happen in my lifetime, I have high hopes for the destiny of mankind to be shaped among the stars.... the distances indeed may only seem insurmountable.... if you were to explain to an ancient Greek exactly how far away the moon actually is, and what lays between earth and moon, they might well conclude that such a barrier could never be bridged (in fact when Galileo errantly proposed that there were civilizations on the Moon, the Church worried that this contradicted the Biblical account of the flood of Noah destroying all mankind)!! But this is a technical question, one that will be solved, I think, by a technical answer.... and though I think the distance is incidental, I also think that God intended us to be presented with a Universe full of challenges to be overcome, so that God's knowledge of the overcoming of challenge could be most fully completed!!
Just as humans have long interpreted an internal longing for God as a sign of God's existence, so I believe is the internal longing of many to believe in life on other worlds in fact a subconscious reception on our part of the beacons of sentience originating on those far-away orbs, dangling about their own flaming suns!!
