The Irreducible Complexity of the Standard Model of Particle Physics

Irreducible complexity is a notion introduced by Creationists in an attempt to undercut the theory of evolution by natural selection, essentially by proposing that some features found in nature are so complex even at their most fundamental levels that they could not have been arrived at through evolution.

This is a debunkable notion, especially given recent molecular evidence pointing to a Universal Common Ancestor. But interestingly, because of the Creationist focus on nonevolved life, the idea has not been much applied to nonbiological fields. And yet, there is one field to which this idea truly does belong, and that is particle physics. Within particle physics an equation has been developed, a very long and complex and powerful equation describing the intricate balance of relationships between all of the particles and forces of our Universe which combine to give it its perceivable physical characteristics.

To the right is the Standard Model of Particle Physics (and here, to be especially exact, the Standard Model Lagrangian -- a Lagrangian being an especial sort of comprehensive description of a system). 

Now, here's the thing, the equation is an equation of the whole; it is complete, and inseparably so. No part of the equation may be taken out without the function of the whole collapsing -- and that function is the sustainment of our Universe itself!! Every constant needed to insure our existence is there, and not only to insure that our Universe exists and continues to exist, but that it grows instead of collapsing on itself.

And, even more, that this growth is steadily paced and will happen to yield expressions of fundamental forces such as the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism, which happen to contribute to the progressive diversity of chemical elements. One of the fundamental questions of science and philosophy is, why is there something, instead of nothing at all? Well, now we know that the mechanisms set forth in the Standard Model require there to be something, force 'something' to come seemingly from nothing. But the Standard Model is a something which necessarily precedes every other something which otherwise comes from nothing. And therein lies the rub, for this complex and massive balance of equations is asserted to exist of its own accord, despite the centuries man has had to progress, and the decades mathematicians have had to labor, in bringing to light the glory of its elegant complexity.

And this, the atheist contends, is a raw fact, a Universe from nothing. And for the theist, this is no aid either, as a Universe arising evolutionarily from such a formula would contradict theistic accounts of wholesale Creation of living organisms and living planets and star systems. And so, the simple, raw and brutal fact of the existence of this formula evidences, at last, Pandeism.

A scientific methodology for determining whether homosexuality is sinful

The nature of religious belief has always made it difficult to scientifically test the truth of its announced principles. After all, most 'causes' in theological systems are metaphysical, and so inobservable in their action. Indeed, one of the great give-and-takes of challenges to the scientific testability of religious beliefs is that the responsible superior metaphysical entities are aware of the 'test' and refuse to play along. Simply put, it is claimed that if a miracle is demanded such as the restoration of an amputated arm, the entity capable of so performing will refuse to do so, cleverly denying those who do not believe in it any rational basis for adopting such belief.

But what if there were a scientifically testable metaphysical occurrence which did not require the intervention of a metaphysical entity -- indeed, one which counted on nonintervention of such entities in order to be able to occur? Exactly such an occurrence manifests in the Biblical doctrine of the origin of carnivorous life out of the idyllic utopia of the Garden of Eden. Specifically, it is a popular doctrine in fundamentalist Christianity that sharks, alligators, tigers, scorpions, crocodiles, wolves and other animals of this sort were, in the days before Adam and Eve bit into that unfortunate fruit, all dedicated plant-eaters, living together in harmony, incapable of killing or dying. So it is written in Genesis 1:30:

And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—-I give every green plant for food. And it was so.

And so, when skeptics question why the 'good' and 'loving' deity of Christianity would drop man in a world full of biting, bloodsucking, and man-eating beasts, the Christian answer is that no deity had anything to do with this, oh no; our Creator created a world with no sin and no death (and, indeed, Christians point out that if the Creator had created a world wherein death existed, then man had no fall and there would be no point to the sacrifice of Jesus, falsifying all of Christianity!!) It was instead, so goes the claim, man's sin which caused this to become a fallen world, and caused all of those previously happily herbivorous creatures to experience super-fast evolution into bloodthirsty carnivores, who had no choice but to kill for their sustenance. No deity had any hand in that; it was sin and sin alone which caused this transformation.

Okay, so let's test this out!!

First, we must find some dedicated homosexuals. Preferably, for thoroughness sake, we ought to have at least one male homosexual couple, and one lesbian couple. Next, we take a well known herbivorous animal such as a cow. We will place the cow in a room adjacent with a gay couple having a gay wedding and thereafter engaging in hardcore gay sex -- all activities generally classed by those fundamentalist Christians as 'sin.' And, simply put, if the cow then turns from a peaceful grass-muncher into a flesh-rending, saber-toothed, razor-clawed carnivorous predator, then we will know that homosexuality is indeed a 'sin.' On the other hand, if no such transformation occurs, then we will know at the least that homosexuality is no sin at all; and quite possibly that the whole of Christianity is false. In fact, the latter proposition can be tested by performing unquestionably sinful acts in that bovine proximity, blasphemy, adultery, wearing fabrics made of the fibers of two different plants, working on the Sabbath, worshiping idols, coveting their neighbors' asses -- we can run through quite a list and still stop short of anything which harms any person or property.

So, with this exciting prospect before us, of scientifically determining whether homosexuality is sinful (or, indeed, whether 'sin' at all is real), let's gather up some gay folks and some cattle, and do some science!!

Man's place in a pandeistic Universe

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!!

Pandeism and Science

I mean to state this proposition with great care and specificity: Pandeism has no conflict with science whatsoever; indeed, Pandeism embraces the scientific method and the awesome nature of scientific discovery, and as with religion, Pandeism fully accounts for science. This is not to suggest that the means of accounting are the same -- for Pandeism accounts for religious experiences -- to the extent they exist as something more than coincidence or psychological phenomena -- as manifestations of the underlying unconscious power of our Creator, often denoted by Pandeists as the Deus. But neither does this mean that Pandeism assumes generally that religious experiences are, in fact, anything more than coincidence or psychological phenomena. After all, one man's vision or revelation is another's hallucination; one man's prophecy is another's clever use of vague wording and exploitation of biases of  memory and expectation; one man's miracle is another's parlour trick.


And What Is Science?


Let us step back a moment and remember what Science is, and what Pandeism is. Science is at bottom not simply a set of beliefs about the nature of the world, but a method of arriving at principles. This method generally involves the specific steps of developing a theory which accounts for especial observations, of developing an experiment (or a series of them) which would serve to falsify the theory based upon contrary results, and performing this experiment. A rock bottom concern of such endeavours is the replicability of the results. That is, if one man conducts an experiment in Kansas City to determine the effect of mixing one enzyme with another, or of colliding two particles of matter, or of teaching a crustacean multiplication, then a counterpart in the field in Boston or Berlin or Bangalore ought to be able to sit down with the same materials at the same starting point, and achieve the same result. It is in this way -- by studying the means by which a proposition is tested, and replicating outcomes, that scientists gain confidence that the outcome is valid.


Confessedly, there are some fields wherein that sort of experimentation is not so simple a thing to engage in, either because of the scale or complexity of the elements involved, or the time frame over which results may be gleaned, or both. Cosmology and evolution offer examples of these problems. We might over a billion years observe two stars developing in different ways based on predictable differences in their known compositions; we might in that same period of time evolve a sea cucumber into a wombat and back again; but the human life span simply does not allow for observations of such periods. Naetheless, we are able to observe many billions of snippets of the evolution of stars and of life, and to make predictions which may be tested by examining stars and life forms known to be at certain stages in these processes. And so, science may equally gain confidence that even these more difficult areas (so far as experimentation is concerned) have provided for valid scientific outcomes.


And What Conflict Does Religion Raise?


A traditional and historic difficulty arises with theistic religions, for these tend to present their own theories about how things came to be, with specific ideas presented as to the time frames, order, and means. And theological accounts tend to be based not on observation or experimentation or verification, but simply on a claim that somebody wrote down in the distant past, almost invariably asserted to have been communicated to that writer by their deity. Religion comes with several built-in defenses to the scrutability of these claims. One is, when somebody comes along and observes for example that the Earth goes round the Sun despite religious authorities teaching otherwise, to kill that person and burn their documentation of the fact; or to at least beat them up, or threaten them with torture, so that they recant the claim and cause others to cower from making such claims. Indeed, recantation of scientific claims is thusly accorded great weight in religious circles, there being no end to the assertions that Charles Darwin recanted his theory of evolution. But recantation is meaningless in science, where replicable experiments by one scientist, even an opponent of the recanted theory, can produce documentation of the truth of that theory. Darwin's recantation held no more power to change the facts observed than did Galileo's or indeed than would a recantation by Pythagoras of the Pythagorean theorem.


But religious literalists have no choice but to soldier on, attempting to prove for as long as possible that the Sun orbits the Earth, that animal species are not related by common descent, that rocks in the ground are thousands rather than billions of years old, that homosexual couples raise maladjusted children, that illnesses are caused by evil spirits, or that the lights in the night sky are pinpricks in a great blanket. The next option is to deem the scientific results to be a test, or a creation of an evil spirit designed to fool us. It is, they might imagine, an evil being who put those strange skeletons in the ground, and who made it appear to us that light was coming from stars millions of light years away. A final defense is to effectively rewrite the scripture so as to cast accounts which contravene science as simply metaphors for the actual scientific results, or to simply pay them no mind at all and focus on those things which are yet claimed to be beyond the ken of science.


And How Does Pandeism Reconcile Science and Religion?


Pandeism need raise none of religion's defenses. For, to the Pandeist, who believes that an intelligent Creator set forth our Universe, logically needing do no more than provide its energy and establish the governing dynamics which guide its behaviour, science is precisely the practice of discovering those very governing dynamics. Gravity, electromagnetism, radioactive decay, evolution, these are not things to be disputed or explained away, but discoveries which take us ever closer to fully knowing the measure of our Creator's design. If the scientific method indicates that our Universe is 13.72 billion years old, then that soundly indicates that our Creator set forth our Universe 13.72 billion years ago. If the fossil record and DNA combine to indicate a common ancestor for man and apes, then that soundly indicates that our Creator set forth a Universe wherein evolution by natural selection would likely lead to some branches of life evolving the capacity for intelligent thought (and in every instance where this is so, it follows that the branch so evolved would have a similar branch lacking such capacity as its closest evolutionary relation).


And, returning to the proposition that Pandeism fully accounts for both scientific and theological evidence, these things are made complementary through it. As a theology of reason, Pandeism does not assume that theological accounts are true, but firstly notes the proposition of David Hume that in order for a miracle to be credible, the documentation supporting it must be such that it is more likely that the miracle occurred than that those purporting to have witnessed it are lying, or were mistaken, or were deceived. A plausible scientific explanation for a perceived miracle would render mistaken the belief that it was miraculous. The possibility of a scientific explanation, or of a simple misreporting or misunderstanding of what was observed, raises a substantial, though perhaps not impenetrable, barrier to the assumption that any recounted miracle is indeed a true account.


It is only if that barrier to believability is overcome that Pandeism need provide a metaphysical accounting for the miraculous thing, and this is fully accomplished -- for all faiths -- by the pandeistic model of an underlying unconscious sustaining power. And no science yet known to man can provide evidence contravening the possibility that such is the nature of what is fundamentally responsible for the Creation and sustainment of our Universe in being.

On The Evolution of the Pocket Watch

One of the more striking arguments (if you will pardon the pun) for the existence of a Creator-god is what is popularly known as the divine watchmaker argument. The argument suggests that things which are the product of an intelligent designer's design are immediately apparent to us by their complexity and intricacy.

It was British religionist William Paley, who perhaps most famously enunciated this contention when he wrote in his Natural Theology:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.

Naturally, there remains (if you will pardon another pun) some grit in the gears of this argument -- for it seems to suppose that the pocket watch itself sprung fully-formed from the mind of man, needing and having neither antecedent technology nor a chain of ancestry for the men who invented it (and observe that the pocket watch is the technology of choice for this illustration because, naturally, the evolution of the wristwatch was yet incipient). In Paley's day, then, startling a conception as it may be, the pocket watch likely represented the very height of peacetime portable technological advancement -- and, indeed, more modern variations of the argument have substituted things such as 747 airliners and cellular phones (both of which by no small coincidence necessarily have time-keeping devices built into them). And yet, the very first 'pocket watch,' assembled at some early point in the 1510s, was necessarily made from some simple parts which had been made for only passingly similar purpose, or even for some other purposes entirely, but which were loosely and handily adapted for use in making that first pocket watch. Nor would it be correct to assume that the very first attempt to make a pocket watch was a complete success; surely it may have worked well enough to draw a few oohs and aahs, but as surely it was a primitive thing when put next to its more advanced descendents.

In fact, the earliest handily portable timekeeping devices which might be called 'pocket watches,' born in the early Sixteenth Century, were relatively heavy brass boxes several inches across, with a single hand -- an hour hand. Mechanisms able to accurately reflect smaller increments had not yet evolved. And even that hour hand didn't rightly tell the hours, typically tending to be off by several of them per day. Metal grillwork, instead of glass, covered the face, and the whole thing was combined by tapered pins and wedges, as screws usable for this purpose had not yet evolved either. Though they needed twice-daily winding to be kept running at all, they were as a practical matter useless as timekeeping devices, impossibly inaccurate and inconsistent. Their use was strictly ornamental, as baubles for show.

But the passage of time and generations of watchmakers developing new innovations, incorporating some and discarding others as obsolete or unhelpful, brought about a gradual and continual advance. Smaller and smaller gears shrank the whole of the thing; more finely tuned springs improved accuracy until it became feasible to add another hand to count off minutes. Lighter and more durable materials were found or innovated, the grillwork was replaced with a glass face. Eventually -- in the far future even from Paley's perspective -- inventions were added ranging from the second hand and a little window displaying the date, to the quartz crystal to keep time, to the watch battery and the digital display.

But were we to come upon even an Eighteenth Century pocket watch on the heath, though we might in an instant recognize it as the product of an intelligent craftsman's hand, we would in the same instant be as well assured that the watch was not produced by a person who had himself never studied watchmaking or some analogous art, nor seen or interacted with a pocket watch. Nor would we credibly assume that the only possible explanation for the existence of the pocket watch on the heath was that it was plopped into existence from nothing by an all-powerful genie who happens, for the sake of arbitrariness, to impose punishment on all people who eat grapes and wine in the same meal, or who have sex with others of a disfavored tribe.

Nor would we be justified in imagining any capacities for the watchmaker other than that he was physically and mentally up to the task of making this one watch, and -- possibly most intriguingly for this analogy -- that he had been taught the particulars of how to make that watch by someone initially more learned on the subject than himself, though the advance of knowledge necessitates that with the passage of generations, some future craftsman would indeed exceed their teachers and improve the craft itself. And so, if a pocket watch implies a watchmaker, it at the same time implies a string of predecessors to the watchmaker, each of whom taught the next and likely improved on the craft itself.

Nor, again, does the finding of the watch demonstrate that the ability to manufacture pocket watches has existed with man, the designer, since time immemorial. Even the hundred most able and intelligent men amongst the Ancients of Greece or Rome or the Dynasties of China would have been unable to build such a device. To the contrary, man began with no way to estimate time but for the following of the sun and moon, first with eyes alone, then with sundials and other stationary devices which caught and distributed their shadows. Then came hourglasses, water clocks, and candle clocks (which measured time by the stable melting time of candles of certain lengths), and finally, only after metallurgy and the consequent discovery of the spring, the true clockwork-mechanism time-telling devices. And even these took countless models, countless small improvements, occasional combinations of innovations, to go from nothing to the modern clock over a few thousand years -- an eyeblink in the vaster geological time scales over which the biological form of evolution occurs.

So, when someone proposes finding a pocketwatch on the heath and wonders how it got there, the accurate response is that it came from ancestors which sprang by unbidden coincidence from the elements, and evolved.

Evolutionary biology as reflected by analogy in Hindu scripture

Efforts to narrow the rift apparent between, on the one hand, science, and on the other, religion (or, most especially, revelation-based theistic faiths) often run through the territory of creative interpretation of one discipline or the other. There are, naturally, two directions in which this prescription flows: one, the assertion that the scriptural account is literally accurate, and that science is accurate only insofar as it may be read to support the scriptural narrative; and two, the assertion that scientific accounts alone are accurate and that whatever is reported in scripture is an allegory of the scientifically discoverable occurrence, or is otherwise subject to a scientific explanation. For example, as to the first method, geographic markers usually taken to indicate slow and sporadic flooding events may be proposed by scriptural literalists as evidence of a single world-wide flood, an event remarked upon in religious traditions from many parts of the world. As to the second method, certain of those same signs might be staked as logical explanations as to why the scripture-writers believed a localized flood to be worldwide, or were given to a metaphor of such a flood (then argued to have never been intended for literal interpretation) thus preserving some measure of validity to that scripture.

Falling within the latter vein,of late, are particular series of parables in Hindu scripture which tell of Vishnu--the ultimate expression of the divine essence, the meta entity within which our whole Universe is wrapped--revealing himself to man in particular forms, known as avataras, arriving in a particular progression. Those forms, it is noted by followers, were those particularly appropriate to the situation in which he appeared (appearing, for example, as a fish to warn of the coming flood, and as a turtle to assist in salvaging what remained after the flood). But more than that, it is posited, a remarkable correlation is to be found between the mythical recounting of the progression of those forms and what is now understood by scientific examination to be the order through which evolution by natural selection has brought to pass the variety of life on Earth.

The ten incarnations accepted by most authorities on the Hindu scripture are:
. Matsya . -- which begins as a very tiny fish, but grows to be a great fish, filling the ocean
.. Kurma .. -- a tortoise
... Varaha ... -- a boar
.... Narsimha .... -- a "hybrid" half-man and half-lion
..... Vamana ...... -- a Dwarf
...... Parasurama ...... -- Rama, the hero with an axe
....... Rama ....... -- the princely hero of the Ramayana epic
........ Krishna ........ -- the divine teacher of the Gita
......... Buddha ......... -- the enlightened founder of Buddhism
.......... Kalki .......... -- which is yet to come....

We begin, then, with Matsya. Matsya comes to warn the faithful Dravidian king Manu that a flood is coming which will drown all life on Earth. When he first appears, he is the tiniest of minnows, whom Manu is able to fit in a jar; but soon Matsya outgrows the jar, and then the tub in which he is next placed, and then even the river, and finally the whole ocean. Then the fish reveals itself to be Vishnu, and instructs the king of the coming flood, and of the need to save all manner of medicinal herbs and other valuable seeds. It is noteworthy that the flood thus described is not claimed to have come from Matsya (or Vishnu), and not to be a punishment directed against man; it is simply a natural occurrence which man is being warned of. Representations of Matsya tend to depict a four-armed upper torso of a man protruding from the mouth of a great fish, but the myth makes it clear that Matsya was the fish itself. And in support of the evolutionary biological argument, it is claimed that Matsya's piscine nature represents the oceanic origin of all life on Earth.

Kurma, the huge tortoise, is the form Vishnu takes after the flood has passed, in some accounts it arrives right afterwards to assist in the rebuilding of civilization, but in most it comes in a different era to deal with a different ocean; as an amphibious animal it is capable of retrieving the gods' elixir of immortality which had been carried by the flood to the ocean's deepest reaches. Restoring it to the demigods of the day, it enables them to defeat various evil demons who had stripped them of their powers. Kurma is claimed, then, to represent the transition from fish to reptiles (though a true amphibian in between would have been a better tell of this). Not long after, the demon Hiranyaksha appears, steals the Vedas, and plunges the Earth itself to the depths of the 'cosmic ocean.' Vishnu reappears in his third avatara, Varaha, the giant Boar. After a thousand-year battle, Vahara prevails and carries the Earth up from the depths between his tusks, in order to return it to its rightful place in our Universe. The boar, then, is claimed to represent the next transition, from reptile to mammal.

Narsimha, the "half-man, half-lion," to my mind, brings forth the image of an animal with some feature which would make one think of a man, and some which would make one think of a lion: the baboon. There are many species of baboon, and amongst them, the Guinea Baboon is known in particular for the lion-like mane of the adult male. It is observed to walk at times on all fours, and other times to stand and take a few steps on its hind legs, and to manipulate things in a markedly human-like fashion with its dexterous primate hands. This is, it must be confessed, a bit of a stretch to accommodate the scriptural narrative into an evolutionary narrative, but at the same time there is no actual half-man half-lion in existence to work into it scientifically. In the myth, Vishnu appears in this 'half-man, half-lion' form to defeat Hiranyakashipu, a demon who had been granted immunity from enemies when indoors and out, when on the ground or in the sky, during the day and in the night, and from both manufactured weapons and living hands. Narimha defeated Hiranyakashipu by seizing him in a doorway (neither inside nor out), at twilight (neither day nor night), holding him on his thigh (not on the ground, nor in the sky), and disemboweling him with his lion-like nails (neither living hands, nor man-made weapons).

That last beast is the last 'beast,' all the rest of Vishnu's incarnations being recognizably human. As to Vamana, the "dwarf," this raises the image of "Lucy," the famously diminutive specimen of species Australopithecus afarensis, a short-statured link in the chain of human evolution. The remainder of the incarnations are human, though arguably representative of progressive stages of human evolution, or, alternately, of the evolution of human civilizations, if not both. Parasurama, Rama, and Krishna are most easily analogized as simply being humans advancing across different levels of civilization and enlightenment. Parasurama, notably, is 'Rama with an ax,' and is oft depicted as swarthed in a beardly beard, conceivably, then, a hairier 'primitive man' version of Rama. And though the inclusion of the Buddha amongst these incarnations is claimed by some as cynically indicating some co-option of religious symbolism by the Hindu majority, it confesses at the same time a universality of recognition of the Buddha as a force for goodness and instruction toward right conduct. But observe as well that in a smaller number of traditions, a brother of Krishna named Balarama, described as well as an enlightened teacher, is included in place of Buddha; this view is most often criticized from the view that Krishna and Balarama lived at the same time, while all other avatara live in distinct and nonoverlapping eras.

And at last there is Kalki, riding a white horse, bringing with him the immolation of our Universe entire, in a blinding white light -- stepping out of the evolutionary fold, this is claimed by some to presage the physics dictating the end of our Universe itself, either by a Big Crunch (possibly leading to a new cycle), or heat death, or some comparably cataclysmic coming.

And through all this it must be remembered that there are precious few 'fundamentalist' or 'literalist' Hindus, who would claim all the tales told above to be literal truths instead of symbolic depictions, making it more palatable to assume that stages of evolution by natural selection were indeed being showcases here. Indeed, some nineteenth century Hindu thinkers thought Charles Darwin had himself taken an unacknowledged cue from Hinduism, an error fueled by J. B. S. Haldane, an English scientist of the same field, who connected the ideas after the fact. But that claim would have been inestimably strengthened by more and more explicitly intermediary incarnations invoking animals which would fill fossil record gaps. Perhaps if Vishnu had earlier appeared as a great crustacean? Or an improbably large bacterium? But still, were one looking for a revelational theistic faith whose scripture was most immediately analogisable to the scientific evidence available, the evolutionary progression of the avatara of Vishu offers as qualified a candidate as any.

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 Faith: the big question!!

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!!