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!!

Is God a good bowler?

Here's the question....

God goes bowling one day, and on his first roll he makes a perfect strike....
So did God (a) roll the ball all the way down the lane from behind the line and manage to knock down all ten pins without tweaking the path of the ball? Or did God (b) secretly and invisibly guide the ball to the pins, or perhaps even secretly run down there and knock over those pins by hand?

Bear in mind, the lane is unusually long -- it takes billions of years for the ball to roll down it -- but also that God made the ball and the lane and the throw.... you might easily say, what evidence is there that the ball didn't just roll itself? The evidence is simply this: the laws of physics are too fortuitous!! The Universe is too friendly to the sort of complexity that we living, thinking creatures embody, when it could have been otherwise in so many ways.

This analogy is primarily aimed at theists who believe that a God essentially stood next to the pins and knocked them down, a silly conceit designed to puff up human importance in the Universe.... a friend of atheistic persuasion suggested of this analogy that "God knew the outcome of the game before he played it. When the outcome was unfavorable, he modified his swing to create the desired outcome." I'd like to think that, like any bowler, "he modified his swing" to maximize the probability of the desired outcome, and ceased to exercise any control over the ball once it hit the hardwood.... on the other hand, while the bowler is just aiming to knock down a particular set of ten pins, God is aiming to create a Universe in which intelligent life pops up -- anywhere, and at any time.... So I think God has an easier task of it!!

If there are, as my friend goes on to suggest, other Universes, it would make sense that God created all of them for the same purpose!! Since God would have preceded time (which is a function of the Universe) there is no need for God to have been "made", it only had to exist -- and if such an entity existed at any point, then by its nature it would have "always" existed!!

There is only one rational purpose for which a being properly described as "God" would create anything -- to learn something that it can not learn in any other manner.... and what other knowledge could God attain from creating the Universe than the knowledge of limitation, uncertainty, and failure? Curiosity is a rational trait, and I would presume God to be rational (as any intelligent being with complete or substantially complete information would be).... I am certainly as entitled to this presumption as any physicist is to presume that mathematical models of the Universe can be validly projected -- we live in a Universe that appears to be organized rationally rather than randomly; if this Universe has a creator, this creator must be at least some part rational.... indeed, the more we delve into the Universe, the more certain we become that it is entirely rational, and so would support the presumption of an entirely rational creator.

Hence, Pandeism proposes, a rational God becomes the Universe (or, as even as my friend suggests, a collection of Universes), and nothing exists of God outside this Universe (or these Universes).... however many there may be, they are logically designed with physical characteristics that maximize the possibility that complexity will arise, and that life will arise from that complexity, and that intelligent life will ultimately evolve, capable of experiencing and reflecting on its own limitation, thus providing these knowledge-completing experiences to God!!

As to the human purpose served by this speculation, well, what human purpose is served by knowing how black holes work? We can't make them or harness their energy for anything.... but we strive to know what's out there.... if such a God exists, it is something that's "out there"; and if it's a rational being, as is the pandeistic conception of God, then we should eventually be able to discern either its actual existence, or at least the probability of it!!

PanDeism explains why the Universe has so many galaxies and stars!!

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!!

In short, once again PanDeism explains it all!!

One Universe, everything that is goes in; everything that is needed comes out!!

I've been thinking over this question for some time.... a friend argued that PanDeism could not be true because a Creator who wanted to experience everything that could possibly be eperienced would have to create an infinite number of Universes to carry out this plan.... the basic example being that our Creator could not know how it feels to be Stephen Jay Gould at the age of seven standing on the edge of Ayers Rock, Australia, because Stephen Jay Gould was never even in Australia in his seventh year -- therefore a Creator becoming the Universe to fulfill such experiences is useless unless such Creator is capable of making an infinite number of Universes, and was therefore already an infinite being....

Something about the question itself struck me as wrong. Took a while to put my finger on it exactly, but here it is: our Creator isn't looking to learn how someone with Stephen Jay Gould's experiences and memories and perspective at age 7 feels when gazing down from Ayer's rock.... our Creator isn't looking to experience every possible combination of interactions that can possibly be experienced by any possible being that might ever exist; rather, our Creator is looking to learn what it is like to experience those things that our Creator can not experience prior to the existence of a Universe where these things occur (e.g. feeling awe when looking down from Ayer's rock)....

The reason our Creator doesn't need to feel everything is the same reason we don't memorize every possible fraction between 1 and 2.... once we know 1 and 2 and how fractions work, we can extrapolate what's in between.... once we know that 1/8 is greater than 1/9 is greater than 1/10, we need not go furtherdown this progression to understand what the next number would be.... if you were to win $1,725,251 in the lottery tomorrow, would you really feel any different than if you were to win $1,725,252?

There is simply no need for our Creator to have "infinite" experiences, because experiences are like points on a range, maybe like points on the outside of an n-dimensional object.... if you have two or three points in space, they may look like they are just out there, floating unconnected; if you have 100, you may see that these points are the boundaries of some kind of a shape; if you have 10,000, you will clearly be able to make out a sphere, and where there are empty spaces (which there must be, because we're only talking about points here) you can pretty much figure out where a point in such a space would go by looking at the relationships between all the other points around the sphere in general, and then the relationship between the local points near that spot.... if the surface of the sphere has a texture or a pattern of colors or a degree of luminosity (or all of these features, or even an ever-changing medley of these features) you can figure out what color, feel, rate of movement, and other characteristics wil be ascribable to any point by learning what experiences befall the points in general, and the points in that area....

Before the Universe exists, our Creator can't know how it feels for anyone to look down from Ayers rock at any age!! It can't know how it feels to be in awe of anything, because nothing exists that it could be in awe of, so the only way it could know what awe feels like is to create a Universe containing (a) beings capable of being in awe of things and (b) things that such beings would indeed be in awe of.... however, our Creator does not need any particular beings feelings of awe, just the feelings felt by enough beings (however random) to know how any kind of awe is likely to feel (in a sense to eliminate the extreme outliars, to be sure that there is no unique feeling that can not be estimated but is nonetheless not captured or approached in anyone's experience of the Universe.... however, PanDeism requires at the outset the concession that our Creator can not be all-knowing, because if it were, there would be no need to create the Universe, hence no Universe created!!

The experiences that our Creator is seeking may be many times more layered even than the example of the colorful and active sphere noted above, but there are many billions of people, and every single one of us has had literally millions of experiences (every moment of our lives is a new experience, really).... not to mention the likely life forms in other galaxies, and even the experiences of animal life on Earth.... so our Creator need not make infinite universes, if existing as this one Universe for the course of its existence will provide all the points that our Creator could possibly need to understand (either by direct sharing of experiences or by extrapolation from the closest similar experiences) how it feels to be in just about any possible situation!!

In other words, our Creator already knows everything about how it feels to be Stephen Jay Gould at age 7, and it knows how it feels to be looking down from Ayer's rock (and probably someone has looked down from Ayer's rock at age 7, or from some edifice of comparable magnificence at some comparable age) so our Creator can estimate from the perspective of perhaps tens of thousands who have had similar enough experiences to know almost certainly how it would feel to be Stephen Jay Gould looking down from Ayer's rock, aged 7....

And so: One Universe, everything that is goes into it; everything that is needed comes out!!

Scientific Proof of PanDeism?

Italian astrophysicist and mathematician Paola Zizzi recently demonstrated in a paper that the Universe, in the course of the Big Bang explosion, could have experienced a moment of consciousness -- that the pattern of physical energy existing in the expanding proto-Universe could have imitated the patterns of chemical energy found necessary for the human mind to experience consciousness....

The idea that the Universe was conscious before its formation -- and this consciousness directed the formation, but then ceased to exist as a result of it -- is an inherent part of PanDeism, the theory that God became the Universe, thus ceasing to be God.... so it would seem that this development would make the Universe pandeism-possible!!

Of course, all things are relative, and since the universe was exploding at or near the speed of light, time would have slowed down for this conscious structure, and it would have experienced a relative eternity of contemplation before being dispersed in the continued expansion of the Universe....

Further, the Universe reaching this point of consciousness through a Big Bang is only one possibility, for a conscious entity may have existed before the "Big Bang" which merely transformed itself into something that approximated that particular stage of a Big Bang as the actual starting point of transforming into the Universe!!

The other question that arises is whether this consciousness could control the direction of the Universe.... the answer is, of course, yes.... if all that existed at that point was a particular form of energy, and that energy could be controlled, then the expanding Universe could be controlled.... for we can control our own thoughts (you can, for example, force yourself to think about a pink elephant on roller skates), and in so doing, we control the flow of that energy.... since we can think about anything we wish to think about, our control over that energy is vast, if not "absolute"!!

//// Pacific PanDeist

The Morality of PanDeism

My parents were nominally Christians, but not of the Churchgoing type.... they encouraged me to explore all different religions and choose what felt right to me.... I don't think anything "brought me out of Christianity" as I don't see PanDeism as inconsistent with the true message of Christianity.... naturally, some of the details don't match up with what people do in the name of Christianity, or even believe it to stand for, but that doesn't mean that those people are right (remember, slaveowners used to quote chapter and verse from the Bible to justify slaveowning, and their descendants took the same tactic to support segregation and prohibitions on interracial marriage)....

PanDeism teaches that God, being essentially unlimited, was missing the knowledge of the experience of limitation, so God became the Universe.... if you examine the underlying structure of the Universe, there is really nothing out there but energy (even a piece of iron is just a collection of atoms, which are just super-minute bits of energy tied into orbits by other super-minute bits of energy), and beneath the atoms and electrons/protons, and quarks, there is nothing but pure energy, and that is God.... remember also that God is not limited, therefore God not only can be in all things, but must be in all things, for nothing can exist that keeps God apart from itself!! So God is indeed the Ocean (but an inconceivably vast Ocean it is) and we are indeed drops of the Ocean....

God is not so much "hands-off" in the sense that God could choose to interfere but does not; God has, in becoming the Universe, essentially gone to sleep for the duration of its existence.... this is necessary, for the purpose of the Universe is for God to experience things that would be impossible for a waking God to experience!! For example, fear -- God has no knowledge of fear, because there is nothing God can fear.... and without fear it is impossible to know courage, or even contentment!! Can you imagine leading your entire life and being unable to experience a single moment of bravery, or relief, or even surprise? Can you imagine that, in a life that endures for countless billions of years? The only way God can experience true fear (and the positive contrary feelings) is if, for a time God ceases to be God, and instead becomes something capable of feeling fear!! So God does not interfere, but lets the Universe unfold as it will, only according to the rules that God set forth at its Creation....

We must remember that our purpose is to provide the experiences that will fulfill God's knowledge.... but we are not mere tools in this progression, for we are part of God, and will always be so!! At the end of the Universe, when all things collapse back to the point from which the Creation began, we will be ourselves within God, and we will share in all of the experiences of the Universe....

Now, here is the basis for right and wrong: everything that has been done in the course of the Universe will be part of that experience, and each of us will have the knowledge of who we were in life and what things we did.... every one of us will experience both the good and the bad that has come to pass, but most of this experience will be in the abstract (and hopefully the good will vastly outweigh the bad); however each of us will experience the pain and suffering that we caused to others from their point of view -- if you strike someone in this life, in the next you will have their experience of being struck (not only the pain, but perhaps the humilation and anger) along with the knowledge that this infliction of suffering was your choice (hence my Pacifism, for I will never make the choice to strike another person, nor will I cause an animal to be butchered for my meal).... if you kill someone, you will experience their suffering of death at your hands, and the experience of all the grief that others felt from your act.... (but then, if you give a child a gift, you will experience his joy, and so forth)....

This is truly the Golden Rule in action!! What you do unto others will be done unto you!! Hence, the afterlife, the return to oneness with God, is both Heaven and Hell for us as individuals.... imagine someone like Hitler or Stalin, their experience in the afterlife utterly dominated by experiencing firsthand the pain and suffering of the millions they persecuted.... imagine someone like Jonas Salk, his experience in the afterlife dominated by the joy and comfort and gratitude of the millions who were saved by his vaccine.... so you see, our choices in this life determine our experience in the next, not because God will judge what is right and wrong, but because we already know what is right and wrong at a more fundamental level.... and that, I believe is the origin of the admonition that we must turn the other cheek, and of the affirmation that what we do to the least of our brothers, we do to God!!

Bless Yourself, for Thou Art God!!

The Yin and Yang (or male and female) in PanDeism

Consider for a moment the gender roles that best suit the parent philosophies of PanDeism. First you have Deism - this is absolutely a masculine concept. God is a father-figure, not a mother giving birth to the universe, but a mechanic, an architect, a craftsman, a clockmaker, a typical male role. And what does this father do after the universe has been made and set in motion, when the gears are wound? He abandons us. He disappears, and does not make himself available to us. We trust that he is still there, but can only confirm this through the exercise of cold reason; this is a God who is cold, emotionless, out of reach, like every stoic father who has presented only this face to a son, a tradition passed down from generations before. The God of Deism therefore possesses the attributes of the Yang.
Now you have PanTheism - a feminine concept if ever one was! God is the universe that envelops us, is all around us, wraps us in her warmth. God is ever present, sharing herself completely with us, giving us unconditional love because we are part of her, born from her womb with an umbilical cord that can never be severed. This is the ultimate mother, the ultimate feminine, possessing the attribute of the Yin.
Hence, PanDeism strikes the perfect balance of masculinity and femininity, of Yin and Yang (thus not surprisingly, PanDeistic ideologies are far more prevalent in Asia). Like the masculine Deist God, the PanDeist god is a mechanic, an architect, a clockmaker; but the PanDeist God does not abandon us when his act of creation is completed; rather, the PanDeist God assumes the other role, that of the PanTheist all enveloping mother, allowing us to exist through her very substance
So, as Deism and PanTheism combine to find the perfect balance in PanDeism, so must we strive to find this balance in ourselves and in our relationships, to both build and nurture, to be sufficiently distant yet always present when this presence is called for. We are each a microcosm of the potential balance of the universe, and each of us already carries with us the connection with the universe that enables us to emulate its temperment, should we desire to touch the God within ourselves. Realize, therefore, beloved friends, that touching God therefore means touching the characteristics within ourselves that reflect the opposite gender - men must find their feminine side, and women their masculine.