Pandeism

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Pandeism is occasionally used as a synonym for pantheism or for omnitheism; this article discusses other uses of the term.

Pandeism is a term that has been used at various times to describe religious beliefs. It is now particularly addressed to syncretist concepts incorporating or mixing elements of pantheism (that God is identical to the universe) and deism (that the creator-god who designed the universe no longer exists in a status where he can be reached, and can instead be confirmed only by reason). It is therefore most particularly "the belief that God precedes the universe and is the universe's creator, [and] that the universe is currently the entirety of God",[1] with some adding the contention that "the universe will one day coalesce back into a single being, God".[2]

This use has been inconsistent over time - modern usage has described (or contrasted) the nature of God as described by broader philosophical systems, but the term has also occasionally been misused to refer dismissively to this, and also to simultaneous belief in all religions, or some elements thereof. Some 19th century figures (particularly religionist Godfrey Higgins, later echoed by occult figure John Ballou Newbrough) used the term to describe the beliefs that they attributed to a particular cult or sect, the worshipers of a group of gods called Pans. For this use, see Pandeism (Godfrey Higgins).

Contents

[edit] A pantheistic form of deism

Pandeism falls within the traditional hierarchy of philosophies addressing the nature of God. This use of the term is a blend of the Greek root πάν ( 'pan' ), meaning 'all', and the Latin deus meaning God. Pan, is used this way in pantheism and panentheism, and pandeism is a variation of the term "pantheism". Pantheism, in turn, came from the term "pantheist" purportedly first used by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work, Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. This is fused to the word deism, itself originally derived from the Latin root deus. Centuries ago, theism and deism had been interchangeable, both referring to belief in God, but deism was adopted by the deist movement, which used it to refer to a God who was not known by revelation, but could only be found by rational thought.

[edit] Development

[edit] Ancient philosophy and mythology

Religious studies professor, F. E. Peters traced the idea to the philosophy of the Milesians, who had also pioneered knowledge of pantheism, in his 1967 Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon:

What appeared here, at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism (see theion) that is the legacy of the Milesians. [3]

Some ancient mythologies suggested that the world was created from the physical substance of a dead deity or a being of similar power. Norse mythology for example, posited that Odin and his brothers, Vé and Vili defeated a frost giant, Ymir and then created the world from Ymir's body. Similarly, later Chinese mythology recounts the creation of elements of the physical world (mountains, rivers, the sun and moon, etc.) from the body of a creator called Pan Gu. Because these myths were developed by people unaware of the true scope of the universe, they can fairly be said to describe the creation of the "entire world" from the body of one being. However, such stories generally have not gone so far as to identify the designer of the world as being one with the being whose body provided the material.

[edit] Origin of modern pandeism

The ideas that underscore modern pandeism have many authors, but a few are of note. In the 17th Century, Baruch Spinoza was perhaps the earliest to use deistic reason to arrive at the conception of a pantheistic God. Spinoza's God was deistic in the sense that it could only be proved by appeal to reason, but it was also one with the Universe. As one critic states:

The labeling of Spinoza's philosophy as "pantheism" by the Church was meant more as an invective and indictment than a true analysis of his writings. It was really a variant of Deism -- a "pandeism," if I may. Theism, however, posits something very different. Theism believes that nature was not God, but created BY God. That God is a completely independent sentient and cognitive Being, and that God interacts with his "children" on a personal level (e.g., The Bible).[4]

Spinoza's pantheistic focus on the Universe as it already existed did not address the possible creation of the Universe from the substance of God, for Spinoza rejected the very possibility of changes in the form of matter required as a premise for such a belief.

18th Century British philosopher Thomas Paine also approached this territory in his great philosophical treatise, The Age of Reason, although Paine was concentrated on the deistic aspects of his inquiry.[5] It was Dutch naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn who first specifically detailed a religious philosophy incorporating deism and pantheism, in his four volume treatise, Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke, und sein innerer Bau (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) released anonymously between 1850 and 1854. In 1884, theologian Sabine Baring-Gould contended that Christianity demanded that the seemingly irreconcilable elements of pantheism and deism must be combined:

This world is either the idea or it is the workmanship of God. If we say that it is the idea,--then we are Pantheists, if we say that it is the work, then we are Deists... But how, it may be asked, can two such opposite theories as Pantheism and Deism be reconciled,--they mutually exclude one another? I may not be able to explain how they are conciliable, but I boldly affirm that each is simultaneously true, and that each must be true, for each is an inexorably logical conclusion, and each is a positive conclusion, and all positive conclusions must be true if Christ be the Ideal and the focus of all truths.[6]

In the 19th Century, poet Alfred Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism",[7] integrating deism with the pantheism of Spinoza, and Spinoza's predecessor, Giordano Bruno.[8]

[edit] Developments from the 1960s to today

Understanding of pandeism was much advanced in the 1960s by Charles Hartshorne, considered by many to be a theological Einstein. Hartshorne identified pandeism as one of his many models of the possible nature of God, acknowledging that a God capable of change (as Hartshorne insisted God must be) is consistent with pandeism. Harteshorne preferred pandeism to pantheism, explaining that "it is not really the theos that is described".[9] However, he specifically rejected pandeism early on in favor of a God whose characteristics included "absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others" or "AR", writing that this theory "is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism."[10] Hartshorne accepted the label of panentheism for his beliefs, declaring that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations".[11]

In 2001, Scott Adams published God's Debris: A Thought Experiment, in which Adams set down his own variation of pandeism. Adams surmised that an omnipotent God annihilated himself in the Big Bang, because God would already know everything possible except his own lack of existence, and would have to end that existence in order to complete his knowledge. Adams asks about God, "would his omnipotence include knowing what happens after he loses his omnipotence, or would his knowledge of the future end at that point?" [12] He proceeds from this question to the following analysis:

A God who knew the answer to that question would indeed know everything and have everything. For that reason he would be unmotivated to do anything or create anything. There would be no purpose to act in any way whatsoever. But a God who had one nagging question—what happens if I cease to exist?—might be motivated to find the answer in order to complete his knowledge. ... The fact that we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way. And since only the challenge of self-destruction could interest an omnipotent God, it stands to reason that we... are God's debris.[13]

Adams' God exists now as a combination of the smallest units of energy of which the universe is made (many levels smaller than quarks), which Adams called "God Dust", and the law of probability, or "God's debris", hence the title. An unconventional twist introduced by Adams proposes that God is in the process of being restored not through some process such as the Big Crunch, but because humankind itself is becoming God.

Adams is hardly the first author to incorporate pandeistic doctrines into fiction. Dan Schneider, in his review of Stranger in a Strange Land, a 1967 novel, by Robert A. Heinlein, so identifies a character who appears to other characters as identifying humanity as God:

Jubal... is a devout and fierce individualist in a world filled with cults and bureaucracies, and by novel's end it is he, not Jill nor Mike, that is still a stranger, still tilting against the windmills. He honestly believes in his own free will, which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, 'Thou art God!' Mike, by contrast, readily abandons his Martian beliefs for human ones, even as he claims to merely find a congress between them.[14]

The idea of humankind becoming God is also fundamental to the 1950s Isaac Asimov short story, "The Last Question", in which human and computer knowledge is merged before the heat death of the universe. The computer, which continued to exist in hyperspace, had been asked how to stop entropy. It finally figured out the answer and implemented it, saying "Let there be light!" This is not a necessary element of pandeism, but correlates with it well.

[edit] Compatibility with scientific and philosophical proofs

Arguments for the existence of God support a pandeistic universe. Both the cosmological argument (that there must be a first cause) and the teleological argument (that the existence of complex patterns in the universe show intentional design) point to a pandeistic universe as readily as one with an activist God. Pandeism is compatible with evolutionary creationism in that it posits the creation of the universe by intelligent design. Pandeism differs from theistic creation theories by suggesting that the designer has ceased to have an independent existence. The Big Bang may be seen as the event signifying the transformation of God into the universe.

Scientific plausibility for this theory was introduced to pandeism through a paper written by Italian astrophysicist Paola Zizzi. Notable for her work in the field of Loop quantum gravity theory that regards the early universe as a kind of quantum computer, Zizzi proposed that the universe could have achieved the threshold of computational complexity sufficient for the emergence of consciousness during the period of cosmic inflation, in a paper entitled "Emergent Consciousness: From the Early Universe to Our Mind" [15], which has become known as the "Big Wow" theory. Zizzi states that the universe reached a level of quantum computational complexity, during the period of cosmic inflation, to undergo Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch-OR, allowing the emergence of consciousness. Zizzi’s paper is fundamentally a theory of Loop quantum gravity which derives some of its power from the Holographic Principle. It suggests that the universe’s conscious moment, or ‘occasion of experience’ came at the end of the inflationary period in physical cosmology, and was the event that allowed the universe’s quantum state vector to reduce, thus selecting the conditions for our specific universe, out of a superposed multitude of possibilities. This, too, has been reflected in fiction, in the Star Trek novel, "Corona" which featured sentient proto-stars seeking to induce a new Big Bang.

The pandeistic universe is just as the universe described in naturalistic pantheism, with the distinction that the belief necessarily encompasses a sentient God that existed before the formation of the universe. Panentheism also suggests a universe designed by a sentient deity, and composed of matter derived from that deity. The belief systems part on the point that panentheism asserts that God is greater than the universe, and therefore continues a separate existence alongside it, while pandeism asserts that everything that was God became incorporated into the universe.

Because "Pandeists believe all consciousness, in all life, to be fragments of God's awareness"[16] Such a God may not consciously interact with the material universe, but might still exerts a latent influence over the development of the physical universe, and the evolution of things within it. Because man is part of the material universe, and therefore composed of remnants of God, it could then be possible for God's energy to be tapped by an individual.

As with man's ability to release the power of the atom in an atomic bomb or nuclear reactor, every human mind could conceivably access and release some portion of the power or the knowledge of God, perhaps by simply realizing their connection with the universe through meditation. If this is valid, religious figures such as Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, and others may have been able to perform those miracles attributed to them by tapping into this infinite source of energy.

[edit] Comparison to eastern philosophy

The ideas described by pandeism in the West have resonance with certian Eastern philosophies, particularly with some expressions of Hinduism. Warren Sharpe wrote:

To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.[17]

[edit] History of use of the term

The earliest known usage of a variation of "Pandeism" to identify a pantheistic deism was in an 1859 German work, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal. Discussing religious philosophy, they wrote, "Man stelle es also den Denkern frei, ob sie Theisten, Pan-theisten, Atheisten, Deisten (und warum nicht auch Pandeisten?)", translated as "Man leaves it to the philosophers, whether they are Theists, Pan-theists, Atheists, Deists (and why not also Pandeists?)".[18]

Godfrey Higgins used the term "Pandeism" as early as 1833 to describe his theorized cult of Pandu and the Pandavas.[19] However, the first use in English to describe a synthesis of pantheism and deism appears to be by William Harbutt Dawson, in his 1904 biographical work, Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time. Dawson used the term "Pan-Deism" as a comparative reference point, writing:

... whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary.[20]

The term appears to have been little used between the 1960s and the 1990s. In 1997, Pastor Bob Burridge[21][22] of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies[23] wrote an essay titled God Is Not the Author of Sin, identifying pandeism as a deistic refinement or subset of pantheism:

All the actions of created intelligences are not merely the actions of God. He has created a universe of beings which are said to act freely and responsibly as the proximate causes of their own moral actions. When individuals do evil things it is not God the Creator and Preserver acting. If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion". That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism.[24]

Burridge disagrees that such is the case, decrying that "The Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism."[25] Burridge concludes by challenging his reader to determine why "calling God the author of sin demand[s] a pandeistic understanding of the universe effectively removing the reality of sin and moral law."

Similarly, a 1995 news article quotes this use of the term by Jim Garvin a Vietnam vet who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbey[3] of Berryville, Virginia, and went on to lead the economic development of Phoenix, Arizona. Garvin described his spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism,' something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit..."[26]

[edit] Usage as a restatement of another concept

Some uses to which the term has been put are etymologically disjunctive, as they ascribe a meaning to the term that does not reflect the roots of what is an obvious portmanteau within a well defined family of similar terms. Conversely, the term may describe a deistic pantheism, in which a God that has always been pantheistic has ceased a previously active interection with the universe. The term has been used in some instances as a restatement of pantheism (the concept that God and the universe are one) or panendeism (the concept that God both is the universe, and transcends the universe). Others have specified that it is a concept distinct from pantheism, and have used it instead to describe a universe which combines elements of pantheism (for example, that God and the universe are one) and deism (for example, that a creator God created a self-regulating universe, but subsequently ceased to actively intervene in its operations).

[edit] Examples

Reverend Natalia Kita,[4] classifies her beliefs as "transcendental pandeism," a phrase to which she assigns the following meaning:

God not only is, always was, and always will be the universe, but that the Universe is contained within God, and God transcends that which we know as the Universe. I also believe that all living beings contain the knowledge/wisdom of God/the Universe within them, if only they open their minds to it. I view God not so much as a being, but as a force of pure spirit and energy, containing all the knowledge/wisdom there is, and sharing it with all.

This use of the term appears to be consonant with panentheism, but with some minor variations with respect to the relationship between God and the individual.

This assertion is echoed by "Cristorly" (the pseudonym of Dominican poet and theologian) Orlando Alcántara, who also characterizes the pantheistic God as transcendent, while the pandeistic God is merely continuous with Creation:

God is inmanent, trascendent and holistic. That is Pantheism, not Pandeism. Pantheism is right, because we are speaking about a personal, individual, trascendent God. Pandeism (like Spinoza's) is not right, due to the fact that is not a trascendent God, a God beyond Creation. [5]

Cristorly developed a "Theognosis" of Omnientheism, which integrates six concepts - theism, deism, panentheism, panendeism, pandeism, and pantheism - into a coherent corpus or canon. Cristorly describes his definitions as "discretional," meaning that each can only be understood in the context of all the rest. Cristorly asserts:

The terms Theism, Pantheism, and Panentheism have their root in Greek, which is a Biblical language, and therefore it is correct. In a discretionary way we assume that these terms present the idea of a personal, individual God. However, the terms Deism, Pandeism, and Panendeism have their root in Latin, which is not a Biblical language, and therefore it is not correct. These terms present the idea of God like synonymous of Energy or Cosmic Force, because God is not personal here, He is not individual.

Within this grouping, the meanings of the terms hinge on their categorization of the "transcendence, immanence, and holism of God". With respect to pandeism, he notes, "we see that Energy or Cosmic Force in Pandeism is immanent and holistic, but it is not transcendent."[6]

The following excerpt from a discussion of a painting by Spanish artist Orlando Cordero illustrates the same conceptual distinction between pantheism and pandeism. The author used the words "pandeísta" and "pandeísmo" in the Spanish version, which were translated by the author into "pandeist" and "pandeism", respectively. The comparison suggests that pandeism is a system with a cold, impersonal God, while pantheism presents a warm and experiential God:

His vision is pandeist, and it had to be pantheist. In order to get a pantheist painting, it is necessary to have Christ as pennant, footpath, and lighthouse. Pandeism is impersonal like in the present canvas, in which man, nature and word integrate themselves; whereas pantheism is a personal Christ-like experience of every day. Here there is signal-like materiality for the making of other paintings. [7]

[edit] Pandeism as omnitheism

A different use of the term is typified in the usage ascribed by J. Sidlow Baxter, who wrote in his 1991 master work, The Most Critical Issue:

If the Bible is only human lore, and not divine truth, then we have no real answer to those who say, "Let's pick the best out of all religions and blend it all into Pan-Deism - one world religion with one god made out of many".[27]

This use of the word is synonymous with omnitheism, which supposes a kernal of truth in all religions, rather than all being simultaneously true in their entirety. In a variation on this theme, the Vatican has been accused of having a pandeism conspiracy with respect to other religions:

The church of Rome uses the term "pandeism", to describe her current program of bringing under her wing the non-Christian religions of the world. In this, Rome will finally succeed, because the prediction says, "all the world wondered after the beast". (Revelation 13:3)[28]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Christian Forums: Pandeism
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ Francis E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, p. 169 (NYU Press 1967).
  4. ^ Roncelin de Fos, Christian Origins of U.S., 2004:
  5. ^ Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
  6. ^ Sabine Baring-Gould, The Origin and Development of Religious Belief Part II (1884) Page 157
  7. ^ Cambridge Book and Print Gallery
  8. ^ Freethought of the Day, August 6, 2006, Alfred Tennyson
  9. ^ Charles Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism - (1964) p. 347 ISBN 0-208-00498-X
  10. ^ Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism, p. 348
  11. ^ Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism, p. 348
  12. ^ Scott Adams, God's Debris (2001) p.43 ISBN 0-7407-2190-9.
  13. ^ God's Debris, p. 43-44.
  14. ^ Dan Schneider, Review of Stranger in a Strange Land (The Uncut Version), by Robert A. Heinlein
  15. ^ gr-qc/0007006
  16. ^ [2]
  17. ^ Warren B. Sharpe, Philosophy for the Serious Heretic: The Limitations of Belief and the Derivation of Natural Moral Principles (2002) p. 396 ISBN 0-595-21596-3
  18. ^ Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (1859), p. 262
  19. ^ Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis: Or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations and Religions (1833), p. 439, ISBN 1-56459-273-1.
  20. ^ William Harbutt Dawson, Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Thought of Our Time, (1904, republished 1977), p. 256.
  21. ^ Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies
  22. ^ Homepage of Bob Burridge
  23. ^ Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies
  24. ^ Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies
  25. ^ Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies
  26. ^ Albuquerque Journal, Saturday, November 11, 1995, B-10.
  27. ^ J. Sidlow Baxter, The Most Critical Issue
  28. ^ Conrad Baker, The Three Powers Of Armageddon: An Exposition of Revelation 16:13-16, August 12, 2005

[edit] See also

Beliefs about the nature of the divine
v • d • e
Acosmism | Agnosticism | Animism | Antitheism | Atheism | Binitarianism | Deism | Determinism | Duotheism | Esotericism | Eutheism and dystheism | Gnosticism | Henotheism | Humanism | Ignosticism | Kathenotheism | Monism | Monotheism | Monolatrism | Mysticism | New Age | Nondualism | Nontheism | Omnitheism | Pandeism | Panendeism | Panentheism | Pantheism | Polydeism | Polytheism | Spiritualism | Theism | Thelema | Theopanism | Theosophy | Transcendentalism | Transtheism | Trinitarianism | Unitarianism


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