Pandeism (pronounced Pan-DEY-ism) is a combination of the Greek πάν (pan), meaning all, and the Latin deus, meaning God. It refers to a collection of religious beliefs that combine deism with pantheism. These beliefs hold that the Universe was designed by an intelligent and powerful creator, usually referred to as the Deus to avoid confusion with theistic conceptions of "God". This creator, it is argued, not only designed the Universe but in fact became the Universe, transferring all of its energy into the creation of the Universe and ceasing to exist as a separate being. In short, Pandeism is the belief that a Deistic God-like entity became the Pantheistic Universe.

Arguments in support of Pandeism

Many of the same philosophical arguments used to support theistic belief systems also support a pandeistic system. Pandeism, at the same time lacks various points of weakness with which theistic faiths are often attacked. By far the most effective argument in favor of pandeism is a modified form of the argument from design. Like deism, pandeism accepts scientific evidence of things such as the Big Bang and evolution by natural selection as accurate indicators of the mechanism by which the Universe achieved its current form. However, the fact that the Universe is at all capable of supporting such processes is seen as evidence that the laws of physics were themselves finely tuned to facilitate this outcome. There is also a variation of Pascal's Wager, called The Pandeist's Wager, which extols the virtue of behaving as though Pandeism were true, even while acknowledging that an absolute truth can not be known.

Unlike theistic faiths however, Pandeism does not suffer from the problem of evil, because the pandeistic creator is presumed to be limited to the scope of the Universe that it has become. Thus, it has not created evil which it could have prevented. With no revelation asserted and no purported judgment to be imposed, there is no concern that the pandeistic creator has created a merely deterministic Universe, with full foreknowledge of the outcome. Quite the opposite, pandeism proposes a Creator that has no foreknowledge of the specific course of events that will occur within the Universe, and creates the Universe for the very purpose of experiencing that which is unexpected in the outcome.

Philosophical implications

Pandeism suggests that all things are part of a Deus which has chosen to exist as the universe. This Deus is presumed to be rational (at least to the degree that rational thought is required to create a rational universe), and the further presumption follows that this Deus had a rational purpose in becoming the universe. Speculation as to this purpose has ranged from the Deus needing to see itself from the perspective of human beings in order to know what it is; to the Deus wanting to experience the foibles and failures of the human experience, and in that way to learn how such experiences feel; to the Deus wanting to experience non-existence.

The universe, Pandeism suggests, was set in motion by God's act of becoming it, setting forth the basic laws of physics which would inevitably lead to the origin and evolution of life, and eventually intelligence. The Big Bang is, so far as science has determined, the moment of this creation. The universe was so designed that no further intervention would be required from God after that moment to carry out the purpose of the design. Scientific investigation and discovery are seen not as an attack on religion, but as a means of discovering the mechanism used by God in setting forth the creation, which is a worthy pursuit.

The moral basis of pandeism is somewhat ambiguous, depending on the view of God's purpose. One possibility is that, since God created the universe with no conception of right and wrong, we may exist to teach God these things, and should develop and abide by concepts of right and wrong for the purpose of providing God with our understanding of them. Another possibility arises for those who believe that we will continue to share in God's experience when the universe returns to being God. If we share in God's experience, and God shares in our experience, then we ultimately share in one anothers' experience. If that is so, then whatever harm we do to one another may be experienced by all in the return to God, and we should strive to minimize the suffering that we inflict on others now, in order to preserve ourselves from sharing in that suffering later.

A strain of pandeistic thought is reflected in certain verses of the Bible, especially the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46), where Jesus instructs that whatever people do or fail to do unto the "least of" us, we do unto God; and the Biblical instruction from the Sermon on the Mount that we "turn the other cheek." (Matthew 5:38-42, Luke 6:27-31).

Pandeism explains miracles, which are reported by adherents to all theistic faiths, as unconscious manifestations of the power of the Deus which underlies the Universe. Thus miracles happen and prayers appear to be answered not because "God" is intervening on behalf of the person seeking assistance, but because that person taps the power of the Deus, but under the illusion that it is the conscious work of a higher power.

History

Components of Pandeism were considered by the ancient Milesian philosopher Anaximander of Miletus, and by the only slightly less ancient Heraclitus of Ephesus, each of whom viewed the universe as a physical construct of some divine material. In the 9th Century, Christian scholar Johannes Scotus Eriugena proposed in his great work, De divisione naturae, that a four-stage history of the Universe incorporated a pandeistic God. Eriugina contributed to this line of thought the idea that God, as a being above being, could not understand itself unless it viewed itself from the viewpoint of a lesser being than itself. Thus God had to become the universe (and the people in it) in order to understand how God relates to the universe.

It was not until the 1850s that Pandeism got rolling as a serious school of thought. In that decade, Dutch naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn's four volume treatise, Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke, und sein innerer Bau (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) was banned in Germany for rejecting Christianity and, in its place, detailing a pandeistic religious philosophy incorporating deism and pantheism. In 1859 this philosophy was formally named by German philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, in their Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. They wrote:

Man stelle es also den Denkern frei, ob sie Theisten, Pan-theisten, Atheisten, Deisten (und warum nicht auch Pandeisten?) (Man leaves it to the philosophers, whether they are Theists, Pan-theists, Atheists, Deists (and why not also Pandeists?))

In the 1940s, theologian Charles Hartshorne scrupulously examined and rejected both deism and pandeism (as well as pantheism) in favor of a God whose characteristics included "absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others" or "AR", writing in Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism that this theory "is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism", concluding that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations". Pandeists would argue, however, that the negations of pandeism are not arbitrary at all, but instead derive from logical examination of the universe.

In 1995, Jim Garvin, a Vietnam veteran who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbey of Berryville, Virginia, and went on to lead the economic development of Phoenix, Arizona, described his spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism,' something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit..."

Other noted pandeists, or persons who leaned towards Pandeism, have included Victor Hugo and Alfred Tennyson. Most recently cartoonist Scott Adams proposed a form of Pandeism as the basis of the philosophy in his book, God's Debris. Adams describes God blowing itself up in order to discover what the effect of its nonexistence would be, leaving behind the debris from which the universe is made.

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Some resources:

http://www.youtube.com/user/PanDeism (YouTube channel on pandeism)
http://www.thelemapedia.org/index.php/Pandeism
http://www.viswiki.com/en/Pandeism
http://keywen.com/en/PANDEISM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pandeism
http://pandeismwithrustynails.blogspot.com/