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Pandeism or Pan-Deism (derived from Greek p??, 'pan' = 'all' and Latin deus = God, in the sense of deism), is a term used at various times to describe religious beliefs. Since at least as early as 1859, it has delineated 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).
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Quotations
I can conceive of only one challenge for an omnipotent being—the challenge of destroying himself.
I think God would prefer to exist than to not exist.
Im not saying he wants anything. Im saying its the only challenge.
That sounds like a thoroughly unanswerable question. I think youve hit a dead end,.
I said.
The old man looked at nothing and said, We are Gods debris.
Scott Adams, God's Debris (2001) p.42-44. ISBN: 0740721909.
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FREE THINKERS: all people whose beliefs regarding spirits are compatible with modern science. Deism, pandeism, agnosticism and atheism are compatible, while theism is not.
Charles Brough, Untwisting the Social Sciences (2006), p. 220.
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Encyclopedia
Pandeism or Pan-Deism (derived from Greek p??, 'pan' = 'all' and Latin deus = God, in the sense of deism), is a term used at various times to describe religious beliefs. Since at least as early as 1859, it has delineated 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", with some adding the contention that "the Universe will one day coalesce back into a single being, God".
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 p?? ( 'pan' ), meaning 'all', and the Latin deus meaning God. These differing roots make pandeism a hybrid word, like automobile, hyperactivity, neonatal, sociology, and television. Pan is used in this same way in pantheism and panentheism, while deism is derived from deus. Pandeism shares these roots as a variation of the term "pantheism", and of "deism".
The words deism and theism are both derived from words for god. While the root of the word deism is the Latin word deus, which means "god", the root of the word theism is the Greek word ?eó? (theos), which also means "god".
The deist movement adopted that name to refer to a God not knowable by revelation, but who could only be found by rational thought. Perhaps the first use of the term deist is in Pierre Viret's Instruction Chrestienne (1564), reprinted in Bayle's Dictionnaire entry Viret. Viret, a Calvinist, regarded deism as a new form of Italian heresy. Viret wrote:
Pantheism, in turn, came from the term "pantheist" purportedly first referenced by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work, Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. The word "pantheism" was first used by Toland's opponent Jacques de la Faye in de la Faye's Defensio Religionis ('"Defense of Religion') a 251-page critique of Toland published at Utrecht in 1709. The 1859 coining of the term "Pandeism" to identify a pantheistic deism by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal is discussed below.
The concepts of pantheism and deism can each be used to cover a wide variety of positions on a wide variety of religious issues. Thus, pandeism may theoretically cover a wide variety of positions, so long as these logically fall at the same time within some form of pantheism and some form of deism. Like many Deists (and some Pantheists), Pandeists may refer to "God" as "the Deus" to avoid confusing Pandeist conceptions of the creator with those of theistic faiths.
Development
In mythology
Many ancient mythologies suggested that the world was created from the physical substance of a dead deity or a being of similar power. In Sumerian mythology, the young god Marduk slew Tiamat and created the known world from her body. Similarly, Norse mythology posited that Odin and his brothers, Vili and Vé defeated a frost giant, Ymir and then created the world from his. 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 Pángu (??). 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 did not go so far as to identify the designer of the world as being one as having used his or her own body to provide the material.
The 2006 film, The Fountain, depicts Mayan mythology as incorporating similar elements of pandeism, describing a world made from the body of the "First Father", who sacrificed his own life to become the world. However, the film-makers took some liberties with the mythology, which is in fact more polytheistic than pandeistic.
Ancient philosophy
Religious studies professor, F. E. Peters traced the idea of pandeism to the philosophy of the Milesians, who had also pioneered knowledge of pantheism, in his 1967 Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, noting that "[w]hat appeared... 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.
Milesian philosopher Anaximander in particular favored the use of rational principles to contend that everything in the world was formed of variations of a single substance (apeiron), which had been temporarily liberated from the primal state of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, stated that Anaximander viewed "...all coming-to-be as though it were an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which destruction is the only penance." Anaximander was among the material monists, along with Thales, who believed that everything was composed of water, Anaximenes, who believed it was air, and Heraclitus, who believed it to be fire.
Although the rise of Christianity displaced nontheological discourse for many centuries, some pandeist concepts are conveyed in the New Testament. Particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, 25:31-46, popularly known as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. There Jesus tells of how those who do good things for their fellow men will be blessed, and those who fail to will be cursed, saying to the blessed:
- And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. .
Jesus then also says to the cursed:
- Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. .
This conforms to the pandeist view that, the Deus having become the Universe and all things (including people) being part of the Deus, everything that one person does for the benefit of another is experienced by the Deus, and whatever one person fails to do for another (or even whatever harm one person does to another) is experienced by the Deus.
Origin of modern pandeism
In the 9th century, Johannes Scotus Eriugena proposed in his great work, De divisione naturae (also called Periphyseon, probably completed around 867 AD), that the nature of the Universe is divisible into four distinct classes:
- that which creates and is not created;
- that which is created and creates;
- that which is created and does not create;
- that which neither is created nor creates.
The first is God as the ground or origin of all things, the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns. One particularly controversial point made by Eriugena was that God was "nothing", in that God could not fall into any earthly classification. Eriugena followed the argument of Pseudo-Dionysius and from neo-Platonists such as Gaius Marius Victorinus that because God was above Being, God was not a being: "So supremely perfect is the essence of the Divinity that God is incomprehensible not only to us but also to Himself. For if He knew Himself in any adequate sense He should place Himself in some category of thought, which would be to limit Himself." A more contemporary statement of this idea is that: "Since God is not a being, he is therefore not intelligible... This means not only that we cannot understand him, but also that he cannot understand himself. Creation is a kind of divine effort by God to understand himself, to see himself in a mirror."
Eriugena depicts God as an evolving being, developing through the four stages that he outlines. The second and third classes together compose the created Universe, which is the manifestation of God, God in process, Theophania; the second being the world of Platonic ideas or forms. The third is the physical manifestation of God, having evolved through the realm of ideas and made those ideas seem to be matter, and may be pantheistic or pandeistic, depending on the interference of God in the Universe:
The divine system is thus distinguished by beginning, middle and end; but these are in essence one; the difference is only the consequence of man's temporal limitations. This eternal process is viewed with finite comprehension through the form of time, forcing the application of temporal distinctions to that which is extra- or supra-temporal. Eriugena concludes this work with another controversial argument, and one that had already been scathingly rejected by Augustine of Hippo, that "[n]ot only man, however, but everything else in nature is destined to return to God." Eriugena's work was condemned by a council at Sens by Honorius III (1225), who described it as "swarming with worms of heretical perversity," and by Pope Gregory XIII in 1585. Such theories were thus suppressed for hundreds of years thence.
Pandeism from the 16th Century on
Giordano Bruno conceived of a God who was immanent in nature, and for this very purpose was uninterested in human affairs (all such events being equally part of God). However, it was Baruch Spinoza in the 17th Century who appears to have been 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:
Unlike Eriugena, 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. 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. Junghuhn's book was banned for a time in Austria and parts of Germany as an attack on Christianity. In 1884, theologian Sabine Baring-Gould would contend that Christianity itself demanded that the seemingly irreconcilable elements of pantheism and deism must be combined:
Within a decade after that, Andrew Martin Fairbairn similarly wrote that "both Deism and Pantheism err because they are partial; they are right in what they affirm, wrong in what they deny. It is as antitheses that they are false; but by synthesis they may be combined or dissolved into truth". Ironically, Fairbairn's criticism concluded that it was the presence of an active God that was missing from both concepts, rather than the rational explanation of God's motives and appearance of absence.
In the 19th century, poet Alfred Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism", integrating deism with the pantheism of Spinoza, and Spinoza's predecessor, Giordano Bruno.
Literary critic, Hayden Carruth, said of Alexander Pope that it was "Pope's rationalism and pandeism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature"
Developments from the 20th Century to today
Understanding of pandeism was much advanced in the 1940s by the process theology of Charles Hartshorne. 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. Hartshorne preferred pandeism to pantheism, explaining that "it is not really the theos that is described". 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." Hartshorne accepted the label of panentheism for his beliefs, declaring that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations".
In 2001, Scott Adams published God's Debris: A Thought Experiment, in which he explicitly set down his own variation of pandeism, a radical form of kenosis. 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?" He proceeds from this question to the following analysis:
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. Robert A. Heinlein, in his Stranger in a Strange Land, a 1967 novel, so identifies a character who appears to other characters as identifying humanity as God. Heinlein's pandeistic bent in that novel is encapsulated in his use of the phrase "Thou Art God", and in key passages in which the protagonist of the story, Michael Valentine Smith, explains how, "Thou art God, and I am God and all that groks is God," God being that which is in all things (even the "happy blades of grass") and having no choice but to experience all things. Smith sets humankind on the course to releasing itself from its physical limitations, and thus truly becoming God. 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.
Another notable pandeist is documentarian Bruce Parry who spoke of how his experiences among primitive tribes led him to adopt the more skeptical form of pandeism:
Parry has since been described, with his apparent approval, as a "Christian turned sceptical pan-deist turned reluctant atheist" who "sees himself on a spiritual journey."
Compatibility with scientific and philosophical proofs
Arguments for the existence of God (other than those premised on the truth of a particular religious text) tend to support a pandeistic Universe as readily as a theistic 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 active God. Pandeism is particularly compatible with evolutionary creationism in that it posits the creation of a fine-tuned 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 the Deus 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 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", 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 being 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 the Deus became incorporated into the universe. Pandeism is notable for explicitly accepting, and even revering, concepts such as chemical abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection, including human evolution. A basic assumption of Pandeism is that scientific inquiry will accurately reveal the mechanisms by which the Universe operates, which in turn will be shown to derive from a very simple set of principles established with the creation of the Universe.
Because "Pandeists believe all consciousness, in all life, to be fragments of God's awareness" Such a being may not consciously interact with the material Universe, but might still exert 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 the Deus, it could then be possible for the energy of the Deus 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 the Deus, 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.
Comparison to Eastern philosophy
The ideas described by pandeism in the West have resonance with certain Eastern philosophies, particularly with some expressions of Hinduism. Warren Sharpe wrote:
History of use of the term
The earliest reported usage of a variation of "Pandeism" to identify a pantheistic deism was in the 1859 German work, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal. Discussing religious philosophy, they wrote:
This is translated as:
Some inconsistent uses of this nuanced term has also been made over time. It has occasionally been used to refer dismissively to pantheism alone, from the presumption that pantheism is deistic. It has been used to mean simultaneous belief in all religions (omnitheism), or some elements thereof.
Earlier in the 19th century, some figures (particularly religionist Godfrey Higgins, later echoed by occult figure John Ballou Newbrough) used an etymologically distinct variation of the term to describe the beliefs that they attributed to a particular cult or sect (see Pandeism (Godfrey Higgins) for this use). Higgins, in particular, used the term "Pandeism" as early as 1833 to describe his theorized cult of Pandu and the Pandavas.
The term was used 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:
Early in the 20th century, Pandeism, with its sweeping reinterpretation of the nature of the Deus and the purpose of mankind, was viewed as a threat to Christianity and possibly a force for the positive reorganization of human civilization. Towards the end of World War I, the Yale Sheffield Monthly published by the Yale University Sheffield Scientific School commented:
A similar concern was raised by Charles A. Bolton in a 1963 article, Beyond the Ecumenical: Pan-deism?
An early 19th century German philosopher, Paul Friedrich Köhler, expressed the skeptical view that all of these religious labels were referring to the same thing. Köhler wrote:
Roughly translated, this means that Pantheism, Pandeism, Monism and Dualism all refer to the same God illuminated in different ways, and that whatever the label, the human soul emanates from this God.
In 1997, Pastor Bob Burridge of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies wrote an essay titled God Is Not the Author of Sin, also identifying pandeism-described as a deistic refinement or subset of pantheism-as a threat to Christianity:
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."
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."
There is marked contrast in a 1995 news article quoting this use of the term by Jim Garvin, a Vietnam vet who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbey 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..."
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 interaction 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).
Examples
Reverend Natalia Kita, classifies her beliefs as "transcendental pandeism," a phrase to which she assigns the following meaning:
This use of the term appears to be most consonant with panentheism, but with some 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:
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:
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."
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:
Pandeism as omnism or 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:
This use of the word is synonymous with omnism or omnitheism, which suppose a kernel 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:
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