Pandeism
Encyclopedia
Pandeism or Pan-Deism is a term describing beliefs incorporating or mixing logic
ally reconcilable elements of pantheism
(that "God", or its metaphysical equivalent, is identical to the Universe
) and deism
(that the creator-god who designed the Universe no longer exists in a status where it can be reached, and can instead be confirmed only by reason). It is therefore most particularly the belief that the Creator of the Universe actually became the Universe, and so ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity.
Through this synergy
pandeism claims to answer primary objections to deism (why would God create and then not interact with the Universe?) and to pantheism (how did the Universe originate and what is its purpose?).
al 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. 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 θεóς (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 earliest use of the actual term, Pandeism, may have come as early as 1787, with another use related in 1838, both discussed below, though it is possible that the relative authorities were really discussing Pantheism. The unequivocal 1859 coining of "Pandeism" explicitly in contrast to both Pantheism and Deism by Moritz Lazarus
and Heymann Steinthal
is discussed below.
Thus no-one used the term Pandeism or Pandeist before the 18th century, because these words did not exist. However, many earlier writers, schools of philosophy, and religious movements expressed essentially pandeistic ideas.
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 logic
ally 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.
at Duke University
with a background in philosophy
, published a scientific proof asserted to demonstrate the truth of pandeism under information theory. Titled "The Pandeist Theorem", the theorem states that "If God exists, then God is identical to the Universe. That is, the theorem is a statement of conditional pandeism. If God exists at all, God must be absolutely everything that exists." The basic premise is that a being properly defined as God must have absolute knowledge of the Universe, and that no method except existing as a real-time map of the whole content of the Universe would permit that. Brown's conception does not accept a created "Universe," (he is careful to distinguish the "Universe" to mean all that is, including God, from the "Cosmos
" which is simply our physical experience of galaxies and other physical phenomena) but one that is pandeistic without having been created (as "God" can, and indeed must, become the Cosmos) although he allows for the possible consciousness of "God" - the Universe itself - at n-dimensional levels.
Stephen Hawking
's recent determination that our Universe (and others) needed no Creator to come about inspired the response from Deepak Chopra
, interviewed by Larry King
, that:
Chopra insists that Hawking's discoveries speak only to the nature of God, not to its existence.
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.
has published two books expressing a pandeistic model of our Universe. The first was the 2006 book entitled The God Theory, in which he writes
Haisch published a follow-up in 2010, "The Purpose-Driven Universe." Both books reject both atheism and traditional theistic viewpoints, favoring instead a model of Pandeism wherein our Creator has become our Universe, to share in the actualized experiences therein manifested. Haisch provides as proof of his views a combination of fine tuning
and mystical experiences arguments.
. Robert G. Brown, in his Pandeist Theorem, identifies Hinduism as "perhaps surprisingly, remarkably compatible with the theorem," and specifically observes that "pure Vedantic Hinduism as described in particular in the Upanishads is monist and either pandeist or panendeist...." Similarly, Warren Sharpe wrote:
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as well, had previously observed this:
suggested that the world was created from the physical substance
of a dead deity
or a being of similar power. In Babylonian 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 Pángǔ
(盤古). Such stories 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
.
But, one such example exists in Polynesian
myth, for in the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity manifests in a divinity that New Zealand
ers call Tangaroa
, the Hawaiia
ns Kanaroa, the Tonga
ns and Samoa
ns Tangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa
. A native poetic definition of the Creator relates: " He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named."
In Jesus and the Lost Goddess the authors claim that some Gnostic Christians
held to a pandeistic idea (while acknowledging that most believed in an a celestial disaster and an ignorant/evil demiurge).
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 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
.
Gottfried Große in his 1787 interpretation of Pliny the Elder
’s Natural History, describes Pliny, a First Century figure, as a pandeist as well, though this may be a misunderstanding on Große's part, no other historian having proposed the same as to Pliny the Elder.
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:
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 Plato
nic ideas or forms
. The third is the physical manifestation of God, having evolved through the realm of idea
s 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.
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. According to the Encyclopedia of American Philosophy "Later Unitarian
Christians (such as William Ellery Channing
), transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau
), writers (such as Walt Whitman
) and some pragmatists (such as William James
) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world." 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 (Image
s 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.
Literary critic, Hayden Carruth
, said of 18th century figure Alexander Pope
that it was "Pope's rationalism
and pandeism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature" 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
. Friedrich Engels
var also Pandeistic. Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels By Tristram Hunt. 2010. Page 43.
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.
The 1976 Simon Raven
novel, The Survivors
includes an exchange between characters where one observes, "God became the universe. Therefore the universe is God." while the other counters:
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."
alone, from the presumption that pantheism is deistic. It has been used to mean simultaneous belief in all religion
s (omnism
or omnitheism), or some elements thereof.
root word πάν or 'pan' meaning 'all
' and Latin
word 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".
This can lead to criticism because it goes against the Classical compound
method of creating words. Technical English words should only be constructed from Latin or Greek words not a combination. Indeed, in The Pilgrimage from Deism to Agnosticism, Moncure Daniel Conway
stated that the name is "an unscholarly combination." Pandeism holds that at some time or in some way the universe was sentient so it is separated from pantheism
. It bears similarities to the god of the Watchmaker analogy
which is commonly found in arguments for Monotheism
.
’s Natural History:
English translation:
What's described here appears to be a description of Pantheism rather than Pandeism. There is no mention of God existing before creation, but rather of a God synonymous with Nature.
Pandeism was next mentioned in 1838 by Italian phrenologist Luigi Ferrarese
in Memorie Risguardanti la Dottrina Frenologica ("Thoughts Regarding the Doctrine of Phrenology"):
Ferrarese was unequivocally critical, as he attacked the philosophy of Victor Cousin
as a doctrine which "locates reason outside the human person, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual Pandeism, absurd for us, and injurious to the Supreme Being." Though Ferrarese's target, Cousin, has often been identified as a pantheist, it was said that he repudiated that label on the basis that unlike Spinoza, Cousin asserted that "he does not hold with Spinoza and the Eleatics that God is a pure substance, and not a cause."
A more optimistic note was struck in the 1859 German
work, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus
and Heymann Steinthal
, who wrote:
This is translated as:
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.
Another view expressed is more by way of comparison:
, 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 beginning of World War I
, an article in the Yale Sheffield Monthly published by the Yale University
Sheffield Scientific School
commented:
A similar concern was raised by Charles Anselm Bolton
in a 1963 article, Beyond the Ecumenical: Pan-deism?: "I first came upon this extension of ecumenism
into pan-deism among some Roman Catholic scholars interested primarily in the "reunion
of the churches," Roman
, Orthodox
, Anglican." . . . . "We may perhaps ask what is the ultimate aim of the Curia in promoting the pan-deist movement."
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
..."
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).
, in his Mastery of Being:
He claims that if God were evolving or improving, being an infinite being, it would have to be traceable back to some point of having "an infinitely undeveloped state and condition." But, this claim was made prior to the rise of scientific knowledge pinpointing the beginning of the Universe in time, and connecting time with space, so that time would not exist as we know it prior to the Universe existing. In Islam, a criticism is raised, wherein it is argued that "from the juristic standpoint, obliterating the distinctions between God and the universe necessarily entails that in effect there can be no Sharia
, since the deontic nature of the Law presupposes the existence of someone who commands (amir) and others who are the recipients of the command (ma'mur), namely God and his subjects."
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
ally reconcilable elements of pantheism
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
(that "God", or its metaphysical equivalent, is identical to the Universe
Universe
The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
) and deism
Deism
Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...
(that the creator-god who designed the Universe no longer exists in a status where it can be reached, and can instead be confirmed only by reason). It is therefore most particularly the belief that the Creator of the Universe actually became the Universe, and so ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity.
Through this synergy
Synergy
Synergy may be defined as two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable.The term synergy comes from the Greek word from , , meaning "working together".-Definitions and usages:...
pandeism claims to answer primary objections to deism (why would God create and then not interact with the Universe?) and to pantheism (how did the Universe originate and what is its purpose?).
A pantheistic form of deism
Pandeism falls within the traditionTradition
A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...
al hierarchy
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
of philosophies
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
addressing the nature of God. This use of the term is a blend of the Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
root πάν ( 'pan' ), meaning 'all', and the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
deus
Deus
Deus is Latin for "god" or "deity".Latin deus and dīvus "divine", are descended from Proto-Indo-European *deiwos, from the same root as *Dyēus, the reconstructed chief god of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon...
meaning God. These differing roots make pandeism a hybrid word
Hybrid word
A hybrid word is a word which etymologically has one part derived from one language and another part derived from a different language.-Common hybrids:The most common form of hybrid word in English is one which combines etymologically Latin and Greek parts...
, like automobile
Automobile
An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
, hyperactivity, neonatal, sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, and television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
. Pan is used in this same way in pantheism
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
and panentheism
Panentheism
Panentheism is a belief system which posits that God exists, interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it...
, 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
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
word θεóς (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
Pierre Viret
Pierre Viret was a Swiss Reformed theologian.- Early life :Pierre Viret was born to a devout middle class Roman Catholic family in Orbe, a small town now in Switzerland. He was a close friend of John Calvin....
's Instruction Chrestienne (1564), reprinted in Bayle's
Pierre Bayle
Pierre Bayle was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work the Historical and Critical Dictionary, published beginning in 1695....
Dictionnaire entry Viret. Viret, a Calvinist
Calvinism
Calvinism is a Protestant theological system and an approach to the Christian life...
, regarded deism as a new form of Italian heresy. Viret wrote:
Pantheism, in turn, came from the term "pantheist" purportedly first referenced by Irish
Irish people
The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
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
Jacques de la Faye
Jacques de la Fave was a 17th-18th century French writer whose Defensio Religionis a 251-page critique of the pantheism of John Toland, was published at Utrecht in 1709...
in de la Faye's Defensio Religionis ('Defense of Religion') a 251-page critique
Critique
Critique is a method of disciplined, systematic analysis of a written or oral discourse. Critique is commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgement, but it can also involve merit recognition, and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt...
of Toland published at Utrecht
Utrecht (city)
Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features...
in 1709. The earliest use of the actual term, Pandeism, may have come as early as 1787, with another use related in 1838, both discussed below, though it is possible that the relative authorities were really discussing Pantheism. The unequivocal 1859 coining of "Pandeism" explicitly in contrast to both Pantheism and Deism by Moritz Lazarus
Moritz Lazarus
Moritz Lazarus , born at Filehne, in the Prussian province of Posen, was a German philosopher, psychologist, and a vocal opponent of the anti-Semitism of his time.- Life and education :...
and Heymann Steinthal
Heymann Steinthal
Heymann or Hermann Steinthal was a German philologist and philosopher....
is discussed below.
Thus no-one used the term Pandeism or Pandeist before the 18th century, because these words did not exist. However, many earlier writers, schools of philosophy, and religious movements expressed essentially pandeistic ideas.
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
Theory
The English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...
cover a wide variety of positions, so long as these logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
ally 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
Deus
Deus is Latin for "god" or "deity".Latin deus and dīvus "divine", are descended from Proto-Indo-European *deiwos, from the same root as *Dyēus, the reconstructed chief god of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon...
" to avoid confusing Pandeist conceptions of the creator with those of theistic faiths.
Scientific proofs
In 2009, Robert G. Brown, a professor of physicsPhysics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
with a background in philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, published a scientific proof asserted to demonstrate the truth of pandeism under information theory. Titled "The Pandeist Theorem", the theorem states that "If God exists, then God is identical to the Universe. That is, the theorem is a statement of conditional pandeism. If God exists at all, God must be absolutely everything that exists." The basic premise is that a being properly defined as God must have absolute knowledge of the Universe, and that no method except existing as a real-time map of the whole content of the Universe would permit that. Brown's conception does not accept a created "Universe," (he is careful to distinguish the "Universe" to mean all that is, including God, from the "Cosmos
Cosmos
In the general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from the Greek term κόσμος , meaning "order" or "ornament" and is antithetical to the concept of chaos. Today, the word is generally used as a synonym of the word Universe . The word cosmos originates from the same root...
" which is simply our physical experience of galaxies and other physical phenomena) but one that is pandeistic without having been created (as "God" can, and indeed must, become the Cosmos) although he allows for the possible consciousness of "God" - the Universe itself - at n-dimensional levels.
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA is an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity...
's recent determination that our Universe (and others) needed no Creator to come about inspired the response from Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra is an Indian medical doctor, public speaker, and writer on subjects such as spirituality, Ayurveda and mind-body medicine. Chopra began his career as an endocrinologist and later shifted his focus to alternative medicine. Chopra now runs his own medical center, with a focus on...
, interviewed by Larry King
Larry King
Lawrence Harvey "Larry" King is an American television and radio host whose work has been recognized with awards including two Peabodys and ten Cable ACE Awards....
, that:
Chopra insists that Hawking's discoveries speak only to the nature of God, not to its existence.
The pandeistic universe is just as the universe described in naturalistic pantheism
Naturalistic pantheism
Naturalistic pantheism is a naturalistic form of pantheism that encompasses feelings of reverence and belonging towards nature and the wider universe, but is realist and embraces rationalism and the scientific method...
, with the distinction that the belief necessarily encompasses a sentient being that existed before the formation of the universe. Panentheism
Panentheism
Panentheism is a belief system which posits that God exists, interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it...
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.
The God Theory
Physicist Bernard HaischBernard Haisch
Bernard Haisch is a German-born American astrophysicist who has done research in solar-stellar astrophysics and stochastic electrodynamics. He has developed with Alfonso Rueda a speculative theory that the non-zero lowest energy state of the vacuum, as predicted by quantum mechanics, might provide...
has published two books expressing a pandeistic model of our Universe. The first was the 2006 book entitled The God Theory, in which he writes
Haisch published a follow-up in 2010, "The Purpose-Driven Universe." Both books reject both atheism and traditional theistic viewpoints, favoring instead a model of Pandeism wherein our Creator has become our Universe, to share in the actualized experiences therein manifested. Haisch provides as proof of his views a combination of fine tuning
Fine Tuning
Fine Tuning was the name of XM Satellite Radio's eclectic music channel. The program director for Fine Tuning was Ben Smith and the tag line was, "The World's Most Interesting Music"....
and mystical experiences arguments.
Comparison to Eastern philosophy
The ideas described by pandeism in the West have resonance with certain Eastern philosophies, particularly with some expressions of HinduismHinduism
Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions...
. Robert G. Brown, in his Pandeist Theorem, identifies Hinduism as "perhaps surprisingly, remarkably compatible with the theorem," and specifically observes that "pure Vedantic Hinduism as described in particular in the Upanishads is monist and either pandeist or panendeist...." Similarly, Warren Sharpe wrote:
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as well, had previously observed this:
In mythology
Many ancient mythologiesMythologies
Mythologies is a book by Roland Barthes, published in 1957. It is a collection of essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, examining the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths...
suggested that the world was created from the physical substance
Substance theory
Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....
of a dead deity
Deity
A deity is a recognized preternatural or supernatural immortal being, who may be thought of as holy, divine, or sacred, held in high regard, and respected by believers....
or a being of similar power. In Babylonian mythology, the young god Marduk
Marduk
Marduk was the Babylonian name of a late-generation god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon, who, when Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of Hammurabi , started to...
slew Tiamat
Tiamat
In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is a chaos monster, a primordial goddess of the ocean, mating with Abzû to produce younger gods. It is suggested that there are two parts to the Tiamat mythos, the first in which Tiamat is 'creatrix', through a "Sacred marriage" between salt and fresh water,...
and created the known world from her body. Similarly, Norse mythology
Norse mythology
Norse mythology, a subset of Germanic mythology, is the overall term for the myths, legends and beliefs about supernatural beings of Norse pagans. It flourished prior to the Christianization of Scandinavia, during the Early Middle Ages, and passed into Nordic folklore, with some aspects surviving...
posited that Odin
Odin
Odin is a major god in Norse mythology and the ruler of Asgard. Homologous with the Anglo-Saxon "Wōden" and the Old High German "Wotan", the name is descended from Proto-Germanic "*Wodanaz" or "*Wōđanaz"....
and his brothers, Vili and Vé
Vili and Vé
In Norse mythology, Vili and Vé are the brothers of Óðinn , sons of Bestla daughter of Bölþorn and Borr son of Búri:Old Norse Vili means "will"...
defeated a frost giant, Ymir
Ymir
In Norse mythology, Ymir, also called Aurgelmir among the giants themselves, was the founder of the race of frost giants and was later killed by the Borrs.-Etymology:...
and then created the world from his. Later Chinese mythology
Chinese mythology
Chinese mythology is a collection of cultural history, folktales, and religions that have been passed down in oral or written tradition. These include creation myths and legends and myths concerning the founding of Chinese culture and the Chinese state...
recounts the creation of elements of the physical world (mountains, rivers, the sun and moon, etc.) from the body of a creator called Pángǔ
Pangu
Pangu was the first living being and the creator of all in Chinese mythology.- The Pangu legend:...
(盤古). Such stories did not go so far as to identify the designer
Designer
A designer is a person who designs. More formally, a designer is an agent that "specifies the structural properties of a design object". In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, such as consumer products, processes, laws, games and graphics, is referred to as a...
of the world as being one as having used his or her own body to provide the material
Material
Material is anything made of matter, constituted of one or more substances. Wood, cement, hydrogen, air and water are all examples of materials. Sometimes the term "material" is used more narrowly to refer to substances or components with certain physical properties that are used as inputs to...
.
But, one such example exists in Polynesian
Polynesian mythology
Polynesian mythology is the oral traditions of the people of Polynesia, a grouping of Central and South Pacific Ocean island archipelagos in the Polynesian triangle together with the scattered cultures known as the Polynesian outliers...
myth, for in the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity manifests in a divinity that New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
ers call Tangaroa
Tangaroa
In Māori mythology, Tangaroa is one of the great gods, the god of the sea. He is a son of Ranginui and Papatuanuku, Sky and Earth. After he joins his brothers Rongo, Tūmatauenga, Haumia, and Tane in the forcible separation of their parents, he is attacked by his brother Tawhirimatea, the god of...
, the Hawaiia
Hawaiia
Hawaiia is a genus of very small air-breathing land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusks or micromollusks in the family Pristilomatidae.- Species:Species within this genus include:* Hawaiia minuscula...
ns Kanaroa, the Tonga
Tonga
Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga , is a state and an archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean, comprising 176 islands scattered over of ocean in the South Pacific...
ns and Samoa
Samoa
Samoa , officially the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa is a country encompassing the western part of the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. It became independent from New Zealand in 1962. The two main islands of Samoa are Upolu and one of the biggest islands in...
ns Tangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa
Ta'aroa
Ta'aroa is the supreme creator god in the mythology of French Polynesia. While the use of the 'eta is appropriate given the pronunciation of his name, as is typically the case with Tahitian words it is often omitted in practice.-The Myth:...
. A native poetic definition of the Creator relates: " He was; Taaroa was his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus he himself is named."
In Jesus and the Lost Goddess the authors claim that some Gnostic Christians
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
held to a pandeistic idea (while acknowledging that most believed in an a celestial disaster and an ignorant/evil demiurge).
Ancient philosophy
Religious studiesReligious studies
Religious studies is the academic field of multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.While theology attempts to...
professor, F. E. Peters traced the idea of pandeism to the philosophy of the Milesians
Milesians (Greek)
The Milesians of Hellenic civilization were the inhabitants of Miletus, a city in the Anatolia province of modern-day Turkey, near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and at the mouth of the Meander River. Settlers from Crete moved to Miletus sometime in 16th century BC...
, 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
Pythagoreanism
Pythagoreanism was the system of esoteric and metaphysical beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who were considerably influenced by mathematics. Pythagoreanism originated in the 5th century BCE and greatly influenced Platonism...
tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche
Psyche (psychology)
The word psyche has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and has been one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view. The English word soul is sometimes used synonymously, especially in older...
that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism that is the legacy of the Milesians
Milesians (Greek)
The Milesians of Hellenic civilization were the inhabitants of Miletus, a city in the Anatolia province of modern-day Turkey, near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and at the mouth of the Meander River. Settlers from Crete moved to Miletus sometime in 16th century BC...
.
Milesian philosopher Anaximander
Anaximander
Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia; Milet in modern Turkey. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales...
in particular favored the use of rational
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
principles to contend that everything in the world was formed of variations of a single substance (apeiron
Apeiron (cosmology)
Apeiron is a Greek word meaning unlimited, infinite or indefinite from ἀ- a-, "without" and πεῖραρ peirar, "end, limit", the Ionic Greek form of πέρας peras, "end, limit, boundary".-Apeiron as an origin:...
), which had been temporarily liberated from the primal state of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is a publication of an incomplete book by Friedrich Nietzsche. He had a clean copy made from his notes with the intention of publication. The notes were written around 1873. In it he discussed five Greek philosophers from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C....
, 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
Material monism
Material monism is a Presocratic belief which provides an explanation of the physical world by saying that all of the world's objects are composed of a single element...
, along with Thales
Thales
Thales of Miletus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition...
, who believed that everything was composed of water
Water
Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...
, Anaximenes
Anaximenes of Miletus
Anaximenes of Miletus was an Archaic Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher active in the latter half of the 6th century BC. One of the three Milesian philosophers, he is identified as a younger friend or student of Anaximander. Anaximenes, like others in his school of thought, practiced material monism...
, who believed it was air, and Heraclitus
Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
, who believed it to be fire
Fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition....
.
Gottfried Große in his 1787 interpretation of Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
’s Natural History, describes Pliny, a First Century figure, as a pandeist as well, though this may be a misunderstanding on Große's part, no other historian having proposed the same as to Pliny the Elder.
Origin of modern pandeism
In the 9th century, Johannes Scotus EriugenaJohannes Scotus Eriugena
Johannes Scotus Eriugena was an Irish theologian, Neoplatonist philosopher, and poet. He is known for having translated and made commentaries upon the work of Pseudo-Dionysius.-Name:...
proposed in his great work, De divisione naturae
De divisione naturae
De divisione naturae was the magnum opus of ninth century theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena....
(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
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
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
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, also known as Pseudo-Denys, was a Christian theologian and philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century, the author of the Corpus Areopagiticum . The author is identified as "Dionysos" in the corpus, which later incorrectly came to be attributed to Dionysius...
and from neo-Platonists such as Gaius Marius Victorinus
Gaius Marius Victorinus
Gaius Marius Victorinus was a Roman grammarian, rhetorician and Neoplatonic philosopher. Victorinus was African by birth and experienced the height of his career during the reign of Constantius II...
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
Universe
The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
, which is the manifestation of God, God in process, Theophania; the second being the world of Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
nic ideas or forms
Theory of Forms
Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract forms , and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized...
. The third is the physical manifestation of God, having evolved through the realm of idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
s and made those ideas seem to be matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
, 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
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
, 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
Sens
Sens is a commune in the Yonne department in Burgundy in north-central France.Sens is a sub-prefecture of the department. It is crossed by the Yonne and the Vanne, which empties into the Yonne here.-History:...
by Honorius III (1225), who described it as "swarming with worms of heretical
Heresy
Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma. It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one's religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion...
perversity," and by Pope
Pope
The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, a position that makes him the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church . In the Catholic Church, the Pope is regarded as the successor of Saint Peter, the Apostle...
Gregory XIII in 1585. Such theories were thus suppressed for hundreds of years thence.
Pandeism from the 16th Century on
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
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
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
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
Thomas Paine
Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...
also approached this territory in his great philosophical treatise
Treatise
A treatise is a formal and systematic written discourse on some subject, generally longer and treating it in greater depth than an essay, and more concerned with investigating or exposing the principles of the subject.-Noteworthy treatises:...
, The Age of Reason
The Age of Reason
The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is a deistic pamphlet, written by eighteenth-century British radical and American revolutionary Thomas Paine, that criticizes institutionalized religion and challenges the legitimacy of the Bible, the central sacred text of...
, although Paine was concentrated on the deistic aspects of his inquiry. According to the Encyclopedia of American Philosophy "Later Unitarian
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
Christians (such as William Ellery Channing
William Ellery Channing
Dr. William Ellery Channing was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century and, along with Andrews Norton, one of Unitarianism's leading theologians. He was known for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches, and as a prominent thinker...
), transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
and Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
), writers (such as Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
) and some pragmatists (such as William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world." It was Dutch
Dutch people
The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...
naturalist
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn
Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn
Friedrich Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn , was a German botanist. His father, Friedrich Junghuhn was a barber and a surgeon. His mother was Christine Marie Schiele. Junghuhn studied medicine in Halle and in Berlin from 1827 to 1831, meanwhile publishing a seminal paper on mushrooms in Limnaea...
who first specifically detailed a religious philosophy incorporating deism and pantheism, in his four volume treatise, Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke, und sein innerer Bau (Image
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
s of Light
Light
Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...
and Shadow
Shadow
A shadow is an area where direct light from a light source cannot reach due to obstruction by an object. It occupies all of the space behind an opaque object with light in front of it. The cross section of a shadow is a two-dimensional silhouette, or reverse projection of the object blocking the...
from Java's interior) released anonymously between 1850 and 1854. Junghuhn's book was banned for a time in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
and parts of Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
as an attack on Christianity. In 1884, theologian Sabine Baring-Gould
Sabine Baring-Gould
The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was an English hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist and eclectic scholar. His bibliography consists of more than 1240 publications, though this list continues to grow. His family home, Lew Trenchard Manor near Okehampton, Devon, has been preserved as he had it...
would contend that Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
itself demanded that the seemingly irreconcilable elements of pantheism and deism must be combined:
Within a decade after that, Andrew Martin Fairbairn
Andrew Martin Fairbairn
Dr Andrew Martin Fairbairn was a Scottish theological scholar, born near Edinburgh.-Education:Fairbairn was educated at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Berlin, and at the Evangelical Union Theological Academy in Glasgow...
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.
Literary critic, Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth was an American poet and literary critic. He taught at Syracuse University.-Life:Hayden Carruth grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Chicago. He lived in Johnson, Vermont for many years...
, said of 18th century figure Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
that it was "Pope's rationalism
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
and pandeism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature" In the 19th century, poet Alfred Tennyson revealed that his "religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism
Agnosticism
Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable....
and pandeism", integrating deism with the pantheism of Spinoza, and Spinoza's predecessor, Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
. Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
var also Pandeistic. Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels By Tristram Hunt. 2010. Page 43.
Developments from the 20th Century to today
Understanding of pandeism was much advanced in the 1940s by the process theologyProcess theology
Process theology is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and further developed by Charles Hartshorne . While there are process theologies that are similar, but unrelated to the work of Whitehead the term is generally applied to the...
of Charles Hartshorne
Charles Hartshorne
Charles Hartshorne was a prominent American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument...
. 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
Scott Adams
Scott Raymond Adams is the American creator of the Dilbert comic strip and the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, business, and general speculation....
published God's Debris: A Thought Experiment
God's Debris
God's Debris: A Thought Experiment is a 2001 novella by Dilbert creator Scott Adams.God's Debris espouses a philosophy based on the idea that the simplest explanation tends to be the best...
, in which he explicitly set down his own variation of pandeism, a radical form of kenosis
Kenosis
In Christian theology, Kenosis In Christian theology, Kenosis In Christian theology, Kenosis (from the Greek word for emptiness (kénōsis) is the 'self-emptying' of one's own will and becoming entirely receptive to God's divine will....
. Adams surmised that an omnipotent
Omnipotence
Omnipotence is unlimited power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence to only the deity of whichever faith is being addressed...
God annihilated himself in the Big Bang
Big Bang
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in...
, 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
Energy
In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...
of which the Universe is made (many levels smaller than quarks), which Adams called "God Dust", and the law of probability
Probability
Probability is ordinarily used to describe an attitude of mind towards some proposition of whose truth we arenot certain. The proposition of interest is usually of the form "Will a specific event occur?" The attitude of mind is of the form "How certain are we that the event will occur?" The...
, 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
Big Crunch
In physical cosmology, the Big Crunch is one possible scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the metric expansion of space eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately ending as a black hole singularity.- Overview :...
, but because humankind itself is becoming God.
Adams is hardly the first author to incorporate pandeistic doctrines into fiction. Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
, in his Stranger in a Strange Land
Stranger in a Strange Land
Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians. The novel explores his interaction with—and...
, a 1967 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, so identifies a character
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
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
Thou Art God
Thou Art God is a statement of divine immanence that is popular within Neopaganism and other religions. The phrase is also stated numerous times in the pages of Robert A...
", 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
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
short story, "The Last Question
The Last Question
"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows , The Best of Isaac Asimov , Robot Dreams , the retrospective Opus 100 , and in Isaac Asimov: The...
", in which human and computer knowledge is merged before the heat death of the Universe. The computer, which continued to exist in hyperspace
Hyperspace (science fiction)
Hyperspace is a plot device sometimes used in science fiction. It is typically described as an alternative region of space co-existing with our own universe which may be entered using an energy field or other device...
, had been asked how to stop entropy. It finally figured out the answer and implemented it, saying "Let there be light
Let there be light
"Let there be light" is an English translation of the Hebrew יְהִי אוֹר . Other translations of the same phrase include the Latin phrase fiat lux, and the Greek phrase γενηθήτω φῶς . The phrase is often used for its metaphorical meaning of dispelling ignorance.The phrase comes from the third verse...
!" This is not a necessary element of pandeism, but correlates with it well.
The 1976 Simon Raven
Simon Raven
Simon Arthur Noël Raven was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence...
novel, The Survivors
The Survivors (Simon Raven novel)
The Survivors is Volume X of the novel sequence Alms for Oblivion by Simon Raven, published in 1974. It was the tenth and last novel to be published in The Alms for Oblivion sequence and is also the tenth novel chronologically. The story takes place in Venice in 1973.-Characters, in the order of...
includes an exchange between characters where one observes, "God became the universe. Therefore the universe is God." while the other counters:
Another notable pandeist is documentarian
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
Bruce Parry
Bruce Parry
Bruce Parry is a Former Royal Marines Officer and Instructor who is now a TV presenter and adventurer, known particularly for the documentary programme series Tribe , co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel...
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."
History of use of the term
Some inconsistent uses of this nuanced term has been made over time. It has occasionally been used to refer dismissively to pantheismPantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
alone, from the presumption that pantheism is deistic. It has been used to mean simultaneous belief in all religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
s (omnism
Omnism
Omnism or omnitheism is the belief in all religions; those who hold this belief are called omnists . The Oxford English Dictionary quotes as the term's earliest usage the 1839 long poem "Festus" by English poet Philip J. Bailey: "I am an omnist, and believe in all religions"...
or omnitheism), or some elements thereof.
Etymology
The term Pandeism is a blend of the GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
root word πάν or 'pan' meaning 'all
The All
The All is the Hermetic or panentheistic view of God, which is that everything that is, or at least that can be experienced, collectively makes up The All...
' and Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
word deus
Deus
Deus is Latin for "god" or "deity".Latin deus and dīvus "divine", are descended from Proto-Indo-European *deiwos, from the same root as *Dyēus, the reconstructed chief god of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon...
meaning God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
. These differing roots make pandeism a hybrid word
Hybrid word
A hybrid word is a word which etymologically has one part derived from one language and another part derived from a different language.-Common hybrids:The most common form of hybrid word in English is one which combines etymologically Latin and Greek parts...
, like automobile
Automobile
An automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
, hyperactivity, neonatal, sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, and television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
. Pan is used in this same way in pantheism
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
and panentheism
Panentheism
Panentheism is a belief system which posits that God exists, interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it...
, while deism is derived from deus. Pandeism shares these roots as a variation of the term "pantheism", and of "deism".
This can lead to criticism because it goes against the Classical compound
Classical compound
Classical compounds are compound words composed from Latin or Ancient Greek root words. A large portion of the technical and scientific lexicon of English and other Western European languages consists of classical compounds. For example, bio- combines with -graphy to form biography...
method of creating words. Technical English words should only be constructed from Latin or Greek words not a combination. Indeed, in The Pilgrimage from Deism to Agnosticism, Moncure Daniel Conway
Moncure Daniel Conway
Moncure Daniel Conway was an American abolitionist, Unitarian clergyman, and author.-Early life and education:Conway was born of an old Virginia family in Falmouth, Stafford County...
stated that the name is "an unscholarly combination." Pandeism holds that at some time or in some way the universe was sentient so it is separated from pantheism
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
. It bears similarities to the god of the Watchmaker analogy
Watchmaker analogy
The watchmaker analogy, or watchmaker argument, is a teleological argument for the existence of God. By way of an analogy, the argument states that design implies a designer...
which is commonly found in arguments for Monotheism
Monotheism
Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one and only one god. Monotheism is characteristic of the Baha'i Faith, Christianity, Druzism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Samaritanism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism.While they profess the existence of only one deity, monotheistic religions may still...
.
Earliest use
The earliest mention of pandeism found to date is in 1787, in a footnote of Gottfried Große’s translation of Pliny the ElderPliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
’s Natural History:
English translation:
What's described here appears to be a description of Pantheism rather than Pandeism. There is no mention of God existing before creation, but rather of a God synonymous with Nature.
Pandeism was next mentioned in 1838 by Italian phrenologist Luigi Ferrarese
Luigi Ferrarese
Luigi Ferrarese of Naples, Italy was an Italian physician and the leading proponent of phrenology in Italy in the Nineteenth Century...
in Memorie Risguardanti la Dottrina Frenologica ("Thoughts Regarding the Doctrine of Phrenology"):
Ferrarese was unequivocally critical, as he attacked the philosophy of Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was a proponent of Scottish Common Sense Realism and had an important influence on French educational policy.-Early life:...
as a doctrine which "locates reason outside the human person, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual Pandeism, absurd for us, and injurious to the Supreme Being." Though Ferrarese's target, Cousin, has often been identified as a pantheist, it was said that he repudiated that label on the basis that unlike Spinoza, Cousin asserted that "he does not hold with Spinoza and the Eleatics that God is a pure substance, and not a cause."
A more optimistic note was struck in the 1859 German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
work, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus
Moritz Lazarus
Moritz Lazarus , born at Filehne, in the Prussian province of Posen, was a German philosopher, psychologist, and a vocal opponent of the anti-Semitism of his time.- Life and education :...
and Heymann Steinthal
Heymann Steinthal
Heymann or Hermann Steinthal was a German philologist and philosopher....
, who wrote:
This is translated as:
Earlier in the 19th century, some figures (particularly religionist Godfrey Higgins
Godfrey Higgins
Godfrey Higgins , was an archaeologist, Freemason and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, humanist, social reformer, and author of various now-esoteric and rare books...
, later echoed by occult
Occult
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
figure John Ballou Newbrough) used an etymologically distinct variation of the term to describe the beliefs that they attributed to a particular cult
Cult
The word cult in current popular usage usually refers to a group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre. The word originally denoted a system of ritual practices...
or sect
Sect
A sect is a group with distinctive religious, political or philosophical beliefs. Although in past it was mostly used to refer to religious groups, it has since expanded and in modern culture can refer to any organization that breaks away from a larger one to follow a different set of rules and...
(see Pandeism (Godfrey Higgins)
Pandeism (Godfrey Higgins)
Anacalypsis is a lengthy two-volume treatise written by religious historian Godfrey Higgins, and published after his death in 1833...
for this use). Higgins, in particular, used the term "Pandeism" as early as 1833 to describe his theorized cult of Pandu
Pandu
In the Mahābhārata epic, King Pandu is the son of Ambalika and Rishi Ved Vyasa. He is more popularly known as the father of the Pandavas and ruled Hastinapur.-Birth:...
and the Pandavas.
Another view expressed is more by way of comparison:
- It is certain that this concept [universal brotherhood] forms one of the fundamental moral bases of religions whose believers are more than two-thirds of the world's population, while it [that concept], at the same time, is influenced by the unique temperament of each of them; that is to say, by a superhuman idealism in Christianity, by an anti-human nihilism in Buddhism, and by an incipient but growing (progressing) pandeism of Indian Brahmanism. Furthermore, to this set of beliefs, all of which admit an ideal principle of universal brotherhood, it makes sense to include naturalism in all of its forms – aesthetic, scientific, Greco-Roman, and modern - which naturalism influences, to a significant degree, all of the public education (conducted) in Europe, and against which (all) orthodox Christians, from Pope Paul II to Joseph de Maistre, always protest with perfect logic (always and very logically).
Use of the term in the Twentieth Century
The term appears to be used to describe a synthesis of pantheism and deism by William Harbutt DawsonWilliam Harbutt Dawson
William Harbutt Dawson was a British author who wrote numerous books around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Dawson was educated at Berlin University, and most of his works deal with Germany and various aspects of German social and political culture. However, he also wrote on General John...
, in his 1904 biographical work, Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
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 beginning of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, an article in the Yale Sheffield Monthly published by the Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
Sheffield Scientific School
Sheffield Scientific School
Sheffield Scientific School was founded in 1847 as a school of Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut for instruction in science and engineering. Originally named the Yale Scientific School, it was renamed in 1861 in honor of Joseph E. Sheffield, the railroad executive. The school was...
commented:
A similar concern was raised by Charles Anselm Bolton
Charles Anselm Bolton
Charles Anselm Bolton was for many years a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, being the Priest of Salford Diocese in 1950. His education was continental, encompassing an Master's Degree from Oxford University, following a Bachelor's Degree from Belgium's Louvain, and with theological diplomas...
in a 1963 article, Beyond the Ecumenical: Pan-deism?: "I first came upon this extension of ecumenism
Ecumenism
Ecumenism or oecumenism mainly refers to initiatives aimed at greater Christian unity or cooperation. It is used predominantly by and with reference to Christian denominations and Christian Churches separated by doctrine, history, and practice...
into pan-deism among some Roman Catholic scholars interested primarily in the "reunion
Ecumenism
Ecumenism or oecumenism mainly refers to initiatives aimed at greater Christian unity or cooperation. It is used predominantly by and with reference to Christian denominations and Christian Churches separated by doctrine, history, and practice...
of the churches," Roman
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
, Orthodox
Eastern Orthodox Church
The Orthodox Church, officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church, is the second largest Christian denomination in the world, with an estimated 300 million adherents mainly in the countries of Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece,...
, Anglican." . . . . "We may perhaps ask what is the ultimate aim of the Curia in promoting the pan-deist movement."
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
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
, Pandeism, Monism
Monism
Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry. Accordingly, some philosophers may hold that the universe is one rather than dualistic or pluralistic...
and Dualism
Dualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
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
Pastor
The word pastor usually refers to an ordained leader of a Christian congregation. When used as an ecclesiastical styling or title, this role may be abbreviated to "Pr." or often "Ps"....
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
News
News is the communication of selected information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience.- Etymology :...
article
Article (publishing)
An article is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating the news, research results, academic analysis or debate.-News articles:...
quoting this use of the term by Jim Garvin, a Vietnam vet who became a Trappist
TRAPPIST
TRAPPIST is Belgian robotic telescope in Chile which came online in 2010, and is an acronym for TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, so named in homage to Trappist beer produced in the Belgian region. Situated high in the Chilean mountains at La Silla Observatory, it is actually...
monk
Monk
A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...
in the Holy Cross Abbey
Holy Cross Abbey, Virginia
Holy Cross Abbey is a monastery of the Catholic Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance , popularly known as the Trappists. The monastery is located near Berryville in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, United States...
of Berryville, Virginia
Berryville, Virginia
Berryville is an incorporated town in and the county seat of Clarke County, Virginia, United States. The population was 2,963 at the 2000 census.-Geography:...
, and went on to lead the economic development of Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
. Garvin described his spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism,' something very close to the Native American
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit
Great Spirit
The Great Spirit, also called Wakan Tanka among the Sioux, the Creator or the Great Maker in English, and Gitchi Manitou in Algonquian, is a conception of a supreme being prevalent among some Native American and First Nations cultures...
..."
Variations on the concept
Some uses to which the term has been put are etymologicallyEtymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
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
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
and the Universe
Universe
The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
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
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
(for example, that God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
and the Universe
Universe
The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
are one) and deism
Deism
Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the...
(for example, that a creator God created a self-regulating Universe, but subsequently ceased to actively intervene in its operations).
Criticisms
Some theologians have criticised particular points of pandeism. An example is William Walker AtkinsonWilliam Walker Atkinson
William Walker Atkinson was an attorney, merchant, publisher, and author, as well as an occultist and an American pioneer of the New Thought movement. He is also known to have been the author of the pseudonymous works attributed to Theron Q...
, in his Mastery of Being:
He claims that if God were evolving or improving, being an infinite being, it would have to be traceable back to some point of having "an infinitely undeveloped state and condition." But, this claim was made prior to the rise of scientific knowledge pinpointing the beginning of the Universe in time, and connecting time with space, so that time would not exist as we know it prior to the Universe existing. In Islam, a criticism is raised, wherein it is argued that "from the juristic standpoint, obliterating the distinctions between God and the universe necessarily entails that in effect there can be no Sharia
Sharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
, since the deontic nature of the Law presupposes the existence of someone who commands (amir) and others who are the recipients of the command (ma'mur), namely God and his subjects."
External links
- Institute for Pandeism Studies
- The Pandeist Theorem by Robert G. Brown (excerpt from A Theorem Concerning God)
- The Parallels of Pandeism by Bernardo Kastrup
- Discussion of Creative Evolution (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
See also
- Creative EvolutionCreative Evolution (book)Creative Evolution is a 1907 book by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its English translation appeared in 1911. The book provides an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by an élan vital, a "vital impetus" that can also be understood...
, Henri BergsonHenri BergsonHenri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
, Chapter IV