Why Pandeism is Better than Theism

To begin with, naturally, it is necessary to recite the essential meaning of the term — what, exactly, is Pandeism? Princeton University’s ‘WordNet’ dictionary defines Pandeism as “the belief that God created the universe and its phenomena by becoming the universe, thereafter the sole manifestation of God.” Looking to another source, the Encyclopedia Britannica notes in its “Deism” article that “Pandeism…. attempted to unite aspects of Deism with pantheism, (and) held that through the act of creation God became the universe. There is thus no theological need to posit any special relationship between God and creation; rather, God is the universe and not a transcendent entity which created and subsequently governs it.” These propositions effectively sum up the idea which we are talking about. Now the question is: how do we get there, and why do Pandeists consider this to be a “better” model?

It is important, in this inquiry, to avoid confusing different ideas of a “better” model. We must speak in terms of a more logically suitable explanation, and not necessarily one which provides believers with a greater sense of self-importance or assurance of some better destiny. Indeed, these common hallmarks of religion are ones to be wary of, since man so easily slips into the desire to believe what is comforting over what is true — the very reason why even in markets where results are more susceptible to confirmation, men are yet easily scammed.

To avoid the fruits of human biases, we begin with First Principles. What can we know, and how may we know it? Firstly, there is an epistemological question as to how we may know anything at all. In the DesCartesian sense, we know that we exist because we are thinking about it, and so we must exist insofar as we experience our own contemplation of it. There would seem along with ourselves to be at least one entity external to our immediate experience of ourselves because we are met with thought which seems not to be originating in our own minds. Now it could be true that all of our sensory perceptions are illusions created to test our reactions or some similar purpose, but this requires that there be at least one source of intelligence external to our own experience of self, to be imposing such experience on us (though even then we can not exclude the possibility that we are merely an isolated expression within a larger mind appearing to us as this seemingly other intelligent being).

But speculation about an illusory Universe raises the question, how can we know our experience of our Universe to be real? Now, there are precisely two possibilities about the reality of our Universe as it presents itself to us. Either it is absolutely real, or it is not at all reliable, for if any part of our perception of our Universe is an illusion, an impenetrable deception, then the acknowledged presence of unreality means that nothing may be logically taken as “the real thing” instead of being a like deception. But we will backtrack for a moment here and concede that even if our perception of our Universe is simply an illusion being imposed upon us, it is what is being presented to us to be taken as real, and so ought to be treated as real. But in any event, absent affirmative proof of an illusory capacity of our Universe, we simply have no reason to assume it to be anything but real.

We have two sources of information. Our senses, and our logical and mathematical contemplations. It is dubious to suggest that we may draw conclusions based on our senses alone, in part because we suffer from grave problems of scale. There are events vital to our understanding of our existence occurring at scales far too great and too small to be perceptible by man, and it must be confessed that assumptions about our Universe which fail to observe a proper awareness of these can be dismiss in the first instance. So far as our current capacity to observe informs us, we humans are approximately 43% of the way from the largest scale of observation — that of our entire visible Universe — to the smallest, that being the subquark (though there are potentially smaller units in string theory, which is mathematically very promising).

But I submit that investigation of the nature of our Universe reveals it to be the product of an act of design. We are able to observe that we human beings are made out of a collection of interacting organs, that these organs are made out of cells, and that these cells are made out of molecules — and indeed every tangible thing which we are able to observe or interact with is similarly made out of molecules; and these molecules have particular properties reflective of the atoms of which they are themselves made, and there is no molecule in our Universe but one made from atoms. And we are further able to observe that there are many kinds of atoms, almost all of which are created by stellar fusion and spat out of dying stars but that these kinds adhere to a strict set of rules — which are in turn dictated by their composition of subatomic particles, and so forth down past the level of those subquarks we mentioned before.

It is a remarkable thing that at each level of substance, the material at issue is able to self-organize in accordance without the governing dynamics of our Universe (things such as the strength of gravity and the speed of light and the combination of attractive and repulsive forces between protons and electrons. I’ll not belabor here the fineness of calculation needed to permit subatomic particles to form lint atoms, which form stars spitting out heavy atoms in their death throes, heavy atoms forming the complex self-replicating molecules of life, and eventually intelligent life, and eventually something even beyond that. But even this is not what I rest the proposition of design upon; for not only is our Universe fundamentally complex enough to generate this level of complexity; it is at the same time fundamentally simple enough for intelligent beings to figure out that these forces are what is at play, and to use them to invent things like light bulbs and calculators and computers and massive particle colliders.

I’ll give one very specific example. We have determined by observing the light signatures of distant galaxies that our Universe is expanding at a rate consistent with origin in a single explosive expansion from a singularity having occurred approximately 13.72 billion years ago. We have observed as well that there exists a Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation in our Universe, which is as well indicative of the same origin and of the same time frame. But given sufficient time those galaxies will recede beyond detectibility and that microwave background radiation will evaporate entirely; were we not fortunate enough to develop the tools by which to measure these things before they became undetectable to us, we would never know or have any reason to imagine the age of our Universe — suggesting that our Universe was designed to essentially knock on our door and inform us of its age and origin. And we have only in the past few years acquired the ability to confirm the long-suspected existence of habitable worlds within the conceivable range of our technological reach. These worlds call to us for exploration and colonisation, perhaps an entire galaxy able to be made man’s.

In addition to these indications, there are other reasons to suppose a design behind our existence. There is a broad, if inconsistently expressed, human tendency to intuitively reach for such an explanation. There is, for example, across the recorded human experience, a vast catalogue of claimed events given metaphysical significance, going back to the earliest days of the recording of history. People of all faiths and within all types of theological models have had spiritual visions, believed themselves to be the recipients of divine communications, had dreams portending future occurrences, prayed for miraculous results which have seemingly come about. Reductionism would counter that all of these have non-metaphysical explanations, that visions and revelations may be occurring only in the mind of the recipient, that prayers seemingly answered fall neatly within the range of coincidences dwarfed by the obviously unanswered prayers, that the appearance of miracles can be faked, or that the claim itself may be fraudulent. Evolutionary biology claims to account for this with notions of the fear of shadows protecting in those instances where something lurks therein, but the explanations offered in biology seem strained compared against the richness of religions belief.

But the reductionist explanation requires that every single one of the millions of religious events reported in the annals of human history is an error or a fraud. At the same time, the vast variety of such sentimentations (and the occasional absence of them altogether in a person) demonstrates that none of the theistic models claiming to be universal can be true, for such theistic models depend in part upon their being known or having been revealed or transmitted to all peoples, a verifiably false assumption. But the simplest explanation for the multitudes of seemingly contrarily faith-affirming miracles for mutually exclusive faiths remains the proposition that all reflect a part of the truth sublimated to the manifestations of a single subconscious all-sustaining and all-experiencing mind.

And additionally, on a slightly different note, there exists a very specific tendency of some especially to have ‘mystical’ experiences. And the experience of mysticism is, surprisingly enough, replicable through meditation and the use of certain mind-expanding (e.g. mind-altering) substances. The mystical experience recounted by those who have gone this route, whether by meditation or with chemical assistance, is regularly reported as a sensation of oneness with out Universe and with an overriding spiritual force bound up in its fabric.

Now, having established (at the least) a reasonable basis for believing ours to be a Created Universe, we turn to the characteristics of our Creator. There are THREE — and only three — which are absolutely necessary (and ONE more flowing from those): it must have sufficient power to supply and control the incomprehensible energy of our Universe; it must have sufficient intelligence to design the governing dynamics which result in that energy taking the increasingly complex material forms observed; and it must have sufficient rationality to create a Universe which operates rationally, building itself towards these evident ends. The one flowing correlation is that, if rational, it must be rationally motivated to create.

And let me be absolutely clear here, if a theological model exists by which these three assumptions suffice to account for all of the observations man is able to make, then no other assumptions may logically be added, no matter how strongly they might serve our sense of importance. This is as simple a proposition as stating that footprints in the sand most likely reveal that a person walked there. If a person capable of walking sufficiently explains what is observed, then there is no basis for assuming that the leaver of the footprints was able to fly as well, or that it possessed any particular set of loves or hates.

And here we come to the theological theory of Pandeism. A Creator defined by its possession of 1) sufficient power to create by becoming, 2) intelligence enough to design the physics of a Universe which unfolds into increasing complexity, and which is 3) rationally motivated to do so by the desire to obtain the experiential knowledge of existing as our Universe, a Universe inevitably containing intelligent life which travels amongst the many habitable worlds provided for it through the operations of physics.

Now, the acid test, the sixty four million dollar question. Is there anything in our Universe which can NOT be accounted for by this model? Theists tend to point to their respective scriptures and the events described in them, to reports of faith affirming miracles or visions or the like, and to emotional appeals begging that absent an intervening deity, wrongs will not be punished. But because there are many contradictory accounts of this sort, and because there are and have been many millions of people who are isolated from ever hearing about any given theistic path, additional assumptions must be piled on to explain this, usually involving the additional creation of contingent evil spirits, or of past or future lives, or of varying degrees of life after death.

But if the assumptions underlying the pandeistic model are correct, then we are all fragments of an incomprehensibly powerful and intelligent Creator, and so all of the things which theists point to — scripture, miracles, revelations, prophecies, beliefs, spiritual activities, spiritual emotions, visions, dreams, egrigori, seemingly efficacious prayer, oracles, signs, and all the rest, all of these are simply expressions of the power of our incomprehensible Creator as touched by and filtered by our limited (if sometimes spiritually talented) human minds. I don’t doubt that theists tire of having this pointed out to them as much as I tire of explaining it anew each time, but the principle remains that every theistic explanation inherently requires fatally more assumptions to account for the same proof (and most leave substantial proof unaccounted for altogether).

Pandeism fully accounts for every one of these claimed proofs of a spiritual basis for our Universe, and more importantly it does so for all faiths, without requiring the invocation of assumptions of evil spirits or demigods to explain them. For if any of these events occur at all, then they are simply explicable as manifestations of the power of our Creator unconsciously underlying our Universe, as unwittingly misread through the biased minds of human observers. Imagine for a moment, if you were able to travel back in time to a much earlier point in human history, and were there able to show a select handful of pre-civilisation homo sapiens perhaps a ten-minute vid of vital images which accurately laid out the history of our Universe and our planet only to that point. Understanding that you would not be able to communicate anything with them verbally for lack of a common language, how do you imagine they would interpret what they saw? The Big Bang, the massive cycles of starbirth and stardeath necessary to generate heavy elements which permit the existence of our world at all. The violent geological activities, periods of evolution, the strange eras of prehistoric beasts which necessarily preceded human existence, even the seemingly sudden leaps in human technology (from nothing to the lever, wheel, inclined plane, fire, axes, and such) — if the primitives with whom you shared these images then felt the need to relay that vision to others, using what limited language and symbology as was then available to them, would they not couch it as a series of miracles, creditable to the intervention of inscrutable metaphysical forces such as a deity?

And yet, if our Creator became our Universe, if we are of our Creator in this fragmentary sense, wafting on the winds of its unconscious sustainment despite our illusion of concreteness, then all of our religious visions represent such manifestations, glimpses of the commonalities well known within the unconscious mind of the metaphysical progenitor of which we are so stunningly a part. Our world glitters, then, about us with the promise of a similar oneness of being, a potential to be whatever world we wish it to be — if we wish it.

Under the pandeistic model it need not be assumed that our Creator is a conscious and active deity who chooses to act or not act, and is opposed by superpowered evil entities — quixotically presumed to have been created by it as well, either errantly or as part of some complicated scheme for which additional levels of excuses and assumptions must be made. For our Creator need not continue to interfere in our Universe, judge or condemn, send seeming conflicting messages to prophets of various faiths, nor need it to create or permit any other spiritual forces to do so, or in any way to contend with man. Pandeism avoids the traditional response to the multiplicity of claimed miracles, revelations, prophecies, and so forth supporting irreconcilable differences of faith, which has been the invocation of the agency of evil spirits. Such assumption is itself deeply irrational, for it is simply impossible for there to be an evil spirit from whom ‘miraculous’ results emanate for the affirmance of other faiths. All laws of nature, and the laws of physics among them, these would necessarily be the laws of our Creator, then, and all things are bound by them except (and only except) as allowed by the power of our Creator; put otherwise, even were we to impose upon our Creator the additionally assumed characteristics of consciousness and a need to intervene, our Creator would nonetheless be the force sustaining our Universe. It would be impossible for anybody, any entity, to violate the laws of physics except by using such Creator’s own power to do so. And if there is proposed to be a conscious Creator, this simply means that nothing miraculous may occur except as done by such Creator.

In the pandeistic model, our Creator unconsciously underlies existence, and so what miracles occur (if anything is not susceptible to naturalistic explanation) do so because that power is manifested by the fragments of our Creator which constitute all of existence. And, as importantly, no good and wise Creator would grant free reign to an entity sufficiently powerful as to undermine the ability of other entities to make informed decisions, if reward or punishment hinged upon such decisions. If so powerful an entity were deemed to exist, it would immediately render fatally suspect any widely held belief, as any one of us could have lived our entire existence in an illusion generated by it to secure our falsity of beliefs. If an ‘evil spirit’ exists at all, and is so successful as to be responsible for all the religions with which one disagree (though others adhere tightly to them) then it is overwhelmingly likely it is equally responsible for that last faith with which one does agree. And, in fact, whatever the ‘truth’ is, would then most likely reside only in a minor and obscure and generally ignored or even reviled group, whose few members display impeccable morality.

Another benefit of the pandeistic model is that it equally accounts for and accords with all scientific discovery. Pandeism has no conflict with science whatsoever; indeed, Pandeism embraces the scientific method and the awesome nature of scientific discovery, and as with religion, Pandeism fully accounts for science. This is not to suggest that the means of accounting are the same — for Pandeism accounts for religious experiences — to the extent they exist as something more than coincidence or psychological phenomena — as manifestations of the underlying unconscious power of our Creator, often denoted by Pandeists as the Deus. But neither does this mean that Pandeism assumes generally that religious experiences are, in fact, anything more than coincidence or psychological phenomena. After all, one man’s vision or revelation is another’s hallucination; one man’s prophecy is another’s clever use of vague wording and exploitation of biases of memory and expectation; one man’s miracle is another’s parlour trick. But Pandeism recognizes that all that is discovered by science as to how our Universe operates simply is an uncovering of the governing dynamics set in motion by the Creator in the moment of creating/becoming of our Universe. If science reveals our Universe to be billions of years old, it is so, and is because the rational goal sought by our Creator was one which required our Universe gestating through billions of years of natural development to give birth to its desired set of information. If science reveals our descent from a Universal Common Ancestor, it is so, and is because our Creator set forth a Universe capable of giving rise to sufficiently complex life through a simple process of evolution by natural selection.

And, lastly, this model contains a remarkable powerful basis for morality, as it proposes that all things are part of our Creator, and that our Creator experiences through us the consequences of our actions. And so we ought to be motivated to act in ways which avoid causing suffering and harm, because in so doing we would simply be inflicting these things on our own Creator — and, in a way, upon ourselves. And indeed, such raises the Golden Rule from good advice to universal law, for that which we do unto others, we may thusly veritably do unto ourselves!!

And so, because the pandeistic model fully accounts for all of the proof generally presented in support of both faith and science, it is presumably true against any theological system which requires additional assumptions to account for the same proof — such as a desire for sacrifice, a need for deity intervention, arbitrary assignments of ‘sin,’ or the creation of evil spirits. And Pandeism is most especially presumptively true against any system which fails to fully account for contradictory beliefs either within or without its own model and the manifestations of the miraculous claimed to support those beliefs, and most of all to account for scientific discoveries contradictory to the accounting of such a belief.

So just as we do not rely on steady footprints in the sand to hypothesize the footprint-leaver’s power of flight or teleportation or love of Bach and condemnation of chocolate, neither can we rationally extend to spirituality any assumptions beyond those captured by the theological model of Pandeism. And, finally, the truth of this proposition can be demonstrated with one simple question:

• Is the Creator in which you believe powerful enough to have set forth the Universe as we experience it — in every particular — while needing do nothing more than set forth from its own energy this Universe and the governing dynamics which control the behavior of that energy?

And is it? Is it powerful enough to have become a Universe where everything which we experience has come to pass — stars, planets, the origin of life, the rise of complex ecosystems, the rise of intelligent life, machinery, technology, and social institutions (including religious institutions, writings, and beliefs) — by doing no more than simply initially causing this Creation through the provision of the power already residing within itself? Is it intelligent enough to have brought about our complete experience of our world without needing to interfere again, other than through that which was set forth in the moment of Creation? For if it was powerful enough to have brought about our Universe in every particular without thereafter intervening, that would include bringing about the appearance of intervention where there is none, and even bringing about the varied and contradictory beliefs of people who insist they have been told otherwise — even when they have not, when this ‘telling’ was simply their own interpretation of the underlying truth of a pandeistic Universe!