Doesn't deism seem more logical?

[Pandeist_Man]

Welcome to CAF, and welcome to my thread! So glad to have an actual pandeist participating.

Can you explain how pandeism differs from pantheism? If I understand it correctly, pandeism says there was a creator but the creator is now the universe, while pantheism says there was no creator. Is that right?

That is correct. It is important to keep an eye on some historical context. When pantheism was first proposed around the beginning of the 18th century, there was no reason to know that our Universe had ever had a beginning; evolution had not yet been proposed as a theory of the development of species, and the expansion of our Universe had not yet been observed. In fact, it was not until the 1920s that astronomers were able to confirm that galaxies other than the Milky Way existed at all!!

More interestingly still, when the evidence of galactic expansion and the Big Bang were first adduced, the official position of the Roman Catholic Church was strong support of the correctness of discoveries, showing as they did that our Universe had a point of origin; and opposition to the theory was led by atheists, particularly astronomer Fred Hoyle who proposed a ‘steady state’ theory positing that the Universe was eternal, and simply constantly produced new influxes of matter. It was Hoyle who coined the phrase ‘Big Bang,’ intending it to make fun of the theory as proposed. Ultimately, as we now know, the steady state theory was disproven by the confirmation of red shift in all directions showing that all galaxies in our Universe were getting farther from all other galaxies, not simply from some central point from which new matter continued to flow.

But pantheism is to a degree a fuzzy philosophy, and there are some who consider themselves pantheists who posit a Universe having had a point of origin (but being uncreated in the sense proposed most recently by Stephen Hawking) or having in some sense created itself. And there are some pandeists who delve dangerously close to that latter position, although the traditionally pandeist view hews more faithfully to the deistic conception of a Creator having power and intellect all its own before our Universe is ever brought into existence.

 

[William_of_Ware]

Hence Pandeism. Our Creator has the most intimate conceivable relationship with our Universe; it IS our Universe. To understand quantum physics-- that a purity of force inflows and underlies all things perceived by our rough filters as matter and energy-- is to understand this. Naturally, this is demonstrable through other avenues, such as Duke University PhD physicist Robert G. Brown’s Pandeist Theorem, which demonstrates mathematically through information theory that an omniscient entity is necessarily equal to our Universe in operation. One of the remarkable aspects of the Hindu scriptures is that they coem closest to reflecting this knowledge of physics, in much the same way that they most accurately reflect our Universe to be billions of years old-- knowledge they provided hundreds of years before any extant scripture was conceived.

Now, once we realize that our Creator underlies our Universe, we must ask, what would a person who has some contact with that undying mind perceive? Well it would be incomprehensible, but the limited human mind might capture some fragments of truth, however poorly understood, and those fragments might be distilled along with other unrelated ideas or beliefs or biases into books deemed revelatory.

Pandeism has its puzzles as well. For example, why should we accept the premise that god is an extensible being or is made of information? since numbers and logical propositions are immaterial,( they lack weight, volume, extension, etc. ) we can just as well say that God is an immaterial intellect without contradiction.

But let us assume that pandeism is true:

1- The creator or first principle is the universe.

2- the first principle is made of parts.

3- The parts are *ontologically prior to the first principle *

which would entail:

4- The universe is not the first principle.

5- and the first principle is not and cannot be made of parts.

As you can see, pan-deism collapses into contradiction at this point.

 

[Heuchler]

So Pandeist Man, you are telling me that there was God who created the Universe and then that God although he had infinite power began to be jealous of the Universe he created and therefore decided to become it. Thats like saying we will become jealous of hammers and want to become a hammer. And to be the sustainer of the universe which is a part of it all which is what the Church teaches, is completely different than pandeism which says God is the Universe. If God were the Universe that would mean that we are God and that we are just subjectively viewing ourselves and that God is hurting himself and murdering himself and arguing against himself on this forum. If pandeism was correct God would have probably left it as the clockwork universe instead of allowing himself to hurt himself and be stupid and be wrong and essentially have a multiple personality disorder. Its either that or there is no reason to have morals because we are God and we can decide what to do because we are God and therefore no rules really apply to us because all we can do is alter ourselves because we are God.

 

[samiam1611]

Pandeism has its puzzles as well. For example, why should we accept the premise that god is an extensible being or is made of information? since numbers and logical propositions are immaterial,( they lack weight, volume, extension, etc. ) we can just as well say that God is an immaterial intellect without contradiction.

But let us assume that pandeism is true:

** 1- The creator or first principle is the universe.**

2- the first principle is made of parts.

3- The parts are *ontologically prior to the first principle *

which would entail:

4- The universe is not the first principle.

5- and the first principle is not and cannot be made of parts.

As you can see, pan-deism collapses into contradiction at this point.

I don’t think that’s pandeism (point #1.)

“[T]he belief that the Creator of the Universe actually became the Universe, and so ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity” ~en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism. I wish I had put that definition in my OP.

I think a pandeist would say the Creator or first principle was not originally the universe…but **now **It is.

You sound smart though and sounds like you know more about it than me so I stand to be corrected.

 

[Pandeist_Man]

Pandeism has its puzzles as well. For example, why should we accept the premise that god is an extensible being or is made of information? since numbers and logical propositions are immaterial,( they lack weight, volume, extension, etc. ) we can just as well say that God is an immaterial intellect without contradiction.

It is quite possible that our entire Universe is exactly this at base – information; and as we percieve energy as matter, so might we be, at a lower level, percieving information as energy.

But let us assume that pandeism is true:

We must, for it presupposes all the assumptions you already make about your own theological model, and thus already concede to be true. The pandeistic Creator is an entity having at least sufficient power to set forth a Universe of the scope which we observe of our own; at least sufficient intellect to set forth a Universe of the intricate design which we observe in our own; and at least sufficient rationality to set forth a Universe which functions as rationally as our own. Incumbent in its power it must have at least the ability to create such Universe by the transmission of its own power into being what we perceive as the substance of our Universe.

You may or may not disagree with that being the method of Creation – but so long as you suppose our Universe to be perpetually sustained by the power of its Creator (as Pandeism does) there is no more efficient or logical supposition as to how it was created, and there is no need to assume an additional act of creation from some external source or causing to come into being some external source. Indeed, it would be contradictory of the omniscience credited to our Creator to suppose anything to exist which is not of our Creator. But if you wish to prove the pandeistic model impossible, you must prove that our Creator lacked the power, intellect, or rationality to make it so, hence to travel in the direction of atheism. And if you wish to propose that additional assumptions are required, such as ex nihilo Creation, well then you’ll essentially have to point to something in our Universe which it would be impossible for our Creator to create.

1- The creator or first principle is the universe.

That is not what Pandeism proposes; that is pantheism. Pandeism proposes that our Creator preceded our Universe, and that it designed and created our Universe; the method of Creation was becoming.

2- the first principle is made of parts.

Inapplicable if this continues your error stated above.

3- The parts are *ontologically prior to the first principle *

Inapplicable if this continues your error stated above.

which would entail:

4- The universe is not the first principle.

5- and the first principle is not and cannot be made of parts.

I believe these all of these continue the error of your first proposition. If you feel I am misunderstanding your first proposition please restate it more clearly.

As you can see, pan-deism collapses into contradiction at this point.

Let me be clear here that since the qualities discerned of the pandeistic Creator – at least sufficient power, intellect, and rationality to create, are necessary elements of your own theological model, the pandeistic model cannot collapse into contradiction without all models including those elements and simply adding additional assumptions collapsing even more completely.

 

[Pandeist_Man]

So Pandeist Man, you are telling me that there was God who created the Universe and then that God although he had infinite power began to be jealous of the Universe he created and therefore decided to become it. Thats like saying we will become jealous of hammers and want to become a hammer.

You confound Pandeism with elements of pantheism and deism which are not incorporated into it, and with a traditional element of theism – jealousy – which is absurd to attribute to any deity. A ‘jealous god’ is by defnition not a god at all.

But it is a common error to imagine that our pandeistic Creator’s act of creation is like a person filling a bathtub with water and then jumping into the water out of desire to be in the bath. That is simply not at all correct. The pandeistic model is one of our Creator becoming our Universe, as if the person became the water in an empty bathtub. Now I suppose you will be tempted to mock the analogy as you have with the idea of people becoming hammers. But you could in fact become a hammer; if, when you died and your body was buried, your molecules might break down and become the soil which feeds the growth of a tree, from which a handle is carved; the iron in your blood might return to the soil and be crushed under later volcanic rock, then mined and smelted and forged into a hammer’s head. It would be a very slow process, but then you are not a Universe-creating entity, and have not the power to act as such an entity would be able to act.

I have already set forth in a previous post a rational model of motivation to create which, if given some thoughtful reflection, has nothing at all to do with ‘jealousy.’

And to be the sustainer of the universe which is a part of it all which is what the Church teaches, is completely different than pandeism which says God is the Universe. If God were the Universe that would mean that we are God and that we are just subjectively viewing ourselves and that God is hurting himself and murdering himself and arguing against himself on this forum. If pandeism was correct God would have probably left it as the clockwork universe instead of allowing himself to hurt himself and be stupid and be wrong and essentially have a multiple personality disorder. Its either that or there is no reason to have morals because we are God and we can decide what to do because we are God and therefore no rules really apply to us because all we can do is alter ourselves because we are God.

Do you deny that God is in all things? I will not go into the deepest depths of quantum mechanics here, but it is sufficient to observe that all things are at base perpetually active energy – a state of things first proposed by Heraclitus of Ephesus more than twenty-five centuries ago, but only confirmable by observation within the past few decades. But here are the three points of error in your analysis:

First, your proposition that our Creator would wish to avoid “allowing himself to hurt himself and be stupid and be wrong” requires that our Creator possesses inferior knowledge of the human experience. Do you suppose that your experience of pain, however inflicted, is superior to your god’s knowledge of your experience? Since stupidity is known by the observation of it, do you suppose your knowledge of things which you observe to be stupid exceeds your god’s knowledge of these things? Whether you agree that our Creator has become our Universe or believe that our Creator exists somewhere externally to our Universe, the omniscience and omnipresence accorded to it necessitates its full experiential knowledge of every moment of suffering and anguish ever experienced.

Second, conversely, your proposition presupposes that these negative experiences are something which our Creator would wish to avoid, perhaps believing that it can not handle such things. But as I note above, any entity worthy of the appellation of god is already experiencing all of these things. And consider your own experience of life. You have doubtless suffered at times, perhaps done things which in retrospect you consider to have been stupid or thoughtless; and yet here you are, the sum of your experiences and hopefully the better for it.

Though I believe these points address the concerns you raise, I will turn to your final concern. As a pandeist, if I strike my fellow man, I strike at my Creator, and how ungrateful an act – and one which I will myself experience upon returning to its fold. If I so much as kill an animal to sate my appetite, I kill my Creator; if I steal from another man, I steal from my Creator; now perhaps I could kill an animal to avoid starvation or steal a bauble from a wealthy man for the same reason, and perhaps I might even strike another man in defense of my life, but in each such situation I must weigh carefully whether the harm I knowingly do so outweighs the harm to be avoided that it is worth it for me to suffer the eternal contemplation of that harm done. In all of this, I think mine the rather harder path than simply believing that the right profession of faith will ensure me an eternal reward.

 

[William_of_Ware]

That is not what Pandeism proposes; that is pantheism. Pandeism proposes that our Creator preceded our Universe, and that it designed and created our Universe; the method of Creation was becoming.

I’ll be brief.
if saying god is the universe is incorrect, are you saying god is not the universe, then?

I never refereed to pantheism when I said god is the universe. it makes no difference if i say god is the universe or became the universe.

The argument I gave is sound against pandeism .

 

[William_of_Ware]

I don’t think that’s pandeism (point #1.)

“[T]he belief that the Creator of the Universe actually became the Universe, and so ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity” ~en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism. I wish I had put that definition in my OP.

I think a pandeist would say the Creator or first principle was not originally the universe…but **now **It is.

You sound smart though and sounds like you know more about it than me so I stand to be corrected.

There’s no difference between saying god is the universe or god became the universe in this case. you became an adult, but it is also true samiam1611 is an adult.

thanks for calling me smart . but, I am just borrowing an argument from a pagan neo-platonist called Plotinus.

 

[Heuchler]

You confound Pandeism with elements of pantheism and deism which are not incorporated into it, and with a traditional element of theism – jealousy – which is absurd to attribute to any deity. A ‘jealous god’ is by defnition not a god at all.

But it is a common error to imagine that our pandeistic Creator’s act of creation is like a person filling a bathtub with water and then jumping into the water out of desire to be in the bath. That is simply not at all correct. The pandeistic model is one of our Creator becoming our Universe, as if the person became the water in an empty bathtub. Now I suppose you will be tempted to mock the analogy as you have with the idea of people becoming hammers. But you could in fact become a hammer; if, when you died and your body was buried, your molecules might break down and become the soil which feeds the growth of a tree, from which a handle is carved; the iron in your blood might return to the soil and be crushed under later volcanic rock, then mined and smelted and forged into a hammer’s head. It would be a very slow process, but then you are not a Universe-creating entity, and have not the power to act as such an entity would be able to act.

I have already set forth in a previous post a rational model of motivation to create which, if given some thoughtful reflection, has nothing at all to do with ‘jealousy.’

Do you deny that God is in all things? I will not go into the deepest depths of quantum mechanics here, but it is sufficient to observe that all things are at base perpetually active energy – a state of things first proposed by Heraclitus of Ephesus more than twenty-five centuries ago, but only confirmable by observation within the past few decades. But here are the three points of error in your analysis:

First, your proposition that our Creator would wish to avoid “allowing himself to hurt himself and be stupid and be wrong” requires that our Creator possesses inferior knowledge of the human experience. Do you suppose that your experience of pain, however inflicted, is superior to your god’s knowledge of your experience? Since stupidity is known by the observation of it, do you suppose your knowledge of things which you observe to be stupid exceeds your god’s knowledge of these things? Whether you agree that our Creator has become our Universe or believe that our Creator exists somewhere externally to our Universe, the omniscience and omnipresence accorded to it necessitates its full experiential knowledge of every moment of suffering and anguish ever experienced.

Second, conversely, your proposition presupposes that these negative experiences are something which our Creator would wish to avoid, perhaps believing that it can not handle such things. But as I note above, any entity worthy of the appellation of god is already experiencing all of these things. And consider your own experience of life. You have doubtless suffered at times, perhaps done things which in retrospect you consider to have been stupid or thoughtless; and yet here you are, the sum of your experiences and hopefully the better for it.

Though I believe these points address the concerns you raise, I will turn to your final concern. As a pandeist, if I strike my fellow man, I strike at my Creator, and how ungrateful an act – and one which I will myself experience upon returning to its fold. If I so much as kill an animal to sate my appetite, I kill my Creator; if I steal from another man, I steal from my Creator; now perhaps I could kill an animal to avoid starvation or steal a bauble from a wealthy man for the same reason, and perhaps I might even strike another man in defense of my life, but in each such situation I must weigh carefully whether the harm I knowingly do so outweighs the harm to be avoided that it is worth it for me to suffer the eternal contemplation of that harm done. In all of this, I think mine the rather harder path than simply believing that the right profession of faith will ensure me an eternal reward.

Ok so as I said, God created the universe in order to become the Universe (which indicates that the universe is supperior to his previous state of being even though He was all powerfull and was the creator of the Universe) This would once again be similar to us wanting to become hammers (and not dying and becoming parts of hammers by chance, the difference is God has control over His change into the Universe, we do not)

And pandeism says that the universe which includes me is God. God’s knowledge is only found in the knowledge of life. To imply that God has any more knowledge implies that he is an outside force and not the Universe itself. So, unless God is also outside the universe making pandeism wrong, God’s knowledge and opinion are the sum of ours meaning he is torn on the issue and really can’t make up his mind on anything.

Once again if God is the universe, the only source of his opinion would be the intelligence found within. Since we all have the urges to know the truth, to live, to avoid pain, to be happy, etc. these seem to be the attributes of God. Therefore, God must not want to be wrong, dead, suffering, or sad. So, why are we all not working together to reach these common goals. If God wants these things and we are all God, why haven’t we worked together to make this happen? Why would God appear to have a split personality?

(Continued)

 

[Heuchler]

And pandeism says that the whole universe is God. So, you are God. Do what you want, it won’t hurt anything. You are God, you deserve to be treated as such. You make the rules because you are God. Unless there is an outside force telling us all a universal set of morals, whatever you decide you want, is what God wants meaning it should happen. You are God, how can you harm youself. If you eat you harm the universe. If you don’t eat, you die which once again harms the universe. If you steal something, the other guy is sad. If you don’t have what you want you are sad. Either way someone is sad. And you are both God so if you can make it happen, make it happen. One way or another God is going to be happy. After that it becomes a survival of the fittest to where whoever can eat lives and whoever can steal gets it. It doesn’t matter one way or another because you are both God and one of you will end up losing, might as well be the other guy. Get what you want because you can and you are God.

 

[Pandeist_Man]

I’ll be brief.
if saying god is the universe is incorrect, are you saying god is not the universe, then?

I never refereed to pantheism when I said god is the universe. it makes no difference if i say god is the universe or became the universe.

The argument I gave is sound against pandeism .

The difference is that the Creator discerned by the pandeistic model is one which has its own attributes and existence which are not the attributes and existence of our Universe prior to the existence of our Universe (and here I use ‘prior’ not in the sense of linear time which comes into existence with our Universe, but simply in the sense of the absence of our Universe existing), and those attributes are the ones which are at least necessary for our Creator to execute the act of becoming our Creation.

Thus, if the argument is sound against Pandeism then it must disprove precisely such attributes, and since your own theological model includes the assumption of all of the same attributes (as well as requiring additional assumptions) then you may only move in the direction of atheism (or perhaps to pure Deism or Pantheism).

The fundamental proposition of Pandeism is:

Even when our Universe did not exist, there existed an entity which existed outside of any need for time and space, which possessed at least sufficient power, intelligence, and rationality to set forth a Universe of the scope and nature of the physical Universe which we are now able to observe; and that this entity possessed the capacity and the rational motivation to design such a Universe, and to execute this design by imbuing its own energy into the substance of our Universe, and to continue existing as its underlying sustaining force.

If your theological model proposes a deity which lacks any of these capacities, it describes an entity inferior to the pandeistic Creator. If it possesses these capacities, then Pandeism denies that anything more than this is required to account for every phenomenon, physical or metaphysical, reported to have occurred without our Universe. That’s all there is to it.

To put the inquiry most straightforwardly, Pandeism asks:

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

 

[Pandeist_Man]

Ok so as I said, God created the universe in order to become the Universe (which indicates that the universe is supperior to his previous state of being even though He was all powerfull and was the creator of the Universe) This would once again be similar to us wanting to become hammers (and not dying and becoming parts of hammers by chance, the difference is God has control over His change into the Universe, we do not)

Let me ask you this, does God know in an experiental sense how it feels to be courageous? Courage is the overcoming of fear, which means that whoever feels it must first feel fear. What does an omnipotent and omniscient being fear? Even an all-knowing entity can not by itself have the experiential knowledge of courage; the only way it can experience this is to exist for some time as a being capable of fearing fear. In this sense, an entity which has experienced existence as a Universe wherein things such as fear and courage occur is indeed superior to an entity which has never had such an experience. It is not the state of being the Universe which is superior; it is the later state of having been the Universe. Our current existence is transitory, a waystation towards a logical completion of knowledge. If you know some other way by which an omnipotent being can experience courage, or triumph over adversity, or contentment, please do let me know.

And pandeism says that the universe which includes me is God.

That is correct.

God’s knowledge is only found in the knowledge of life.

Only? Why do you suppose this? This is certainly not a limitation imposed by Pandeism; our Creator’s knowledge prior to the very existence of our Universe (and life within it) was such that it was able to set forth this Universe with all of its finely calculated governing dynamics, which bring about all which we now experience. The mind of our Creator underlies the sustenance of every atom, every particle and force, maintaining them in conformance with our governing dynamics. When our Universe ceases to exist and all things return to oneness with our Creator, it will still have all of the knowledge which it had before our existence, and it will have as well all of the knowledge generated within our Unvierse.

To imply that God has any more knowledge implies that he is an outside force and not the Universe itself.

Or that it was an outside force, is not presently accessible as it was, but will become so again.

So, unless God is also outside the universe making pandeism wrong, God’s knowledge and opinion are the sum of ours meaning he is torn on the issue and really can’t make up his mind on anything.

You mistake our Creator’s mind for the mere sum of the thinking going on within it; men can not make up their minds because all of us have imperfect knowledge and imperfect foresight. Our Creator is simply sharing in our experiences, understanding things from the point of view of our limitations – to claim otherwise would be to propose a deity which is incapable of understanding why men could have different opinions. This, I submit, is necessarily part of the experience of any entity claimed to be omnisicent, for any such entity would know the thoughts of all men even though those thoughts diverge in every manner conceivable.

Once again if God is the universe, the only source of his opinion would be the intelligence found within. Since we all have the urges to know the truth, to live, to avoid pain, to be happy, etc. these seem to be the attributes of God. Therefore, God must not want to be wrong, dead, suffering, or sad. So, why are we all not working together to reach these common goals. If God wants these things and we are all God, why haven’t we worked together to make this happen? Why would God appear to have a split personality?

(Continued)

Because each man’s mind is simply a fragment of a whole, no man can have perfect knowledge upon which to act. Again, without this limitation on the minds of man, ours would be a Universe devoid of experiences such as courage (for there would be nothing to fear and no fear to overcome). And why have we not worked together to reach the common goal of avoiding negatives? I think we are trying. If all men were Pandeists, each would act as if whatever he did to his fellow man, he did to his own Creator, and to himself, and we would not act so as to worsen one another’s lot.

 

[samiam1611]

Have you guys ever watched True Blood? Godric was a thousand year old vampire who basically got sick of existing so he killed himself by going out in the sun. He was a very very powerful vampire (they get more powerful with age, and he was the oldest one around). He just walked outside one morning and burst into flames.

My version of a pandeistic God concept is similar to this. kind of the opposite but similar. What if God was like, I’m sick of this existence. So It crossed the line from immaterial to material, smushed Itself into an extremely dense and extremely hot state and then BANG! God was gone, and the Universe was there.

I don’t think this necessarily means that the Universe is divine. Perhaps the divine ceased to be divine when It blew Itself up.

…

 

[Pandeist_Man]

And pandeism says that the whole universe is God. So, you are God. Do what you want, it won’t hurt anything. You are God, you deserve to be treated as such. You make the rules because you are God.

I think you know that if this was really what Pandeism claimed, there would be an awful lot more Pandeists because people want to believe that it’s that easy. Now as to not hurting anything, the experience of pain and suffering are subjectively real, and if cause suffering to another, I have caused suffering to my Creator, and thus to myself. And so it is clear that to the Pandeist, the imposition of suffering is to be avoided. And if I act recklessly and harm myself, I harm my Creator; so I ought not to be reckless. But if I should engage in a pleasurable activity which causes no harm to another, then I have done nothing to bring suffering to my Creator.

And as to deserving to be treated as such – well if you mean worship, if all things are part of our Creator, there is no sense in one part worshiping another part; but aside from worship, how would you treat your god if it appeared to you in the form of your fellow man? Differently than you already ought to treat your fellow man? Does not your scripture pronounce that what you do to the least of your fellows, you do to your god? Does that not suggest that you ought to treat the least of your fellows with the love and care and dignity with which you would treat your deity?

Unless there is an outside force telling us all a universal set of morals, whatever you decide you want, is what God wants meaning it should happen.

Again, what you or I decide we want, we decide with imperfect information; this can not be confused with what we ought to want if our knowledge was complete.

You are God, how can you harm youself. If you eat you harm the universe. If you don’t eat, you die which once again harms the universe. If you steal something, the other guy is sad. If you don’t have what you want you are sad. Either way someone is sad. And you are both God so if you can make it happen, make it happen. One way or another God is going to be happy. After that it becomes a survival of the fittest to where whoever can eat lives and whoever can steal gets it. It doesn’t matter one way or another because you are both God and one of you will end up losing, might as well be the other guy. Get what you want because you can and you are God.

‘The other guy’ exists within our Creator as well, and what I do to him, I do to my Creator as well. The conclusions you draw from that proposition fail to consider the fact that I am only myself, and have no power to be anyone else, so I must be responsible for what I do to others; only I know whether and how I suffer, and how much I can endure for wanting of things which I do not have. If I am sad for not having something which I do not, and which another has, then perhaps I ought not to want it. I can not know what the other person will feel aside from what I perceive through my senses, and must be prepared to assume that his suffering will be at least as bad as mine, though it is my own actions which I control and my own desires which I may choose to pass upon. I know as a matter of physical reality I am able to persist without a fancy car or pricey shoes or a video game player.

I know as well that I am unable to persist without food and water. I try to partake of those in such a way as to minimise the harm done to any living, feeling thing. Hence I am a vegetarian and a pacifist to the degree life allows me to be. I grow my own food as much as I am able, and if someone hungrier than I comes to my garden, I will offer him my share.

 

[samiam1611]

Only? Why do you suppose this? This is certainly not a limitation imposed by Pandeism; our Creator’s knowledge prior to the very existence of our Universe (and life within it) was such that it was able to set forth this Universe with all of its finely calculated governing dynamics, which bring about all which we now experience. The mind of our Creator underlies the sustenance of every atom, every particle and force, maintaining them in conformance with our governing dynamics. When our Universe ceases to exist and all things return to oneness with our Creator, it will still have all of the knowledge which it had before our existence, and it will have as well all of the knowledge generated within our Unvierse.

So you are suggesting the Creator is intelligent, right? It can think, it has knowledge, it has a mind. I sense some anthromorphisizing going on here It is hard to conceive of a Creator that is not somewhat human-like, isn’t it?

I have a huge problem with anthromorphisizing. I think if there is a higher power it is just that - power. A force. Mysterious, unknowable, practically inconceivable. Not intelligent, knowledgable, or perfect.

We use our imagination when we give this Power traits. Imagination is not reason.

Or that it was an outside force, is not presently accessible as it was, but will become so again

Will become so again? Explain please.

 

[Pandeist_Man]

Have you guys ever watched True Blood? Godric was a thousand year old vampire who basically got sick of existing so he killed himself by going out in the sun. He was a very very powerful vampire (they get more powerful with age, and he was the oldest one around). He just walked outside one morning and burst into flames.

My version of a pandeistic God concept is similar to this. kind of the opposite but similar. What if God was like, I’m sick of this existence. So It crossed the line from immaterial to material, smushed Itself into an extremely dense and extremely hot state and then BANG! God was gone, and the Universe was there.

I don’t think this necessarily means that the Universe is divine. Perhaps the divine ceased to be divine when It blew Itself up.

…

Have you read God’s Debris by Scott Adams? He proposes very much this model (although one wherein destruction is the Creator’s way to see what happens if it destroys itself). This is a radical view not typical of Pandeism, for we suppose our Creator to be able enough that it could if it wished cease experiencing existence without ceasing to actually exist; and perhaps more importantly, able to exist without coming to an existential crisis.

There is more reason to consider the spiritual model which is most fundamental to Pandeism – our Universe not only embodies sufficent complexity to generate intelligent life, awareness, and consciousness; it embodies sufficient fundamental simplicity that such intelligent life is able to crack the code of our Universe, to discover its governing dynamics, and to govern them ourselves in order to create marvels of technology. All of the gods of all of the ancient holy books combined could never drop into the hands of their worshippers something as simple as a transistor radio, much less a laptop computer. It took the hand and mind of man to uncover the secrets of electricity, of those heavy earth elements generated along with the organic elements in the hearts of stars, of the flow of logic circuits. Man is able to self-accelerate, to cure disease and eventually to improve our DNA and make future generations magnitudes more intelligent and able. And this capacity is built into the design of our Universe.

And consider our temporal fortuity. Lawrence Krauss (ironically a vocal atheist) has demonstrated that in a few dozen billion years, galaxies receding out of sight due to universal expansion combined with the evaporation of the Cosmic Background Radiation will yield a Universe wherein it is no longer be possible for inhabitants of any one galaxy to know that other galaxies even exist, or that our Universe is the product of a Big Bang from which it expanded a certain number of billions of years in the past. Simply put, then, is the fact that built into the design of our Universe is the capacity for intelligent life to come about quickly enough to be able to appreciate the physical means by which our Universe originated. We were meant to figure out the Big Bang and the expansion of our Universe and all of that, eventually to glean from that the means and motivation to engage in interstellar travel. And now we know that other stars have planets around them as well. I am reminded of the computer game I played when I was much younger called Oregon Trail, where we were pioneers travelling to an unsettled West. The game designer was thoughtful enough to place food and supplies at conveniently reachable points along the way. So it seems with our galaxy and perhaps our Universe. We are discovering more and more potential convenient stopping points along the way to colonizing our neighbouring stars, and if this occurrance is more than sheer dumb luck, if it is built into the fabric of our Universe that we ought to be able to spread out into it.

 

[Pandeist_Man]

So you are suggesting the Creator is intelligent, right? It can think, it has knowledge, it has a mind. I sense some anthromorphisizing going on here It is hard to conceive of a Creator that is not somewhat human-like, isn’t it?

I have a huge problem with anthromorphisizing. I think if there is a higher power it is just that - power. A force. Mysterious, unknowable, practically inconceivable. Not intelligent, knowledgable, or perfect.

We use our imagination when we give this Power traits. Imagination is not reason.

Our Universe exists; it operates rationally, and has succeeded in generating us, and whatever comes of us. Intelligence is prerequisite to the creation of governing dynamics so elegantly set forth as to be able to generate this level of complexity; the nature of our Creator’s intelligence may be a mystery, but the lower bound of it is not, for it must be at least intelligent enough to accomplish the result with which we are faced.

Will become so again? Explain please.

For those Pandeists who believe the logical purpose of our creation was for our Creator to learn through our experiences, it follows that our Creator must exist after the end of our Universe – for what use would it be for our Creator to become our Universe, but to be able to later contemplate the knowledge gained through that process? In this circumstance, it is not unreasonable to expect that our individual consciousnesses wil be preserved within the mind of our Creator, and that we will share in the knowledge of the experience had by our Creator.

 

[Pandeist_Man]

There have been many questions. Perhaps there will be many more. I will be in meditation for some length of time tomorrow, and will seek to return afterwards to consider additional propositions. Blessings!!

 

[Heuchler]

When you imply that there is an intelligence of God that underlies everything, you imply that God is still thinking and able to do what he wants but just lets the universe go so he can be afraid and have courage. But that is already covered in Christianity. First, our God has given us free will so that would given him the fear that we would defy him, but the courage to go on. Then we have Christ who is God and He was afraid of his coming Crucifxion and had the courage to carry on.
And you keep implying that there is still an intelligence instead of the Universe being all there is of God. But if God became the Universe, that means the Universe is him and the views and ideas held within are his. Why would the Universe contradict him on a whole. Why aren’t we all Pandeists or at leasts Atheists. The majority of all of humanity have believed in a God that is not from pandeism. Why is that. If we are this pandeist God wouldn’t he have left in us the urge to say we are all God that almost none of us could deny. And why do we have imperfect knowledge. What does it help? God can still be afraid and courageous if he knows everything. Why did he want to be ignorant when he came as life even though his knowledge is " the mind of our Creator underlies the sustenance of every atom" Our instincts which are God given tell us that we need to know the truth and not be ignorant. So why did God who is us make it that way.

 

[William_of_Ware]

The difference is that the Creator discerned by the pandeistic model is one which has its own attributes and existence which are not the attributes and existence of our Universe prior to the existence of our Universe (and here I use ‘prior’ not in the sense of linear time which comes into existence with our Universe, but simply in the sense of the absence of our Universe existing), and those attributes are the ones which are at least necessary for our Creator to execute the act of becoming our Creation.

Thus, if the argument is sound against Pandeism then it must disprove precisely such attributes, and since your own theological model includes the assumption of all of the same attributes (as well as requiring additional assumptions) then you may only move in the direction of atheism (or perhaps to pure Deism or Pantheism).

The fundamental proposition of Pandeism is:

Even when our Universe did not exist, there existed an entity which existed outside of any need for time and space, which possessed at least sufficient power, intelligence, and rationality to set forth a Universe of the scope and nature of the physical Universe which we are now able to observe; and that this entity possessed the capacity and the rational motivation to design such a Universe, and to execute this design by imbuing its own energy into the substance of our Universe, and to continue existing as its underlying sustaining force.

If your theological model proposes a deity which lacks any of these capacities, it describes an entity inferior to the pandeistic Creator. If it possesses these capacities, then Pandeism denies that anything more than this is required to account for every phenomenon, physical or metaphysical, reported to have occurred without our Universe. That’s all there is to it.

To put the inquiry most straightforwardly, Pandeism asks:

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

I can tell you really do not want to address what I said. sorry, I am not going to play by your rules.

Again, is the universe god or not?

A simple yes, or not will do.

Again, my argument given against pandeism (and any theology that thinks god is complex or made of parts) is good. if you’ve questions about any of the steps involved feel to ask.
This is the argument, again:

1- The creator or first principle is the universe.

2- the first principle is made of parts.

3- The parts are ontologically prior to the first principle

which would entail:

4- The universe is not the first principle.

5- and the first principle is not and cannot be made of parts.