Talk:Pandeism/Archive 6

GABRIEL D. ROBERTS
GABRIEL D. ROBERTS - THE QUESTION OF PANDEISM

JANUARY 31, 2013

Asked about Pandeism, GABRIEL D. ROBERTS gave this answer:

To me, the idea is like many others, interchangeable and useful for metaphor. I've come to a personal philosophy of using concepts of one, many and all dieties as computer programs. You can fire up the ideas and feelings that each has use for just like you would use photoshop for photos and iTunes for listening to music. When the application has served its purpose, it can simply be closed until it is needed again. I have also integrated the idea of practicing conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Pandeism is a perfectly fine model and yet it is just an excuse to keep a deity in the conversation. The question that comes to us is, "Why do we need a deity in our lives to give us meaning?". Quantum Theory says light is both a wave and a particle, so why cannot we both be seperate from God, meaning God is an outside source we must look to and perhaps also consider that we are God as well. When we relenquish our power to a higher source and ascribe powerful characteristics to it, we are fashioning an anthropomorphized effigy of ourselves in most cases. In a universe that turns chaos into something palpable in consensus reality, we have to hold loosely that which we see as ultimate truth. I'm not saying that you do this, but it's our tendency as humans. In our laziness and desire to have something simple to cling to, we make up something that is "good enough" for our purposes. The best way to do this without being self-dilouted is to acknowledge that we are doing it to serve our own purposes. Do we want to be right, or do we want to be free of the confines of our own entrapment? The question of the value of Pandeism is the same as the question of the value of the word,"The". It might just be that the answer is there is no answer. Find a nice way of life that suits you and people to love with reckless abandon. If there is a God in the traditional sense, the best assumption we can make is that it wants real love as its holiest ritual and rite. May you be blessed in all of your pursuits! - G. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.228.226.45 (talk) 19:04, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Additional reference.
As I have experienced some touchiness in the past when it comes to additions to this page, I write here to propose the addition of reference to a peer-reviewed piece from the American Philosophical Journal. The referenced piece is freely available on JSTOR, to anybody who registers a free MyJSTOR account, as I have done. Anybody who agrees that the following material, or some adaptation or summation of it, is appropriate to this page and to Wikipedia, please insert wherever you think right.

Blessings!! DeistCosmos (talk) 21:36, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Pandeism has been classed as a logical derivation of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's proposition that ours was the best of all possible worlds. William C. Lane contends that:

"If divine becoming were complete, God's kenosis--God's self-emptying for the sake of love--would be total. In this pandeistic view, nothing of God would remain separate and apart from what God would become. Any separate divine existence would be inconsistent with God's unreserved participation in the lives and fortunes of the actualized phenomena.""

Acknowledging that American religious philosopher William Rowe has raised "a powerful, evidential argument against ethical theism," Lane further contends that pandeism escapes the evidential argument from evil: "However, it does not count against pandeism. In pandeism, God is no superintending, heavenly power, capable of hourly intervention into earthly affairs. No longer existing "above," God cannot intervene from above and cannot be blamed for failing to do so. Instead God bears all suffering, whether the fawn's or anyone else's. Even so, a skeptic might ask, "Why must there be so much suffering,? Why could not the world's design omit or modify the events that cause it?" In pandeism, the reason is clear: to remain unified, a world must convey information through transactions. Reliable conveyance requires relatively simple, uniform laws. Laws designed to skip around suffering-causing events or to alter their natural consequences (i.e., their consequences under simple laws) would need to be vastly complicated or (equivalently) to contain numerous exceptions. Such laws would not be discernable from within the world. From that standpoint, the only one that matters, they would not be laws at all. Absent laws, transactions would not reliably convey information, and the world could not be one. God could not consistently become such a world. Since God becomes the world to be with the beloveds, suffering is the price that God pays for love. For us, a world without suffering would be one from which information would constantly vanish. Our actions would have unpredictable effects and so could have no meanings."

Having waited a few days, I heard nothing either way, and so went ahead with it. Blessings!! DeistCosmos (talk) 06:17, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

expand Eriugena?
Since it is now sourced in the article that Eriugena could be considered pandeistic, perhaps we should expand on what Erigena actually wrote? I propose:

Eriugena proposed in his great work, De divisione naturae (also called Periphyseon, probably completed around 867 AD), that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes:


 * 1) that which creates and is not created;
 * 2) that which is created and creates;
 * 3) that which is created and does not create;
 * 4) that which neither is created nor creates.

Eriugena sees God as an evolving being, developing through the four outlined stages. The first is God as the ground or origin of all things; the second is the world of Platonic ideas or forms; the third is the wholly physical manifestation of our Universe, which "does not create"; the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns with the additional knowledge of having experienced this world. 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."

Torquemama007 (talk) 18:46, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and added a very abbreviated version of the above, and also made the discussion flow more smoothly in connecting the Milesians and Pythagoreans. Torquemama007 (talk) 17:26, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I undid a bit of what you did there, as I think you introduced some errors in the formatting of it. I think as well that we'd be better off at this point with a Giordano Bruno image, as his pandeistic notions are more notorious nowadays. DeistCosmos (talk) 20:43, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Ok I added a picture of Bruno instead. Hope you like! Torquemama007 (talk) 18:24, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Pantheist Deism = Pandeism?
We have debated before on only including sources on this page which explicitly mention Pandeism by name, and not simply by description of its Creator-becomes-Creation theology. What about quotes referencing "pantheist deism"? Specifically I am looking at this quote:


 * In the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century Spinoza even became the secular saint of a kind of mystical pantheist deism for authors like Goethe, Schelling, and Coleridge.
 * Aaron V. Garrett, Meaning in Spinoza's Method (2003), p. 2.

There are, naturally, other sources which class Spinoza, Goethe, and Schelling as various degrees of pandeistic thinkers, but I don't know about Coleridge. So, Pandeism itself being defined as Pantheist Deism, can this quote be used here, as it is? DeistCosmos (talk) 06:30, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

More to come -- soon!!
I won't tease it too much but I've just today come across another German work which makes extensive discussion of Pandeism!! DeistCosmos (talk) 23:52, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Add a source
Check out Nature, Woman and Lyrical Ambiguity in Shen Congwen's Writing, Jiwei Xiao, Rocky Mountain Review, Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2013 pp. 41-60. "The third kind of hysteria afflicts those young girls who commit suicide by jumping into caves-"luodong" 落洞. Shen attributes it to the repressive local military culture that imposes strict sexual codes on women and to the influence of pan-deism among Miao people." Torquemama007 (talk) 13:53, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * The link you gave was not the paper but a restricted point of access for it. But I've found a link to the actual paper. The complete passage therefrom gives greater context:


 * Here we see the notion of the god-who-is-in-all-things, including as an aspect the cave itself (I presume when they speak of a cave they mean one which you would find yourself plummeting to death if you threw yourself into it). At page 55 of the piece. Blessings!! Pandeist (talk) 00:47, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Okay, as easily done. Torquemama007 (talk) 13:35, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 21 February 2015

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move. Oppose and support votes are in equal numbers, and some of the support !votes seem to depend on a direct appeal not to use WP:COMMONNAME, which seems a dubious application of policy. Leaning "no move", but will call it no consensus. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 13:40, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Pandeism → Pan-deism – Pan-deism or perhaps Pan-Deism. I do realize this theological model is by far most commonly not hyphenated. But having taken a greater and greater interest in the subject I find it increasingly irritating when detractors mockingly intimate that it is must require the worship of pandas. Were it to become more commonly presented as hyphenated, it would avoid this fopwhatery. (I don't propose extending this to Pantheism or Panentheism or Panendeism.) relisted --Mike Cline (talk) Pandeist (talk) 05:23, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Support, Pan-Deism as per Pan-Islamism and similar. The change brings no change in meaning.  It seems to me to be a logical move so as to clarify the actual wording.  GregKaye 15:39, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Support – This is a logical thing to do. Most words involving the "pan" prefix are hyphenated (note GregKaye's example). This provides a clearer title than the present one, which looks like a mishmash and could be read incorrectly. RGloucester  — ☎ 03:50, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Use Pan-Deism -- 70.51.200.101 (talk) 07:33, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose - As acknowledged by the nominator, the common, widespread form is "Pandeism", not "Pan-deism". We use the form that is most commonly used, not the form we personally want to see used by people... no matter how many silly panda jokes are made. The policy for this is WP:COMMONNAME. And there are plenty of compound words beginning with "pan" that are not hyphenated: pandemic, pangenesis, pansexual, pansophy, etc... not to mention panentheism and pantheism. I don't think it's all that confusing. -kotra (talk) 21:14, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose, much more obscure usage, Google "Pandeism" and you'll see 50,000+ results, "Pan-deism" gets only about 2,000. Searching in books is much the same, "Pandeism" gets about a thousand, "Pan-deism" gets 67. Again with Google scholar, "Pandeism" turns up 80 returns, "Pan-deism" gets one. This is the opposite of the numbers with "Pan-Islamic" by the way. Torquemama007 (talk) 13:50, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Oppose, there is no comparison to Pan-Islamism, which is an attempt to encompass all of Islam. Pandeism is not an attempt to encompass all of Deism, but is a subset of Deism that is pantheistic instead of monotheistic. 63.117.186.3 (talk) 03:49, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Would somebody please relist this move? Blessings!! Pandeist (talk) 20:44, 28 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Merge from God becomes the universe?
Shouldn't God becomes the universe be merged into this article? Editor2020, Talk 04:45, 27 February 2015 (UTC)
 * @ I would completely agree but most of what is now in God becomes the universe (which ought to be at God becomes the Universe was originally on this page until it was moved to that one by people who were affixed to the conviction that including any reference to such a theory where such reference does not use the word "Pandeism" or a variant of it was WP:ORIGINAL RESEARCH. Pandeist (talk) 21:04, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * If you wish to read up on this it is all in Talk:Pandeism/Archive 2. Pandeist (talk) 01:58, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
 * And it might do to appeal directly to the prime movers of the original divisional effort: User:LCS check, User:TippyGoomba, User:Dennis Brown. Pandeist (talk) 05:37, 1 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Any source that talks about God becoming or being the whole universe isn't "Pandeism" unless it IS talking about that specifically. Pandeism isn't the only spiritual philosophy that that covers this, so you can't assume.  That is like saying any source that just mentions Jesus MUST be talking about Christianity, when the Jews, Muslims and the Bahá'í Faith also talk about him.  My participation was about removing OR, and claiming that all sources MUST be talking about Pandeism just because they talk about god became the universe, well, that is the de facto definition of original research here. You can believe that god is the universe without being a Pandeist. Two articles is best because one is exclusive to Pandeism, the other talks about concepts shared with Pandeism.  I would agree with the capitalization of Universe as well, given the context, as we are talking about a proper noun not just a body of stars and planets. Dennis Brown - 2&cent; 14:05, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
 * @ if you agree, as you state, with the capitalization of Universe in this context, that very question is the topic of discussion at Talk:God becomes the Universe. Blessings!! Pandeist (talk) 20:12, 1 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I also agree to no merge. God becomes the Universe-what does it mean? That something starts as God and ends up as the Universe. Pandeism is very specific that it is a Universe without consciousness, without intervention, but some God could become the Universe and not give up some kind of intervention, so it is also Panentheism or other kinds of Pantheism. Torquemama007 (talk) 17:42, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Translating stuff out?
A dozen or so other language wikis boast Pandeism pages, some having substance, but most remaining in comparatively meager shape next to this one. I made a go at Google translating some into Italian but it got kicked out there as gibberish. So, if anybody speaks any language needing buffing up here, do have a go. Blessings!! Pandeist (talk) 03:34, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Page image.
Right now the quote-unquote page image for Pandeism is a pic of Xenophanes. Not altogether unreasonable, but surely we can perch something more germane atop this range? Pandeist (talk) 20:39, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Iff Books blog summary links
From the Iff Books blog:

http://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/blogs/non-fiction/fundamentals-of-pandeism/ Fundamentals of Pandeism

http://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/blogs/non-fiction/philosophical-implications-of-pandeism/ Philosophical Implications of Pandeism

http://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/blogs/non-fiction/pandeism-criticism-and-analysis-from-other-views/ Pandeism: Criticism and Analysis from Other Views

Hyperbolick (talk) 14:17, 15 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I think size isn't a good measure of quality. The quality of the sources is.  I removed the one source, which was a published paper and not a secondary source.  This isn't adequate as we can't judge the independence nor the verifiability of the claims.  Dennis Brown - 2&cent; 22:59, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Agree with this removal. Hyperbolick (talk) 17:59, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

"Notable pandeists and pandeistic thinkers"
What does that mean? Are those two different things? 12.199.40.188 (talk) 21:34, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Timeline confusion
The article first says that pandeism was "first delineated in the 18th century" but in the next paragraph says it was "perhaps first coined in the present meaning in 1859" which would be the 19th century. Then further on it says "the earliest use of the term pandeism appears to have been 1787" which is in the 18th century, but which is not expanded on. Which is it? Anoplocis (talk) 03:25, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

An old blog post on Pandeism
https://pandeism.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/do-we-need-god/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.157.56.18 (talk) 20:16, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

physicalisma
A quote on the page says "New Age cosmologies reject materialism, naturalism and physicalisma." Is "physicalisma" a thing? Maybe "physicalism"?
 * Looks like a footnote remnant. Hyperbolick (talk) 18:06, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Kirn/Kern
It is indeed de:Otto Kirn. Thank you for catching that. Please explain why you think that the opinion of the Dean of Faculty at the University of Leipzig "...could be fringe". If anything he was being diplomatic. Also, the sentenced rm was not "accidentally removed". Why would you think "biblefalseprophet.com" is anywhere near a RS? The article relies entirely too heavily on Weinstein. There are about fifteen lengthy quotes in German, that would be better on the German wiki, if anywhere. Weinstein's opus is over 100 years old. There should be other sources available, preferably in English. Manannan67 (talk) 16:53, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Dean of Faculty takes administrative ability but not so much field expertise. Fringe, maybe not, but not up to us to declare one right or wrong between philosophy professors (Weinstein started as professor of physics but later appointed professor of philosophy as well). Fifteen quotes out of 90+ on the page is a fraction, is it not? Considering Weinstein made a more extensive study of the subject than those before and most since. His book is 500 pages, very thorough, covers many cultures and commonalities in belief. Of that, he spends about a tenth on Pandeism. Most others writing on it cover it in a page, maybe two. Not disproportionately quoted if he happens to be most prolific in examining it. (Worth mentioning, Weinstein was not himself a Pandeist, so not promoting it.)
 * As to Kramer. Thought that was accidental because you were moving passages around, didn’t mention deleting anything in the edit summary, as one usually would intentionally deleting a larger passage. Article is fine without it, but question is really not if the website is reliable, but is the person. If Charles Darwin posted something new about evolution on a questionable website, don’t think it’d matter what website it was posted on. Hyperbolick (talk) 19:31, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Had you taken the occasion to follow the link to Kirn's article you would have found that he took his Doctorate in Philosophy with a thesis on Kants transcendentale Dialektik in its meaning for the philosophy of religion and was for a number of years professor of systematic theology both in Basel and Leipzig. Harnack and Schürer were both highly respected scholars, and the  Theologische Literaturzeitung was not noted for printing fringe. "His book is 500 pages" -that was Kirn's point. Weinstein bit off more than he could chew. "The author apparently intended to divide up religious, rational and scientifically based philosophies, but found his material overwhelming, resulting in an effort that can shine through the principle of classification only darkly." If this is so notable, why has no one given it any "so-called" thorough coverage in over 100 years. And all those long quotes in German are not particularly helpful on the English wiki.
 * "question is really not if the website is reliable, but is the person." Well, no. If the website is unreliable, why should you think the quote is????? That's why I shall be removing gloria.tv forthwith. Manannan67 (talk) 23:38, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I see your point as to Kramer. As to Weinstein and Kirn, professors of philosophy at respective institutions in Berlin and Leipzig, each has their respective views. Ours is not to “pick a winner” between them, but to provide what one wrote, and then what the other wrote. Suppose quotes in German can be mostly removed. Hyperbolick (talk) 23:57, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
 * User:Manannan67, removed all lengthy German quotes. Please review. Hyperbolick (talk) 23:42, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I think it reads much cleaner, as in some instances they merely reiterated what was already in the text, but in a language not all users would understand. Manannan67 (talk) 23:51, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Addition of 'Panendeist' theology
Panendeism emerged as a theory only recently. Alison Plantinga (talk) 06:30, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Can you point to reliable sources, i.e., not self-published books or websites? Hyperbolick (talk) 17:48, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Karl Jaspers
Dropping here: Hyperbolick (talk) 08:59, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

The 'Olson' here is Alan M. Olson. Hyperbolick (talk) 09:01, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Here's the whole quote.

"According to [Alan M.] Olson, Jaspers's perception of ciphers stresses the centrality of the individual experiencing the constitution of the symbol and activity involved in interpreting it, compared with Christian theology, which grants a different weight to the individual and to the symbolic aspects of religion. In his opinion, the fear that pandeism or the tendency to reduce faith into the external means by which it is obtained would eventually lead to the viewing of these means as having purely subjective, and also mutable, validity, was behind the Catholic church's emphasis on the objective truth of the symbols themselves in relation to the individual religious experience."

- Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being (Rodopi 2012), p. 249, ISBN 9042035315.