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Following is the 2nd installment of a series on Worldviews. There are seven questions presented by James W. Sire in his book, The Universe Next Door, which he says every worldview must answer. This book is used in many colleges for philosophy curriculum, and Sire writes from a Christian perspective. Though influenced somewhat by Sire, what I proceed to give answers to comes from my own words and thoughts. No quotes. If you want Sire’s opinion, let me know and I’ll provide that for you.
1. What is prime reality⎯the really real?
Consciousness alone necessitates the idea of God. Prime reality, though, is found in the fact that we exist. Creation is attributed to the works of this God, but he does not intervene, is impersonal, unknown, and possessing no personal attributes, such as love. Therefore, no thing can be truly known about this God. Since this is so, all one really knows to be really real is that which one can perceive with the senses and intellect. We dare not be honest about reason⎯that it cannot move us into a place of awareness of such a creator because the very act would be a kind of personal connection. The creator would have to have granted this access upon creating humans. The ability to know “it” (the creator) in any way, even apart from personal revelation, requires divine assistance. Therefore, what ever is really real is left to the observance through that of the natural man and his clearly limited functions.
2. What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?
External reality is created, though it exists in a closed system, not open for change. It is a purposeless, meaningless series of cause and effect set in a definite procedure. An effect of a cause is not the result of some personal choice; rather it is merely the outcome of the predetermined universe. Thus, any cause that appears to have purpose is a misconception of ultimate reality, and has no personal relationship with its effect.
3. What is a human being?
The human being⎯in spite of attributing significance to self⎯is therefore an equal of its external reality; there is no distinction, for they are counterparts. While the human appears to possess an attitude of purpose, significance, and determination, this is no more than a misunderstanding of the predetermined universe. The predetermined universe necessitates the absence of significance. In spite of the above, human beings maintain a perspective that attributes value and significance to themselves and other life forms and things because the value they place on human reason.
4. What happens to a person at death?
Since humans have no apparent purpose, death is simply the necessary outcome of the insignificant being. All knowledge or reason a human will acquire is but an illusion and of no real value⎯loosing it at death would then be of no concern. Since life has no meaning, neither does death; nor neither does hope. Though, some deists believe in some kind of afterlife, where one is judged to be either eternally separated from God, or eternally united with him. This, though, is uncertain.
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?
Knowledge is gained through personal experience alone, and how that experience is personally interpreted. Since God cannot be known and has not created humans out of any kind of personal love, interpreting information through an objective standard escapes us; for God would be the only objective consciousness and any attempt to make connection is null and void. Since God has no bias for humans, place for objectivity is without reach. Therefore, we hold knowledge even more tentatively, because we do not ultimately know the mind behind the machine, and have no innate revelation from God. Even still, we believe that the natural laws of God can be known through reason.
6. How do we know what is right and wrong?
Right and wrong can be very illusive. Since God has abandoned his creation, humans are left with merely a “cause” to reason by. This “cause” has no personal nature of goodness by which to draw ethics from, nor does it have an understanding of good or evil. Rather, everything just is, just as it ought to be: normal. Therefore, declaring something to be wrong is no more than a personal divergence of the predetermined universe. But this is impossible, because humans are not created to be personal, and declaration of wrong is simply a predetermined cause of the universe. However, we believe that God has somehow established a moral law in the order of things. This we are not entirely certain of, but believe it to be true.
7. What is the meaning of human history?
History is linear, due to its predetermined sequence of events. Its purpose is not to reveal some metanarrative, rather it has no real purpose. History is recorded mainly to evaluate how humans can live most effectively. While revelation does not presently exist, neither can it be seen through history. Once this predetermined machine⎯the universe⎯runs its course, it is simply finished.
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Sire's areas of uncertainty would have been resolved if he'd only looked into pandeism. The creator has not abandoned its creation. Rather, it has become the creation itself. Thus pandeism resolves the uncertainties of deism through a transformation into pantheism.
If I am understanding pandeism correctly, it is largely similar to pantheism. Even still, where is the revelation of knowledge? Pantheism and pandeism (if I'm correct) states that everything is God. If this is the case, we still can not have certainty because if everything is God, then nothing is significant. Each thing has its own relative value. What makes the truth of one thing more relative or important than the next? If each thing has a different "truth" to it, then where is the ultimate, objective? There is none. Thus, where is certainty?
That actually is exactly the difference between pantheism and pandeism. Pantheism finds everything to be God (hence all is equal in being part of God) but can not explain why this could or should be. Pandeism answers that the Universe is not eternal but is merely a temporary manifestation of God (even with a lifespan of scores of billions of years, the Universe would be finite). And pandeism answers the question, what would motivate a being having the power and intelligence necessary to design and create the Universe to undergo such a physical manifestation? A being that as alone in its existence, and which has absolute knowledge of and power over its own realm, necessarily lacks the knowledge of limitation (for it has none). So, it becomes a physical Universe — one established with laws of physics carefully designed to maximize the possibility of complexity arising in the form of intelligent life — in order to experience existence through the lives of thinking beings within the Universe. Though everything is equally "part of God" it is sentient, intelligent life that defines the experience of the Universe, that is the purpose of existence. Our purpose, in return, is to use our limited knowledge to share with the creator the best experience that we can of triumphing over our limitations!!
So, what this sounds like is "God" is trying to understand himself. If we add this to the notion that everything is God, then we are still left without certainty—if we are still discussing certainty. Also, what should we say about evil? If everything is God, then nothing is evil. There are two options that I see: (1) either evil does not exist and is merely an illusion, or (2) evil is God also. If we say that evil is part of God, then we have a contradiction; that God is both good and evil. If evil is an illusion. This seems to only raise more questions, not solve any.
Thanks for stopping back!
Who says God is "good"? Goodness is entirely a function of relations between entities capable of thoughtful interaction — or at last one of them must be; a person might be "evil" towards an animal, such as a child pulling wings off a butterfly, even if the child is too young to know right from wrong — but an entity that is alone in its existence can have no conception of evil; it is not until individual and limited thinking beings exist in the Universe that evil can be known at all. That is one reason why such an entity would become the Universe.
So am I correctly understanding you by concluding there is no such thing as good or evil?
Also, is this "God" trying to understand itself? Is that why it became the universe?
Of course there is such a thing as good and evil!! But it is known because we, humans, have through our experience identified what is good and what is evil. We do not require a God to determine for us what is good or evil any more than we need a God to tell us that that Battlefield Earth was poorly acted.
Eriugena believed that the creator became the Universe to try to understand itself. That may be too simple a take on it, although it is one distinct possibility. Another is that this creator became the Universe to complete its knowledge by obtaining some branch of knowledge which a lone, immensely powerful entity would not have, such as the knowledge of facing limitations, or of not existing. Self-completion by redressing a missing component seems a more direct motivation than self-understanding — but surely one can only understand oneself in the completeness of one's knowledge about what one isn't?
If good or evil is something affirmed only through human beings experience, then no objective standard determines what is good or evil. Thus, good to me may be evil to you, to someone else, and to another. It only makes sense for needing a God to determine good and evil because if good is determined by only what I experience to be good, then each person's definition of what good is changes. It may be good for me to steel cigarettes for sheer convenience, but it was an evil act against the other person. But if I have no concern of others, and if my motivation is to only tend to self, then no ethical standard applies to my behavior. This only raises more questions.
This still has not answered the question of certainty.
Thanks for the discussion!
—Jonathan
I have been mulling your point. If there is no God at all, then there is, naturally, no external arbiter to determine what is right and wrong. Conversely, the Gods of theistic faiths tend to be said to judge right and wrong in unfair ways — putting morally blameless men like Gandhi in Hell for example (or making an eternal Hell at all; and let us not even get started on the nonsense of the Flood). Many pandeists (though by no means all) project a sort of Universal karma onto the logic of pandeism. If God has become the Universe to learn from its experiences, at some point it must return to being God, and must carry the knowledge of having been the Universe with it. Therefore, God must retain intact within itself the minds and memories of every person who has ever existed — but these minds, now being within God would be able to share in all of the experiences held by all the other minds. Each person would therefore have a firsthand experience all of the experiences that person caused in others. Simply put, if you strike someone in this life, in the next you would experience how they felt to be struck. If you trick someone out of their savings, you will experience their anguish and anger at having been so deceived. Such a situation would present ideal situational justice, and perhaps is reflective of the Buddhist influence on pandeism.
Greetings Kohler! I did expect your returned visit!
I see what you are saying about how it can seem wrong that Gandhi should be judged to hell based on the acquiescence of Jesus. But wouldn't you say that your definition of God would be at least as absurd as what you are saying the theist's understanding of what moral law and the justice of God is? If God does not understand himself, he is certainly not God. And speaking numerically only, this does not account for "next life" experiences (reincarnation). There aren't enough people in the world. So we are still left without answers.
Also, we still haven't solved the problem of certainty.
Thanks,
—Jonathan
Sorry, I did not mean to confuse you. Pandeism has some philosophical similarities to Buddhism, but reincarnation is not a doctrine of pandeism (which is to say, it is neither required not expressly disavowed) but since pandeists rely on a strict application of logic and reason to determine the nature of the Universe, any pandeist positing a model of reincarnation would be expected to base this assertion on some rational argument as to why the nature of the Universe demands such a thing must exist (and an answer to the population riddle that you pose).
And why do you suppose it is the case that "if God does not understand himself, he is certainly not God"? There are many definitions of the word "God," but it would be odd to say that the entity responsible for the design and creation of the Universe is not "God," even if it does not understand itself. Looking to the Universe itself, we can see that it is not infinite in size or mass or energy, has not existed eternally, and operates entirely according to a surprisingly small and fundamental set of natural laws. The creator of such a thing must have been intelligent and powerful indeed, but nothing requires that its power or knowledge be infinite, or that it be eternal, or that it have any moral qualities whatsoever.
I agree with you in the fact that there are many definitions of the word "God." Obviously, we are both bias to some degree to our familiar definition of that word. I think we can both agree, though, that God is the creator/initiator of the universe whether it/he be singular or the universe itself, correct?
First, I think if the creator of this universe is not eternal, then something must have come before it, and before it, and before it, and so on and so forth. If this were so, than we must conclude an infinite number of series, which is actually impossible. There must be a first cause. Also, the universe is contingent. When we assume the universe is God, then we defy the very laws we live by, such as the conservation of mass. Also, if God was the universe entire, then God would certainly have infinite knowledge, because he/it would be all things at the same time. There would be no need for understanding himself/itself; it would be the mind and the matter simultaneously in every conceivable way. As far as the moral framework goes, I think that is actually a whole other topic! lol. Lot's of stuff involved there.
And still, we have not solved the issue of certainty.
I think for future comments, we will have to begin a new thread because the longer this one gets, the thinner it gets in size.
Thanks!
—Jonathan
I think you have is a particularized definition of a particular God, whereas I use the term as a referent for any potential entity with Universe-creating power (excepting for the time being the recent slate of scientific papers proposing to demonstrate how man can use technology to generate new Universes in alternate dimensions).
A hundred or more years ago, the presumptions underlying your critique would have been in accord with the scientific knowledge of the time. But their credibility, and the model of God that they supported, has been wiped away by the advance of understanding of the mechanics of the Universe. An infinite series of causation in and of itself is no more and no less impossible than an infinite Creator. But, we have known for nearly a century now that time itself is a function of space, and before the existence of the Universe, there was no time, time being the thing of which eternity is a mere projection. Thus the Creator need not have been eternal, it merely must have existed before time itself. Furthermore, a truly all-powerful God must be capable of time travel, hence it must be capable of going to the exact moment of its own creation and paradoxically creating itself. In any event, nothing in the nature of the Universe itself requires that its creator existed for any particular moment prior to the initiation of the Universe.
If the Creator became the Universe, this would preserve mass precisely, for the Creator would not have to engage in the even less likely task of creating the substance of the Universe out of nothing while maintaining its own substance. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms; thus the energy that preceded that which is the Universe must have changed forms for the Universe to exist.
You suggest that God being the Universe would mean that God would have infinite knowledge. Why? Is the Universe infinite? We know that it is not. Thus the amount of information in the Universe is finite as well. It is a common, but ideologically fatal, error to confuse that which is incomprehensibly large and inconceivable to calculate with that which is infinite.
I must stress that in contravention to revelational faiths, the basis of pandeism is not the presumption of a spiritual model, followed by efforts to interpret scientific data in conformity with this model (such as manufacturing evidence of a worldwide flood, or carving human footprints in the ground next to fossilized dinosaur footprints); rather, pandeism begins with the whole of scientific knowledge of how the Universe actually works, and proceeds to determine from that basis, and from logic, what characteristics are necessary for the Creator of a Universe that operates in this way, what mechanisms may or must have been employed in the Creation, and what conditions must have motivated an entity capable of Creation to carry out this particular endeavor. There can be no certainty, for human knowledge is perpetually incomplete; however, we can develop a model which has by far the highest probability of being true.
If you wish to begin a new thread with a focus on the discussion of pandeism, I would be obliged to participate.
I find it odd that you say that the probability of a personal, distinct God has "been wiped away by the advance of understanding of the mechanics of the Universe." Also, you suggest that revelational faiths twist evidence of what science reveals to better suite their presuppositions. Don't you think this to be hypocritical due to the fact that secular scientists have done this time and time again? I think this is a bit absurd. There's so much in your comment I don't know where to begin.
You know what's really odd? It's the fact that God really loves people! It's amazing, really! Man has nothing intrinsically good about themselves unless God gives them significance. What's more, He grants repentance. Knowing Jesus is the most amazing, best thing that could ever happen to you. I pray that you might find repentance and the true message of the Gospel. God made man, man rebelled, and God has provided a way back to relationship with Him through Jesus. Jesus died the death that you and I deserve for our willful disobedience. If you trust in Him, you will be saved. If you want to talk more about that, I would be obliged to participate. But I will not debate Scripture.
Thank you so much for taking so much time to discuss this topic with me.
—Jonathan
It has been an interesting conversation. I too have no interest in debating Scripture, as all Scripture, from all faiths, is fully accounted for by pandeism as being man's errant attempt to understand brief moments of touching upon the power of in incomprehensible but unconscious Creator underlying the structure of the Universe. Such writings can bear no more relation to the real and discoverable nature of deity than do the traditions of praise to Jupiter and Jove originating in the same era.
And by the way, thanks for stopping by and adding to the conversation!
Bad keystroke sequence on my part and my comment disappeared…so let me try it again…if you got this twice, please delete one.
Sorry it took me so long to get here. Love what you are doing with this series. I look forward to digging in.
Take care Jonathan.
No duplicates here! Thanks for stopping by! Looking forward to your insight as well.
There are a few similarities between deism and wof
REally? In what way?
Man, this is an interesting topic. A little too deep for me though, lol. I’m not sure if you were trying to describe pandeism, or deism, but to hold either to that type of interpretation is just silly. It seems you delve in a little farther than needed. But then again, there is a lot that I don’t know as well. I myself thought Deism just to be a belief in God, without the need for revelation. I don’t try to objectively answer unanswerable questions. I love to debate, and speculate, but to hold it as an ultimate truth, or to try to create truth, is just not feasible, to me. It seems this conversation is digging deeper than it should. To me, it is all the same debate. You are all talking about whether God did this, or did that, and how we got morals, or why we exist, why are we here, etc. This is man’s attempt at understanding what he doesn’t know, whether through man writing the bible, torah, quran, or debates like this, it all stems from human consciousness. All knowledge that we have acquired in our existence, has came from man, so in all, nobody knows. We all just give our best guess.