Abstract
AbstractPandeism is the belief that God chose to wholly become our Universe, imposing principles at this Becoming that have fostered the lawful evolution of multifarious structures, including life and consciousness. This article describes and defends a particular form of pandeism: living God pandeism (LGP). On LGP, our Universe inherits all of God's unsurpassable attributes—reality, unity, consciousness, knowledge, intelligence, and effectiveness—and includes as much reality, conscious and unconscious, as is possible consistent with retaining those attributes. God and the Universe, together “God‐and‐Universe,” is also eternal into the future and the past. The article derives testable hypotheses from these claims and shows that the evidence to date confirms some of these while falsifying none. Theism cannot be tested in the same way.
Highlights
Pandeism is the belief that God chose to wholly become our Universe, imposing principles at this Becoming that have fostered the lawful evolution of multifarious structures, including life and consciousness
Pandeism argues that miracles in Hume’s sense do not exist; against deism, it argues that God is more than an absentee Creator; against pantheism, it argues that any account of God must explain our world’s existence
Pandeisten) to denote a doctrine distinct from deism and pantheism came only in the mid-nineteenth century (Mapson 2016, 27), and its use remained sporadic until the turn of the twenty-first century
Summary
Ryan Mullins (2016, 327) suggests a way to compare competing understandings of God. “In contemporary philosophy of science,” he writes, “it is common to speak of competing research programs. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches both that “God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness” and that “the world was made for the glory of God.” This diversity suggests that God’s reason for becoming is not central to theism; Mullins does not include it in classical theism’s hard core. Attributes that can be surpassed only by God in a future state (knowledge, intelligence, and consciousness) are relatively unsurpassable With this account of God’s attributes and possible motives in hand, we can consider how theism and LGP stack up as research programs
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