Welcome to an essential node of the Pandeism index!!


Many religious views propose that they have a God which is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, but they encounter the problem of evil: specifically why, then, does evil exist in the world? This problem crops up so frequently and is so difficult to address that it has a name all its own: Theodicy. These religions must advance wildly contorted philosophical gyrations to explain this circumstance, such as their supposedly all-powerful God having had no choice but to create the evil that it knew would occur so that humans living on planet Earth could exercise "free will" (meaning that we would puppet-like act out all the steps that this God had chosen for us even before the moment of creation, even with evil outcomes being known to God in advance). Or, they claim that their God essentially has testicles, and that it swore on those testicles that it would not intervene to prevent evil (because God gave testimony, which comes from testes and literally means to promise on one's gonads). Or that it gives us free will and then either directly deceives us or skulkingly merely watches while it allows us to be deceived by another of its agents with respect to the facts required for the formation of our decisions.

But really the problem arises with conceptions of God. The concept that God is all good is the highest order of intellectual masturbation. Naturally, those who believe that there exists an all-powerful God, or even a God of limited but incomprehensibly massive power, are terrified to think that such a being could be an evil one, or impotent in the face of evil. And so, from the beginning of time itself, man has presumed and insisted and dogmatized, with no real evidence, that a God must be good.

But let us examine the evidence. We have before us the Universe itself. So far as we can tell, the Universe is very old relative to our time in it, but it is not eternal (and in fact theistic faiths tend to make it much younger even than science reveals). So far as we can tell, the Universe is very, very large relative to our scale of existence, but it is not infinite. If we presume that the Universe had a Creator, examination of the Universe itself tells us that the Creator was at least powerful enough to create a Universe containing the massive but finite amount of energy to be found in this Universe, and was at least knowledgeable enough to create a Universe which operates according to the laws of physics which govern our Universe, laws which have succeeded in at least one instance of bringing about intelligent life.

But nothing to be found in the nature of the Universe itself requires its creator to be infinite in any dimensions. There is no rational basis for the imposition of far-flung philosophical constructs of the God of the philosophers, a God that is eternal, all-powerful or all-knowing. There is no basis at all on which to determine that the creator has any moral dimension whatsoever. At this point, those who hold to revelation-based religions will grasp their religious texts and declare what the book says about God -- but religious texts are merely things in the Universe, inherently no more authorative as to its nature than a stack of back issues of Penthouse Letters, or even than a block of wood having the same mass.

Pandeism provides an answer based solely on the nature of the Universe itself, without relying on fables or hallucinations or subconcious projections. Pandeism proposes that a critical impetus for the creation of the Universe itself must have been the creator's lack of knowledge of the experiences which make good and evil possible. Consider: what can an immensely powerful being that exists alone in the Universe know about fear? Or grief? Or suffering? It can experience none of these things, and yet what is evil but the imposition of these and like feelings by one person on others? Surely a wildebeest feels something akin to fear when a lion hunts it down on the African plains, but do we call the lion evil for this? Is the spider evil for trapping the fly? The only way we could know would be to experience existence as the lion, and the wildebeest, as the spider, and the fly. Hence, Pandeism logically concludes, the Universe exists so that a creator that is neither good nor evil, because it lacks the experience of good and evil, can obtain such knowledge.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.