Welcome to a question-answering node of the Pandeism index!!
Very often in responding to
commentaries on
Pandeism, I am in the mode of defending against
attack from those on the outside.
But not today.
Former
Jehovah's Witness podcaster
Daniel Torridon has in the past few weeks posted an absolutely fascinating pair of podcasts,
The Freedom to Rethink God—My Journey to Pandeism and
Why I Swapped Christianity for Pandeism (
text version available here). The first of these is more on the reasoning by which he entered into questioning of his previous religious conditioning, but the second very squarely enters into the deep philosophical substance of Pandeism, and why he finds that it works and makes
sense.
For the most part I find this analysis
entirely agreeable. There are a few points which I would perhaps not so much disagree with, but would provide
clarification for from a slightly different pandeistic
point of view.
Daniel states that what is conventionally called "
God" (and what he calls "
Source" and I call "
Creator") seems not to intervene in our
Universe because it "no longer exists." In my view, such phrasing imports the notion that the Creator has fully destroyed itself in becoming our Universe, but I do not consider this
becoming to be a
destruction at all, any more than the
caterpiller has ceased to exist (or destroyed itself) when it becomes a
butterfly, or that an awake person no longer exists when they become a
dreaming person. Insofar as becoming our Universe may be intended as an exercise in experiencing our Universe, the becoming is a
transformation of
characteristics, but not a necessarily permanent and final destruction of being. Though there are indeed different schools of thought within Pandeism on this point, the more popular one is that our Universe may, at the end of its intended course, return to the Creator-state it inhabited before (with the added experience of all that existed without our Universe diring its time).
On one additional note, Daniel notes that though he has never seen an actual
miracle, he did in one period experience feeling his spirituality 'ascend' a level. He writes: "It may be that I was connecting to a Universal force of some kind—a residue of an initial spirit being, or Source,—or I may have just been imagining things." These are both valid possibilities within a pandeistic framework. And although miraculous experiences are not required or even inherently proposed to exist within Pandeism, they are certainly
accounted for -- this accounting being in the very nature of our Universe as the current state of the substance of our Creator, and ourselves as part of the same. Hence the occasional
mantra that "
Pandeism fully accounts."
Daniel states as well that "the more I study science, quantum physics and so forth, the more I find thoughts and ideas that fit into this Pandeistic worldview" -- another point which I wholly agree with and appreciate, even as he concedes (as any logical person ought to as to any theological model), "nevertheless, all that said and done, I accept that Pandeism may simply not be true." And it may not -- but what elegance to our existence there is, if it is. Blessings!!