Over a decade ago, I posted
A Pandeist responds to Lewis Loflin "Debunking Panendeism"; and while I don't know if Loflin took the
criticism leveled there to
heart, he seems to have realized his original work was sufficiently deficient to need to be given another try, posting a rewritten essay
at the same address -- only this time, he enlisted a superior intellect, with an acknowledgment at the end that "
Grok, an
AI by
xAI, helped
smooth this
takedown."
The problem is that Grok is complete
shit when it comes to writing stuff of this sort in the
English language. I've tooled around with Grok enough myself to know, so much so that as I was reading Loflin's "new" essay, I thought to myself, "this isn't writing, this is Grok" before I ever saw the acknowledgement to that effect.
A typical selection of the badness of Grok's writing is on display here:
That’s Voltaire’s Prime Mover—atheist bait. The Big Bang torched it. Deism predates France’s Enlightenment by a century. No mystic fog, just cold logic. “Panendeism’s experiential—‘all is within Deity,’ not ‘all is God.’ Matter’s infused with the Creator’s spark,” he insists. Same pantheist dodge. “Within” vs. “is” is wordplay.
And so you can see that it's just a succession of short, chop-chop sentences seeking to substitute
zip-
zing for actual
argumentation. There is no
structure here, no explanation offered for
why the concept under examination is a supposedly "pantheist dodge" or
why "within" vs. "is" is purported to be "wordplay." It's.... it's just words tossed in a bowl with long
dashes and excessive verbal
contracions. And while Loflin can't rightly be directly condemned for the
nonsensicality of Grok's
patter, he surely can be condemned for
not being able to tell the difference. As a
theologian, it would be an
embarrassment to my
dignity to post something such as this under my name, even with the acknowledgment of having leaned on an AI
crutch. It's not something that can be counterargued against, because no facts or analysis are presented for such
attention.
But I will nitpick at a few points, and they are
regurgitations of errors found in the previous non-AI version of this piece (one which was quite frankly at least more literately written). Loflin (or, well, Grok) actually only discusses
Pandeism in the first few lines, writing:
Pandeism and panendeism got cooked up in 2001. They try to slap “deism” on pantheist mush. They’re fakes, plain and simple. Pandeism’s just atheism with a Nature fetish. It calls it “god” without a shred of divine spine—pure bunk.
The
oddity here is not simply that Loflin (or, again, Grok) is
wrong on the facts here, but that they are so easily disprovable in their assertions -- and Grok, as an AI model,
knows this!! In fact, I asked Grok, fairly straightforwardly:
Write one paragraph describing the earliest origins of Pandeism, and one paragraph describing the coining and earliest uses of the term.
And Grok wrote in response:
The earliest origins of Pandeism can be traced to ancient philosophical and religious traditions that blended the concepts of a singular divine entity with the material universe. Around the 6th century BCE, thinkers like Xenophanes in ancient Greece critiqued anthropomorphic gods, proposing a unified, impersonal divine principle that permeated all existence. Similar ideas appeared in Vedic traditions in India, where texts like the Upanishads (circa 800–300 BCE) described Brahman as an all-encompassing reality, both immanent and transcendent. These early notions laid the groundwork for Pandeism, which posits that a creator deity became the universe itself, losing distinct separateness while remaining its essence. Such ideas emerged organically across cultures, reflecting a synthesis of monism and pantheism, though not yet formalized under the term "Pandeism."
The term "Pandeism" was coined in 1787 by German philosopher Gottfried Große in his translation of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary. Große used "Pandeismus" to describe a system where God and the universe are one, with the deity having transformed into the cosmos. The term gained traction in 1838 when Italian phrenologist Luigi Ferrarese used "Pandeismo" in a published dialogue, framing it as a theological model where God, as the universe, lacks a separate personal identity. By the mid-19th century, German theologians like Christian Weisse further explored Pandeism, distinguishing it from Pantheism by emphasizing a deity that consciously becomes the universe. These early uses established Pandeism as a distinct concept in Western philosophy, bridging deistic and pantheistic thought.
So Grok
already has in its
data that Pandeism was not "cooked up in 2001," but that the concept has existed for
millennia, and the term itself has been in use for centuries longer than Loflin's post claims, from a time closer to the coining of Loflin's own Deism than to our present day. Note by the way that Grok approaches normalcy in writing when it is simply relating historical facts instead of being made to spin claims. Simply put, Loflin got Grok to lie, for the benefit of making a debunkery-sounding claim. The rest, of course, is more of that "just words thrown together" type of stuff. Anybody can write out two dozen sentences using
synonyms to call something untrue, but nakedly repeating an assertion in a
multiplicity of ways simply is not an argument. Just like walking up to a very tall person and declaring, "hey, you're short, you're very small, a tiny fellow, far below average height, towered over by all others" does not diminish their actual height no matter how many variations of "short" are directed towards them, and no matter how snarky and zingy the
delivery of those lines. What is it even supposed to
mean to "slap “deism” on pantheist mush"? In what sense are they "fakes"? What is "atheism with a Nature fetish" outside of sounding quite like the critique of Pantheism offered (at least more poetically) by
Richard Dawkins in
The God Delusion (addressed by me previously in
Is Pandeism "sexed up" and "watered down"?). What is this "divine spine" Pandeism is asserted to lack a shred of? It's never explained, just followed by more snarky salad.
And so my
refutation of Grok's
stream of consciousness rewording exercise is that aside from a singular easily disproved false claim of chronological fact, there is
nothing to refute because
there is no there there to apply any sort of reasoned analysis to. And as noted before, I blame Grok for not being able to write an actual argument against Pandeism, and Loflin for not knowing what one looks like well enough to avoid the shame of adopting
garbage disposal banter under his own
banner.