page_title: Pandeism
section_title: Twenty-first century developments
hierarchical_section_title: Pandeism / Progression / Twenty-first century developments
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Scott Adams – karikaturista, tvůrce Dilberta. Deutsch: Scott Adams. English: Scott Adams, MBA 1986, creator of the comic strip Dilbert. Español: Scott Adams. Suomi: Scott Adams. Français&#160;: Scott Adams. עברית: סקוט אדאמס. 日本語: スコット・アダムス. Nederlands: Scott Adams. Norsk bokmål: Scott Adams (1957). Polski: Scott Adams. Português: Scott Adams.
context_page_description: Pandeism, a theological doctrine first delineated in the 18th century, combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism. It holds that a creator deity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate and conscious entity. Pandeism is proposed to explain why God would create a universe and then appear to abandon it, and an origin and purpose of the universe.
  Various theories suggest the coining of the word "pandeism" as early as the 1780s, but one of the earliest unequivocal uses of the word with its present meaning came in 1859 with Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.
context_section_description: More recently, pandeism has been classed as a logical derivation of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's proposition that ours was the best of all possible worlds. In 2010, author William C. Lane contended that:
  If divine becoming were complete, God's kenosis--God's self-emptying for the sake of love--would be total. In this pandeistic view, nothing of God would remain separate and apart from what God would become. Any separate divine existence would be inconsistent with God's unreserved participation in the lives and fortunes of the actualized phenomena."
  Acknowledging that American philosopher William Rowe has raised "a powerful, evidential argument against ethical theism", Lane further contended that pandeism offers an escape from the evidential argument from evil:
  However, it does not count against pandeism. In pandeism, God is no superintending, heavenly power, capable of hourly intervention into earthly affairs. No longer existing "above", God cannot intervene from above and cannot be blamed for failing to do so. Instead God bears all suffering, whether the fawn's or anyone else's.
  Even so, a skeptic might ask, "Why must there be so much suffering,? Why could not the world's design omit or modify the events that cause it?" In pandeism, the reason is clear: to remain unified, a world must convey information through transactions. Reliable conveyance requires relatively simple, uniform laws. Laws designed to skip around suffering-causing events or to alter their natural consequences (i.e., their consequences under simple laws) would need to be vastly complicated or (equivalently) to contain numerous exceptions.
  Cartoonist and pundit Scott Adams has written two books on religion, God's Debris (2001), and The Religion War (2004), of which God's Debris lays out a theory of pandeism, in which God blows itself up to see what will happen, which becomes the cause of our universe. In God's Debris, Adams suggests that followers of theistic religions such as Christianity and Islam are inherently subconsciously aware that their religions are false, and that this awareness is reflected in their consistently acting like these religions, and their threats of damnation for sinners, are false. In a 2017 interview Adams said these books would be "his ultimate legacy."
  In 2010 German astrophysicist and popular scientist Harald Lesch observed in a debate on the role of faith in science:
  Suppose we would find the all-encompassing law of nature, we are looking for so that finally we could assure proudly, the world is built up this way and no differently -- immediately it would create a new question: What is behind this law, why is the world set up just so? This leads us beyond the limits of science in the field of religion. As an expert, a physicist should respond: We do not know, we'll never know. Others would say that God authored this law, that created the universe. A Pandeist might say that the all-encompassing law is God."
  Alan Dawe's 2011 book The God Franchise, though mentioning pandeism in passing as one of numerous extant theological theories, declines to adopt any "-ism" as encompassing his view, though Dawe's theory includes the human experience as being a temporarily segregated sliver of the experience of God. This aspect of the theology of pandeism (along with pantheism and panentheism) has been compared to the Biblical exhortation in Acts 17:28 that "In him we live and move and have our being," while the Wycliffe Bible Encyclopedia had in 1975 described the religion of Babylon as "clearly a type of pan-deism formed from a synthesis of Christianity and paganism". Another Christian theologian, Graham Ward, insists that "Attention to Christ and the Spirit delivers us from pantheism, pandeism, and process theology," and Catholic author Al Kresta observes that:
  "New Age" cosmologies reject materialism, naturalism and physicalism. They are commonly pantheistic or pandeistic. They frequently try to commandeer quantum physics and consciousness studies to illustrate their conception of the cosmos.
  Also in 2011, in a study o
caption: Cartoonist and pundit Scott Adams wrote God's Debris (2001), which lays out a theory of pandeism.
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