Pandeism, or pan-deism, is a theological doctrine that combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism. Unlike classical deism, which holds that the creator deity does not interfere with the universe after its creation, pandeism holds that such an entity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate entity. Pandeism (as it relates to deism) purports to explain why God would create a universe and then appear to abandon it, and pandeism (as it relates to pantheism) seeks to explain the origin and purpose of the universe.
Various theories suggest the coining of pandeism as early as the 1780s. One of the earliest unequivocal uses of the word with its present meaning was in 1859 with Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.
Definition Pandeism is a hybrid blend of the root words pantheism and deismDr. Santosh Kumar Nayak, "Language in Glocal Cultural Context", International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development, , Volume 3, Issue 3, April 2019, p. 1276. ( and 'god'). The earliest use of pandeism appears to have been 1787, with another usage found in 1838, a first appearance in a dictionary in 1849 (in German as and ), and an 1859 usage of pandeism expressly in contrast to both pantheism and deism by philosophers and frequent collaborators Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.
In his 1910 work ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature"), physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein presented the broadest and most far-reaching examination of pandeism written up to that point. Weinstein noted the distinction between pantheism and pandeism, stating "even if only by a letter (d in place of th), we fundamentally differ Pandeism from Pantheism", indicating that the words, even if spelled similarly, have very different implications.Max Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 227: "Wenn auch nur durch einen Buchstaben (d statt th), unterscheiden wir grundsätzlich Pandeismus vom Pantheismus".
Some pantheists identify themselves as pandeists as well, to underscore that "they share with the deists the idea that God is not a personal God who desires to be worshipped".Alex Ciurana, M.T.S., "The Superiority of a Christian Worldview", ACTS Magazine, Churches of God Seventh Day, December 2007, Volume 57, Number 10, page 11 It has also been suggested that "many religions may classify themselves as pantheistic" but "fit more essentially under the description of panentheistic or pandeistic", or that "pandeism is seen as a middle path between pantheism and deism".Ross Thompson, Ten Ways to Weave the World: Matter, Mind, and God, Volume 2: Embodying Mind (2023), p. 30. Here it is noted as well that "some authors also distinguish 'panendeism', whereby only part of God becomes the universe".
Pandeism falls within the traditional hierarchy of monistic and nontheistic philosophies which address the nature of God. It is one of several subsets of deism:José M. Lozano-Gotor, "Deism", Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions (Springer: 2013). "[Deism] takes different forms, for example, humanistic, scientific, Christian, spiritual deism, pandeism, and panendeism".Mikhail Epstein, Postatheism and the phenomenon of minimal religion in Russia, in Justin Beaumont, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity (2018), p. 83, n. 3: "I refer here to monodeism as the default standard concept of deism, distinct from polydeism, pandeism, and spiritual deism". "Over time there have been other schools of thought formed under the umbrella of deism including Christian deism, belief in deistic principles coupled with the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and Pandeism, a belief that God became the entire universe and no longer exists as a separate being".What Is Deism?, Douglas MacGowan, Mother Nature Network, May 21, 2015.
Bruner, Davenport and Norwine, alluding to Victorian scholar George Levine's suggestion that secularism can bring the "fullness" always promised by religion, observe that "for others, this 'fullness' is present in more religious-oriented pantheistic or pandeistic belief systems with, in the latter case, the inclusion of God as the ever unfolding expression of a complex universe with an identifiable beginning but no teleological direction necessarily present". They suggest that pandeism, within a general tendency of postmodernity, has the capacity to "fundamentally alter future geographies of mind and being by shifting the locus of causality from an exalted Godhead to the domain of Nature".
In the 2013 edition of their philosophy textbook, Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments, Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn define "pandeism" as "[t]he view that the universe is not only God but also a person".Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn, Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments, 5th Edition (Springer, 2013), p. 506, Section 6.3, "Faith and Meaning: Believing the Unbelievable", subsection, "Thought Probe: James and Pandeism": "The view that the universe is not only God but also a person is called "pandeism". Do you agree with James that viewing the universe as a person would help give meaning to your life?" Travis Dumsday, in his 2024 Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual, writes that the emergence of consciousness in panspiritism is what "distinguishes panspiritism from pandeism, since, according to the latter, the physical cosmos emerges (by a process of becoming) out of an ontologically prior divine conscious subject". He goes on to describe that in pandeism, "God became the universe at the big bang, and the resultant cosmos may (depending on the version of pandeism on offer) inherit some or all of His divine characteristics".Travis Dumsday, Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual (2024), ASIN: B0D6NPK7F4, p. 98.
Progression Ancient world
The earliest seeds of pandeism coincide with notions of monotheism, which generally can be traced back to the Atenism of Akhenaten, and the Babylonian-era Marduk.Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt, Routledge 2000, , pp. 36ff. Weinstein thought the ancient Egyptian idea of primary matter derived from an original spirit was a form of pandeism.Max Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 155, 228. He also found varieties of pandeism in spiritual traditions from ancient ChinaMax Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 121. (especially with respect to Taoism as expressed by Lao-Tze),Max Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 234-235. India (especially in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita),Max Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 213. and among various Greek and Roman philosophers.
The 6th century BC Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon has been described by some scholars as a pandeistic thinker.Max Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 231. Weinstein wrote that Xenophanes spoke as a pandeist in stating that there was one god which "abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all" and yet "sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over". Weinstein also found elements of pandeism in the ideas of Heraclitus, the Stoics, and especially in the later students of the 'Platonic Pythagoreans' and the 'Pythagorean Platonists.Max Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 233–34. He specifically identified 3rd century BC philosopher Chrysippus, who affirmed that "the universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul",Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i. 15 as a pandeist.
Religious studies professor, F. E. Peters found that "[w]hat appeared ... at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism that is the legacy of the Milesians". Historian of philosophy Andrew Gregory thought that, of the Milesians, "some construction using pan-, whether it be pantheism, pandeism or pankubernism, describes Anaximander reasonably well", although he questions whether Anaximander's view of the distinction between apeiron and cosmos makes these labels technically relevant at all. (Gregory defines a "pankubernist" as "someone who believes that everything steers"). Gottfried Große in his 1787 interpretation of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, describes Pliny, a first-century figure, as "if not a Spinozist, then perhaps a Pandeist".
Middle Ages to Enlightenment The philosophy of 9th century theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who proposed that "God has created the world out of his own being", has been identified as a form of pandeism.Guillermo Kerber, "Panentheism in Christian Ecotheology", Luca Valera, ed., Pantheism and Ecology: Cosmological, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives (Springer Publishing, 2023), p. 219–220; ASIN: B0CJNC946L.Max Bernhard Weinstein, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature") (1910), page 283-84. Weinstein notes that Eriugena's vision of God was one which does not know what it is, and learns this through the process of existing as its creation. In his great work, De divisione naturae (also called Periphyseon, probably completed around 867 AD), Eriugena proposed that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes:
1 – that which creates and is not created; 2 – that which is created and creates; 3 – that which is created and does not create; 4 – that which neither is created nor creates.
The first stage is God as the ground or origin of all things; the second is the world of Platonic ideals or forms; the third is the wholly physical manifestation of our Universe, which "does not create"; the last is God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of created things ultimately returns to completeness with the additional knowledge of having experienced this world. A contemporary statement of this idea is that: "Since God is not a being, he is therefore not intelligible... This means not only that we cannot understand him, but also that he cannot understand himself. Creation is a kind of divine effort by God to understand himself, to see himself in a mirror".Genest, Jeremiah, John Scottus Eriugena: Life and Works (1998). French journalist Jean-Jacques Gabut agreed, writing that "a certain pantheism, or rather pandeism, emerges from his work where Neo-Platonic inspiration perfectly complements the strict Christian orthodoxy".Jean-Jacques Gabut, Origines et fondements spirituels et sociologiques de la maçonnerie écossaise, 2017 Eriugena himself denied that he was a pantheist.O'Meara, John J., "Introduction", The Mind of Eriugena, (John J. O'Meara and Ludwig Bieler, eds.), Dublin: Irish University Press 1973.