Congratulations!! YOU (yes you, right there) are already
at least halfway to
Pandeism!!
Are you an Atheist? Congratulations!! You've already unencumbered yourself from society's reflexive imposition of unsupportable theistic notions. Out of habit derived from pre-scientific times, man continues clinging to scriptural mythologies as factual accounts, and t claims of
Universe-creating deities which still somehow need to
interfere and
intervene in human squabbles -- typically by sending ambiguous messages which fail to ever even reach the great bulk of peoples. If you are an Atheist, you having shaken off the heavily pressed indoctrination of these notions, but
perhaps you have gone a bit too far to the other extreme -- and so you now need simply divest yourself of the equally unsupported conviction that the governing dynamics permitting such a fortuitous Universe to come about were knowably and definitively
not a product of any kind of designing mind.
Are you a Theist? Congratulations!! Then you've already come to accept a probability that ours is a created Universe, with purpose inherent thereunto, and resisted the relentless scientific drumbeat pressing a spiritless
reductionism. Now you need simply divest yourself of the attachment to human-made mythologies and instead accept that science, logic, and reason are themselves the sacred tools by which we may conquer our cognitive biases and approach unconditioned truths. In 1884, for example,
theologian Sabine Baring-Gould contended that
Christianity itself demanded that the seemingly irreconcilable (to him) elements of
Pantheism and
Deism must indeed be combined, writing:
This world is either the idea or it is the workmanship of God. If we say that it is the idea,--then we are Pantheists, if we say that it is the work, then we are Deists... But how, it may be asked, can two such opposite theories as Pantheism and Deism be reconciled,--they mutually exclude one another? I may not be able to explain how they are conciliable, but I boldly affirm that each is simultaneously true, and that each must be true, for each is an inexorably logical conclusion, and each is a positive conclusion, and all positive conclusions must be true if Christ be the Ideal and the focus of all truths.
But what Baring-Gould did not, could not have known at the time of that writing was that
science would soon reveal most of the mechanisms by which our Universe may proceed, untouched after the moment of its creation, from a point of incalculable energy to a realm of stars and worlds and chemistry giving rise to life, including intelligent life -- and, almost inevitably, the whole panoply of religious thought and religious persons who come about in the pre-scientific stages of intelligence.
Are you a Pantheist? Then you've already come to experience our Universe as an holistic expression of
divinity. Now all you need to do is consider the possibility that this divine energy making up our Universe did not always manifest itself in the familiar physical form, but that the origin of such a form might have come about as a
transformation from a previous form -- a form capable of directed
thought -- expressly for the purpose of experiencing experiences like ours being shared within it.
Are you a Deist? Then you've already come to experience our Universe as the product of an intentional act of creation, and yet one revealed to us by logical examination of our Universe itself (and not one of the innumerable contradictory man-made claimedly revelational texts which
Pandeism fully accounts for. Now you need only consider the possibility that such a Creator would reasonably be motivated to create in order to wholly experience the operations; to
become a Universe, and so to learn what it is to experience the multitudinous range of dramas known only to interacting intelligent being intended to arise within the design of such a Universe and its governing dynamics.
Now, don't for a moment mistake this for meaning Pandeism is simply a compromise position. Pantheism and Deism both reach out towards the same goal, finding a higher truth that explains the Universe in which we live without falling prey to the primitive leaps of cognitive dissonance which nurtured the growth of systems based on superstition, and which continue to define theistic faiths. For the Deist, the order apparent in our Universe evidences the touch of a Creator, if not one thereafter involved in our Universe. But for the Pantheist, it is the awesome spectacle of the ordered Universe itself, which may be a self-ordering thing, that commands our attention. For the Pandeist, it is both. And not simply because it is emotionally satisfying to have an explanation in which both paths lead to one, and all their concerns are accounted for. But because
there is a specific logical argument which leads there, apart and aside from what one may
feel about it.
So, if you are in any of these positions, if you indeed find yourself halfway to Pandeism, don't hesitate to investigate what there is to be found further down that particular path.