The
Internet and the
computer mouse are, fundamentally, boons to
laziness. While there are some few immensely productive people out there, for most it's much easier to
copy and paste something somebody else cleverly created, and repost it
ad infinitum (hopefully with credit given) than it is to come up with an original
thought -- and oftimes even the thing reposted is not itself especially clever or original, or even has all the hallmarks of itself being lazily or hastily written.
And so it is that I occasionally find different people posting the exact same list of responses to the
problem of evil -- claimed in
this 2017 thread on
Reddit by one "HannasAnarion" to've ben written by them "for a conflicted guy in r/christianity a while back." I feel like I've seen this list, or some close approximation of it floating around years before that, but the mind plays tricks and "a while back" is pretty nonspecific, so I'll allow that he may be the true writer of it.
Now, as to the
list itself, it has items like:
Skeptical Theism, aka, "mysterious ways". God does bad things or allows bad things to happen in order to prevent worse things, or in order to provoke response that is even more good.
Augustinian Theodicy, aka, "chain-email-albert-einstein-mic-drop". God does not allow bad things to happen, because "bad" does not exist. What we experience as "evil" is actually merely the absence of the good.
A few items further down the list, the writer gets to
Pandeism. It's no secret that I from time to time go searching the
Internet to see what is new in discourse on Pandeism, and whenever this list is copied and pasted by the next person, it pops up in my searches again. And of it, this writer writes:
Pandeism, aka, "you oughta try these mushrooms". Pandeism asserts that, in the act of constructing the Universe, God became the Universe.
He is still omnipresent and omniscient, but after the act of creation, he is no longer omnipotent, in the sense that he cannot create supernatural effects in the world.
Flat Deism, aka, The Clockwork God works effectively the same way.
One immediate
qualm would be that deity of Deism does not work in "effectively the same way" in the sense of "becoming" the Universe in its
construction. Perhaps the writer means that the deistic deity is the same simply in the sense of not intervening in the world, but there is no tradition in classical Deism of the Creator losing its omnipotence. It simply doesn't intervene in the world because it need not, everything having been put in proper working order at the outset. But the larger point of
contention is the "try these mushrooms" bit. It's pretty clearly not speaking to the Pandeist penchant for
vegetarianism, but to another
implication. There are two ways to interpret this -- one, as an invitation to
experimentation with
psychedelics so as to expand one's
mind, to reach the point of
comprehension of this position; the other as a suggestion that the concept itself is the
product of such experimentation on the part of its coiner. From the gist of the list as a whole, it feels more like the latter is intended.
I get that the writer is partaking of the time-honored tradition of coming up with snarkity-snark lines to characterize (or perhaps to
caricature) the dozen or so positions addressed, but it strikes me that not a high-level of thought went into coming up with this one -- after all, how is this apropos to Pandeism, in a a way that it isn't to any theistic faith? Especially considering the theory that a lot of "
revelations" of a
deity believed by the person to literally appearing and speaking to them could be accounted for as
psychedelic-influenced experiences. And indeed, the whole of the
Abrahamic project stems from a person purportedly receiving instructions from "a
burning bush that does not burn" -- but when you're standing in
proximity to "a burning bush that does not burn" and you think you hear the Voice of God speaking to you on things, your first conclusion ought to be to wonder what you're inhaling from that bush.
And so, if that is the intent, the equivalency drawn is something of a
psyop, a subtle jab to paint the careful
logic of Pandeism as "just tripping" compared with the other more mythcentric items listed. To be fair, Pandeism modernly often does get lumped in with various vestiges of "
New Age" thought -- though "New Age" it's not, having been coined hundreds of years ago, It was first explored by
German and
Italian philosophers, who can be imagined to have enjoyed a nice glass of
beer or
wine, but there is no trace of magic mushrooms in its history up to at least the mid-20th century. This is not at all intended as a criticism of the use of such substances as mind-expanders, simply an observation that they were not at the core of the development of Pandeism as a philosophy. But in the end it is in some sense surely better that Pandeism be mentioned with a sly aside (followed by, surprisingly, a reasonably accurate description of the argument regarding
Pandeism and the problem of good and evil itself, and not one of the usual
antipandeist misdirections) than to not be mentioned at all.
:D