Pandeism
[12] It has also been suggested that "many religions may classify themselves as pantheistic" but "fit more essentially under the description of panentheistic or pandeistic",[13] or that "pandeism is seen as a middle path between pantheism and deism".
[18] 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".
[22] He also found varieties of pandeism in spiritual traditions from ancient China[23] (especially with respect to Taoism as expressed by Lao-Tze),[24] India (especially in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita),[25] and among various Greek and Roman philosophers.
[28] 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".
[34] 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".
[36] Weinstein thought that 13th-century Catholic thinker Bonaventure—who championed the Platonic doctrine that ideas do not exist in rerum natura, but as ideals exemplified by the Divine Being, according to which actual things were formed—showed strong pandeistic inclinations.
[40] Several historians and theologians, including Weinstein, found that pandeism was strongly expressed in the teachings of Giordano Bruno, who envisioned a deity which had no particular relation to one part of the infinite universe more than any other, and was immanent, as present on Earth as in the Heavens, subsuming in itself the multiplicity of existence.
[45] Lutheran theologian Otto Kirn criticized as overbroad Weinstein's assertions that such historical philosophers as John Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Moses Mendelssohn, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing all were pandeists or leaned towards pandeism.
[48] In 1838, an anonymous treatise, Il legato di un vecchio ai giovani della sua patria ("The Legacy of an Old Man to the Young People of his Country"), was published, in which the author, discussing the theory of religion presented by Giambattista Vico a century earlier, speculated that when man first saw meteor showers, "his robust imagination recognized the effects as a cause, then deifying natural phenomena, he became a Pandeist, an instructor of Mythology, a priest, an Augur".
[8] Literary critic Hayden Carruth said of 18th-century figure Alexander Pope that it was "Pope's rationalism and pandeism with which he wrote the greatest mock-epic in English literature"[50] According to American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, "later Unitarian Christians (such as William Ellery Channing), transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), writers (such as Walt Whitman) and some pragmatists (such as William James) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world".
[59] In 1896, historian Gustavo Uzielli described the world's population as influenced "by a superhuman idealism in Christianity, by an anti-human nihilism in Buddhism, and by an incipient but growing pandeism in Indian Brahmanism".
[61] Twenty years earlier, the Peruvian scholar and historian Carlos Wiesse Portocarrero had written in an essay titled Philosophical Systems of India that in that country, "Metaphysics is pandeistic and degenerates into idealism".
[69] Wang Junkang additionally writes of Ye Mei's descriptions of "the worship of reproduction under Pandeism, as demonstrated in romantic songs sung by village people to show the strong impulse of vitality and humanity and the beauty of wildness".
[70] It has been noted that author Shen Congwen has attributed a kind of hysteria that "afflicts those young girls who commit suicide by jumping into caves-"luodong" 落洞" to "the repressive local military culture that imposes strict sexual codes on women and to the influence of pan-deism among Miao people", since "for a nymphomaniac, jumping into a cave leads to the ultimate union with the god of the cave".
[71] Weinstein similarly found the views of 17th century Japanese Neo-Confucian philosopher Yamazaki Ansai, who espoused a cosmology of universal mutual interconnectedness, to be especially consonant with pandeism.
[74] A 1906 editorial by a Unitarian minister in the Chattanooga Daily Times stated that Jesus, "who in exultant faith said 'I and the Father are one', was a Pandeist, a believer in the identification of the universe and all things contained therein with Deity".
[77] According to literary critic Martin Lüdke, early Twentieth-Century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa expressed a pandeistic philosophy, especially in the writings made under the pseudonym of Alberto Caeiro.
[81]: 348 Hartshorne accepted the label of panentheism for his beliefs, declaring that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations".
[81]: 348 Calvinist scholar Rousas John Rushdoony sharply criticized the Catholic Church in his 1971 The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy, writing, "The position of Pope Paul came close to being a pan-Deism, and pan-Deism is the logical development of the virus of Hellenic thought", and further that "a sincere idealist, implicitly pan-Deist in faith, deeply concerned with the problems of the world and of time, can be a Ghibelline pope, and Dante's Ghibellines have at last triumphed".
Literary critic Dan Schneider wrote of Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land that Jubal Harshaw's belief in his own free will, was one "which Mike, Jill, and the Fosterites misinterpret as a pandeistic urge, 'Thou art God!
[85] In a 1990 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Lakers coach and sometime-spiritual author Phil Jackson, describing his religious views, said "I've always liked the concept of God being beyond anything that the human mind can conceive.
[86] Jim Garvin, a Vietnam veteran who became a Trappist monk in the Holy Cross Abbey of Berryville, Virginia, described his spiritual position as "'pandeism' or 'pan-en-deism', something very close to the Native American concept of the all- pervading Great Spirit".
[87] Pastor Bob Burridge of the Geneven Institute for Reformed Studies wrote that: "If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be 'God in motion'.
[88] Author William C. Lane contends that pandeism is a logical derivation of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's proposition that ours is the best of all possible worlds.
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",[97] 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".
[98] Another Christian theologian, Graham Ward, insists that "Attention to Christ and the Spirit delivers us from pantheism, pandeism, and process theology",[99] and Catholic author Al Kresta observes: "New Age" cosmologies reject materialism, naturalism and physicalism.
[103] Resurgence of interest in pandeism was such that by 2022, Gorazd Andrejč and Victoria Dos Santos, in their introduction to the MDPI Religions special issue, "Religion, Science and Technology in Pantheism, Animism and Paganism", wrote: "While pantheism and its 'cousins' (panentheism, pandeism) have experienced some vibrant development in this field in recent years, modern animist and pagan perspectives have had less critical attention in the same".
