A Pandeism thread

Recently came across Pandeism.info - I've glanced at pandeism but don't know much about it so figured a thread might be worthwhile.

Pandeism is the only theology compatible with modern science. It is the theory that the Universe began when the Divine Being then existing created the Universe from its own Self, and thus ceased to exist as an integrated conscious entity. The consciousness of the original Divine Being disintegrated at the moment of creation and subsequently exists as innumerable conscious fragments. The process of creation may be conceived of dramatically as the explosion of the Divine Being at the time of the Big Bang thirteen to twenty billion years ago.

According to the theory of pandeism, the consciousness of the original Divine Being gave rise to the laws of physics which governed the subsequent development of the Universe. The idea is that there is no conscious personal God supervising the Universe and its inhabitants, but there is a kind of inbuilt computer program which has guided its evolution. There is considerable scientific evidence to indicate that the Universe was “fine-tuned” to eventually produce the conditions necessary for the evolution of life. The sceptical scientist Stephen Hawking wrote: “The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Dogmatic atheism is unable to produce a satisfactory explanation for the evolution of life and the presence of conscious beings in the Universe. Conventional monotheism, on the other hand, has failed to show evidence for the existence of a conscious personal God, and is not able to explain how such a God would have created a world in which there is so much suffering and evil. Attempts to cast the blame on a hypothetical progenitor named Adam are no longer credible. Pandeism is the most plausible explanation we have for the evolution of conscious beings in this Universe.

Panentheism or pandeism?

It is my contention that panentheism, unlike pandeism, cannot solve the problem of evil. The problem of evil refers to the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil with an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God. An argument from evil attempts to show that the co-existence of evil and such a God is unlikely or impossible.

In considering the problem of evil with reference to pantheism, we need to be clear about what we mean by pantheism. There may be some pantheists who consider the pantheist God to be a “person”, which view would entail a problem of evil similar to that faced by Christian theism. That view of pantheism, however, is not one held by the majority of modern pantheists. Pandeism, as I understand it, precludes the existence of a “personal god”. The divine being who existed at the time of the Big Bang, whatever its prior nature may have been and about which we can only speculate, disintegrated at the moment of creation and now exists only as scattered finite conscious entities. These finite conscious entities may commit acts of evil, but neither pandeism nor the view of pantheism held by the majority postulates an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God currently existing. The problem of evil therefore does not arise.

Panentheism, as I stated earlier, accepts the existence of a God who is transcendent as well as immanent, and thus faces the same problem of evil as Christian theism. Books have been written by theologians like Alvin Plantinga which claim to explain away the problem of evil, but I am not convinced. (Plantinga, Alvin (1977). God, Freedom, and Evil)