Pandeism is the belief that God chose to wholly become our Universe, imposing principles at this Becoming that have fostered the lawful evolution of multifarious structures, including life and consciousness. This article describes and defends a particular form of pandeism: living God pandeism (LGP). On LGP, our Universe inherits all of God's unsurpassable attributes—reality, unity, consciousness, knowledge, intelligence, and effectiveness—and includes as much reality, conscious and unconscious, as is possible consistent with retaining those attributes. God and the Universe, together “God-and-Universe,” (...) is also eternal into the future and the past. The article derives testable hypotheses from these claims and shows that the evidence to date confirms some of these while falsifying none. Theism cannot be tested in the same way. (shrink)

The argument of this article is that, philosophically, there are but three broad conceptual models that Western thought employs in thinking about the meaning of God. At the level of greatest generality, these are the models known as classical theism, pantheism, and panentheism. The essay surveys and updates these three conceptual models in light of recent writings, finds more flaws in classical theism and panentheism than in pantheism, and suggests a feminist response to each.

The new scientific cosmology which has emerged over the past forty years seems to be forcing philosophers and theologians alike to rethink the traditional theistic conception of God in which God is pictured as a First Cause designer of the universe in favor of what Joseph Campbell more mystically calls an immanent ground of being, transcendent of conceptualization. The central thrust of these reflections is that we encounter that immanent ground of being through the experience of wonder and awe. Since (...) actual experience is involved, then a phenomenological description of exactly what it is in the new cosmology (and the universe) which induces such wonder is possible. The basic thesis is that we experience wonder in the face of the remarkable and transcendent (beyond finite predicates and understanding) coming-into-being of nature over twelve to fifteen billion years. Wonder is the human reaction to and appreciation for the astounding fact that nature and all of its parts actually are. It is; we are; such is the ineffable beyond in our midst. (shrink)

An examination of the history of the development of the philosophical issues in the West indicates that since the Demiurge (Demiourgos) of Plato in_ the Timaeus_ created the sensible world in imitation of the intelligible archetypes, failing at the same time, to overcome some necessities, until the beginning of the seventeenth century and the emergence of the Cartesian anthropocentric conception of reality, the common question most often raised by modern philosophers, in their discussions about the nature of God, man and (...) universes in this: What is Justice? Is God just? Was man created in the best form? Is the existing world, the best among all the possible worlds? The answer to these questions among the Christian thinkers before Leibniz (1646- 1716) was mostly based on the principles of dogmatic theology. Even in the fifteenth century the question as to how God's providence and foreknowledge could be reconciled with the human free choice was the pivot and axis of most philosophical and theological problems. In addition, the progress of natural sciences and the emergence of necessary causal laws in the domain of the various sciences impaired the human freedom of choice.Spinoza and Leibniz, each in his own peculiar way, endeavored to prove that the human free choice is compatible with the causal determinism required. By science. In Leibniz, God wills the most harmonious and compossible worlds. In the present article, prior to Leibniz's rational justifications of the principle of "the best possible World", his conception of the world as based on the principle of the pre-established harmony (in the framework of the monads ), along with some other related issues are analyzed. (shrink)

A common view among nontheists combines the de jure objection that theism is epistemically unacceptable with agnosticism about the de facto objection that theism is false. Following Plantinga, we can call this a “proper” de jure objection—a de jure objection that does not depend on any de facto objection. In his Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga has produced a general argument against all proper de jure objections. Here I first show that this argument is logically fallacious (it makes subtle probabilistic fallacies (...) disguised by scope ambiguities), and proceed to lay the groundwork for the construction of actual proper de jure objections. (shrink)