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CHAPTER 1

Divine Gift

Amy Perry

Amy Perry is a transcendental poet from California, United States. She has been featured in Pandeism: An Anthology and has graduated to co-editor of this second volume. Although writing is her greatest passion, she also enjoys gardening, cooking, yoga, learning, and good conversation. She enjoys experiencing life as a poem and invites you to do the same.

Tear into my passion's furnace,
Softly.
You've wrapped fire with satin,
And fastened Your soul to my own.
The shadow,
Always grasping
, Tossing what I've known.
Red ribbon surprise.
You've spoken to me in depths I still have yet to find.
An illumined gift Of higher divinity,
Cloaked In carnations casing

Unconditional love-like virginity.
Our gift has been taken,
Set ablaze.
Transient Phoenix.
Pandeism remix.
Awaiting a perfect collection Of circumstance,
A mean mix Of an elaborate blessing Not ready to be received;
A tease Of what should and cannot be.
I opened my gift for a holiday morning On a most dark and cold night.
And still, I feel the warmth.
And still, I feel the light.

Thoughts on Deism and Pandeism

Varadaraja V. Raman

Varadaraja V. Raman is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Born into a Brahmin Tamil family in Calcutta, India, he soon earned the reputation of being a multifaceted transcultural voyager, and an able expounder on matters both scientific and philosophical.

In Deism our reason and our belief become happily united. The wonderful structure of the universe, and everything we behold in the system of the creation, prove to us, far better than books do, the existence of a God, and at the same time proclaim His attributed. Thomas Paine

I. Polysophy

Over the centuries thinkers in all cultures have reflected on various aspects of human thought and condition. Their serious reflections constitute what we call philosophies. This multiplicity is what I call polysophy.

The truth content of scientific propositions are governed by criteria of consistency, coherence, and verifiability/falsifiability. They are not the opinions of individuals. The strength of philosophical positions rests on reasoned arguments, cultural context, and emotional appeal: they often originate from individuals, but may spread to form schools of thought.

Scientific results have had significant impacts on human civilization. Philosophical reflections have influenced human culture subtly and palpably. Both science and philosophy affect our worldviews in meaningful and substantial ways.

II. On Philosophy

Philosophy is as ancient in human culture as thinking and wondering. The etymology of the word in most European languages is from Greek, meaning love of wisdom or knowledge. Knowledge is what we know; wisdom is the capacity to use knowledge for individual and collective good.

Hebrew and Russian use the same word for it as English. Arab thinkers coined the word falsifa for philosophy. In Sanskrit the word for philosophy is darshana which means a view or vision of something significant. In my language Tamil one calls it tattuvam which means essence. Combining these we may regard philosophy as love for views on the essence of things.

The world, to all appearances, consists of gross matter, subtle energy, and throbbing life forms. Life is a series of fleeting experiences. For humans these include joy and sorrow, hope and despondency. Beyond sensory titillations we have a mind that is capable of extraordinary feats. One of these is reflection on what is experienced. Philosophy is serious reflection on any aspect of human life. In simple terms, then, the moment we go beyond just reacting to sensory inputs and begin to comment on any experience we are philosophizing. One is philosophizing even when one makes fun of philosophy with answers like: What is matter? No matter. What is mind? Never mind. Pascal put it this way: Se moquer de la philosophie, c'est vraiment philosopher: Ridiculing philosophy is really philosophizing.

No thinking person can avoid philosophizing now and then. This makes every person a philosopher of sorts. I say of sorts because some do it at a loftier level than others. Many have seen the Niagara Falls, the Himalayas, and other natural wonders. Most people exclaim, "How beautiful!" or "How magnificent!" But some write a poem on the experience. Many people witness quarrels and rivalries, broken love and exploitation. But a few turn them into novels or epics.

So it is with philosophy. Reflection on any aspect of human thought and experience is sublimated to serious philosophy when it ascends to higher regions of thought. A sandwich at a burger-joint is food as much as a gourmet banquet, but there is a difference. You may tell a despondent friend, "Come on, don't say life is worthless!" But the poet says, "Tell me not in mournful numbers life is but an empty dream!" So it is between the simple exclamation, "We can't be sure of anything!" and a treatise on Agnosticism. There is a difference between a limpid airless balloon and a full blown colorful one soaring in the air.

III. Attitudes to Other Religions: A Personal View

Many decades ago, my father initiated me into the recital of Sanskrit shlokas. But he also wanted me to learn about other religions. So he sent me to a Jesuit school for two years. Here I studied Latin and took a course in Moral Science (Bible study). My father taught me that to be a good Hindu I should be respectful of other religions.

A few years later, in a biography of Sri Ramakrishna I read that when the saint was in his mid-thirties, a Hindu Sufi introduced him to Islam. Ramakrishna repeated the name of Allah many times, wearing a white Arab garb. The Hindu icons vanished from his psyche. He is said to have experienced the Prophet Muhammad within himself. Some years later, he meditated on Madonna and Child, which resulted in his feeling of merger with Christ.

In my adult life, I began to approach religions from cultural-historical perspectives, and read with care not only the scriptures of the major religions, but also the lives of saintly personages in various traditions. It became clear to me that the well-intentioned thesis that all religions say the same thing is really not true. Not even all the sects within a religion say the same thing. Then, were personages like Ramakrishna, Guru Nanak, and Ramana Maharishi fooled into thinking that all religions are the same?

In an effort to find an answer to this question, I launched a project for myself many years ago. Every week I visited a place of worship of a different denomination, often accompanied by my wife. Fortunate circumstances in my life have taken me to various churches, synagogues, mosques, and also to Buddhist, Bahai, and Hindu temples: mosques in Cairo and Algiers, synagogues in Curaçao and Penfield, churches in Vienna and Seoul, Bahai temples in Wilmette and Delhi, Buddhist temples in Bangkok and Los Angeles, gurudwaras in Calcutta and Rochester, Hindu temples in Kanya Kumari and Kalighat, and to many other places of worship. I even spent an hour at a worship center in Lapland.

Everywhere, I participated in the collective spiritual mode, not as an observer, but as one who wanted to feel a little of the spirit that moves people to piety. These were enormously rewarding experiences. I know very well that not all religions say the same thing: a well-intentioned, but naïve generalization that has rightly come under attack. Unfortunately such attacks come, not always from people who have the most generous heart towards, or respect for others, but more often than not from religious chauvinists who fear that any such identification would bring their own religion from the pedestal which they feel is its due. Every frog within every religious well is always croaking that not all the wells contain the pure and clear water that its own well does.

My own conclusion is that Ramakrishna wasn't at all deluded, as some of his critics suggest. I interpret his truth to mean that all religions have the potential to give an aspirant genuine spiritual fulfillment. Everywhere I went during a worship service, I saw an outpouring of reverence and devotion for the Unfathomable Mystery visualized and invoked in different languages and modes, through different symbols and gestures. Even with all the atrocities and abominations perpetrated in the name of religions by brutal bigots and deluded devotees, something sublime and spiritual is infused in the hearts and minds of people who are prayerful in a place of worship. Of this I became certain.

After my experiment, I was more convinced than ever of the wisdom in the lines:

akâsât patitam toyam yatha gacchadi sâgaram sarvadeva namaskârah shrî kesavam pradigachadi.

As waters falling from the skies go back to the self-same sea Prostrations to all the gods return to the same Divinity.

IV. On the Differing Perspectives on God of Physicists and Biologists

There is much truth in the statement that biologists and physicists look upon the world (in its deeper aspects) in somewhat different ways. There are deep historical as well as epistemological reasons for this. But two broad conclusions we may draw from this fact of observation are that ultimately our statements about the world are interpretations, and that these interpretations are functions of our background, training, and cultural conditioning.

What science and objective inquiry try to accomplish, however inadequately, is to sort out these coloring factors from our appraisals, and come to as best an unencumbered-by-personal-constraints-as-possible set of conclusions as one possibly can.

In this context it is useful to recall what some historians of science have pointed out: In ancient Greek science there were three main paradigms of scientific inquiry: the organic (Aristotle), the mechanistic (Archimedes), and the magical/mathematical (Pythagoras/Plato) traditions.

With the rise of modern science in the 17th century, these survived in varying degrees. The magical tradition became fully mathematical, the mechanistic became dominant in model-building theories, and the organic virtually died in the context of physics. Indeed, soon even biology abandoned its organic roots, and was brought into the mechanistic fold.

The mechanistic model came into conflict with the Church first because its clockwork world was no longer geocentric as was taught in the traditional cosmology of Aristotle et al. Next, the confrontation was because the mechanistic model stripped the human being of the traditional soul of Pythagoras, the Church, et al.

In our own times, physicists are concerned largely with the non-sentient world, and see therein absolutely no sign of anything that normal living beings possess. But they do know that the universe functions with uncanny subservience to immutable laws. In this context, many of them have little difficulty in visualizing the universe as a whole as an entity functioning in accordance with some sort of an intelligent cosmic formula.

For biologists, on the other hand, it is all chemistry, and random mutations resulting in a variety of grown-up amoebas, with little evidence that life forms were specifically created by a Cosmic Creator on the sixth day of the week.

This, as I see it, is the primary difference between the physicist and the biologist when it comes to God-talk with respect to the universe: The physicist thinks of Intelligence, the biologist, of the Creator. Intelligence is tied to logic, mathematics, abstraction, law, and order, and is not incompatible with Physics or Science. The Creator brings to mind Scriptures, the Church, anthropomorphic God, etc., which it is difficult to reconcile with post-Galilean science.

V. On Deism and Pandeism

The world we experience has three extraordinary features. The first is the fact that it exists at all. There is absolutely no reason we can think of why it did happen: this apparently meaningless and purposeless Cosmos. After all, there are many things that just are not there: flying horses, conical roses, two integral cubes that add up to a third cube, let alone people who can sing in a hundred different tongues at the same time. Likewise, we could have had no world at all, an eternal no-space dimensionless void. But the fact remains that there does seem to be a world that all normal human beings (brains) experience for a while, and also rejoice and suffer in. This in itself is quite remarkable.

The next intriguing thing about the world is that we have absolutely no idea of how it came to be. True, many prophets and scriptures, wise men and fantasists in all cultures have told us how it all came about: from Chaos, from Nothingness, as an act of God, as the work of the architect P'an-Ku, as the hatching of the Golden Egg of Brahma, and so on. Ignoring all these ancient theories which have satisfied millions of people over millennia, modern physics has come up with its own answer to this question, using a number of technical terms and mathemagical formulas. They include Higgs bosons, symmetry breaking, and big bang. Higgs bosons refer to fundamental physical entities that, through mechanisms that can't be understood except through complex mathematics like special unitary groups and the like, adduced mass to otherwise massless entities. Through processes called symmetry breaking they ignited what has come to be known as the Big Bang: an extraordinarily creative conflagration that resulted in space and time, matter and energy, and all their stupendous consequences. The net effect of that initial grand outburst in an inconceivable void. That unimaginable infinity from the first tick of time provides us fleeting humans with so much wonder and splendor. We can only contemplate it with unbounded awe.

All this could well have happened by chance, sheer chance. Indeed many think so. However, what makes it difficult to trace our world to a mindless monstrous miracle of randomness is that the end product is not a cluttered heap of haphazard hotchpotch, but a fascinating dynamic process ruled by meticulously precise and quantitatively describable laws, like F = ma2, the equations of Maxwell, and E = mc. The working of the universe follows patterns that conform to partial differential equations and invariance principles. Not only that: the material components of the universe owe their existence and persistence, properties and propensities to incredibly precise values for certain modeling parameters such as the charge on the electron, strengths of fundamental forces, and the speed of light. Ever so slight deviations from these would have resulted in an altogether unimaginable different and perhaps lifeless cosmos.

Given all this, it is difficult to satisfy the curious mind by saying that it all happened helter-skelter, like sheer slot-machine slips. It does not seem like the result of random hits on the keyboard that would result in literary gibberish, or idle doodling by lawless loitering hands. Reckless coloration on canvass could at best cause a Jackson Pollock spray-painting, or perhaps even a Wassily Kandinsky kind of work. But a Raphael or a Rembrandt could not have risen from mindless meanderings of causeless eruptions. This intriguing circumstance has led many reflecting minds, not just to postulate, but to be quite certain that an Intelligent Creative Mind had consciously designed and expertly executed the mammoth project of cosmos-creation.

Given that reflecting minds are here on earth, it was natural for them to imagine that the Intelligent Creator (who came to be called God) had in mind not only Sun and Saturn, stars and stardust, but also, perhaps more importantly, human beings as an ultimate adornment to Creation. This led to the suspicion that God has always been immensely interested in our well-being, comfort, and happiness: an idea that was reinforced by the abundance of fruits and grains for our nourishment, beasts for carrying our burdens, as also birds and butterflies to add to our aesthetic delights.

But then, when humanity repeatedly experiences natural catastrophes from hurricanes and floods to earthquakes and epidemics, let alone innocent children dying and droughts causing famines, and unpleasant characters winning elections, some doubts begin to rise as to the constancy, if not dependability on Divine mercy and help. For the truly faithful, this did not matt er and it did not shake their faith in a caring and compassionate Creator.

Theologians and thinkers are as much concerned with logic and proof as with feelings and devotion. So some of them felt it was time to modify the view of God. They reasoned that while God did create the complex world such as it is, once He had done the job He let it function by itself. This view of God, which found full expression in the Western world in the eighteenth century while science and enlightenment were raging in the air, came to be called Deism. In other words, in the Deist view, God is like an artist who, after finishing his creative enterprise, just let it go to the museum, instead of constantly tinkering with it here and there to modify or make it better. He just lets the laws do the reshaping and the creation of new entities within the realm of the laws of nature. Perhaps — and this was not something the original Deists had in mind — he goes on to make another universe, imposing a different set of laws on it, then yet another, and so on. This idea should be compatible with the multiverse theory of our own times.

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Excerpted from "Pandeism"
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Copyright © 2018 Knujon Mapson and Amy Perry.
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