Questions About Other Gods – Part 2
| By: Dr. Norman Geisler; ©2000 |
| Dr. Geisler continues this series by looking at how Deists and Pantheists view God, the world, evil, and values. |
Contents
Questions About Other Gods—Part Two
(from Dr. Geisler’s book When Skeptics Ask, Victor Books, 1990)
Deism—What if God Made the World and Then Left it Alone?
Deists hold a view of God very much like the Christian view, except they don’t think God performs miracles—ever. They agree that God made the world, but He just lets it run on natural principles. He oversees human history, but He doesn’t intervene. They might compare God to a watchmaker who made the watch, wound it up, and then left it alone to run down.
Springing out of the eighteenth-century enlightenment, deists put reason above revelation (which is a miracle). Some famous deists include Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson used his deistic views to cut all of the miracles from the Bible. His Gospel of John ends in chapter 19 with the words, “Now, in the place where He was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never a man yet laid. There they laid Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed.”[1] Everything after that (John 20-21) is about the Resurrection.
What Do Deists Believe About God?
Deists believe almost everything that a theist does about God, except that they don’t believe in miracles. They believe He is beyond the world, personal, all-good, all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing. They even pray to Him. However, they believe that God never specially intervenes in the world to help mankind. Since this also means that Jesus was not God (that would be a miracle), there is no reason for them to believe that God is a Trinity. The idea of three Persons in one nature (the Trinity) is to them just bad math. Because judgment would be an intervention of God in human affairs, some deists are universalists, claiming that no one will be judged.
What Do Deists Believe About the World?
Like theists, deists think the world was created by God and that we can know something about God by looking at the world. In fact, they say that the world is God’s only revelation. He has given us reason so that we might understand Him through the things He has made.
What Do Deists Believe About Evil?
Deists agree that man’s actions are the source of evil. Most deists recognize an evil principle at work within man. Some blame evil on the abuse or neglect of using reason to rule one’s life. For most deists, then, man will face either reward or judgment in the afterlife.
What Do Deists Believe About Values?
They hold that all moral laws are grounded in nature; however, since reason is the only means of knowing moral laws, there is disagreement as to what laws are binding and how universal they are. Some recognize the human desire for happiness as the single moral principle which guides all actions. All specific moral laws would then be applied differently in different circumstances as reason dictates.
How Should We Respond to Deism?
Deism is inconsistent on its most basic premise. Deists believe in the biggest miracle of all (Creation) but reject what they consider to be all the little miracles. If God was good enough and powerful enough to create the world, isn’t it reasonable to assume that He could and would take care of it too? If He can make something out of nothing, then He can certainly make something out of something; as for example, Jesus made wine out of water. Unlike the seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, scientists today do not consider natural laws to be universal or absolute. They describe what we see in nature, but they do not dictate what ought to be.
Pantheism—What if the World is God?
Eastern religions have long been the seat of pantheistic thought, but this philosophy is now coming to the West through the New Age movement in the form of yoga, meditation, macrobiotic diets, and channeling. The central focus of pantheism is that all is God and God is all. In addition to Hinduism, Taoism, and some forms of Buddhism, pantheism is also the view of Western religions such as Christian Science, Unity, Scientology, and Theosophy. Even some early Greek philosophers were pantheistic, as were later European thinkers like G.W.F. Hegel and Benedict de Spinoza. This worldview has recently been popularized in the Star Wars films.
What Do Pantheists Believe About God?
God, to a pantheist, is the absolute being that unites all things. Some say that God is simply above multiplicity, others that He manifests Himself in many forms, and still others that He is a force which permeates all things. However, they agree that He is an it, not a person. Also, it is so completely different from anything we know that we cannot know anything about it. So reason is of no benefit in understanding ultimate reality. One Hindu Scripture says,
- Him [Brahman] the eye does not see, nor the tongue express, nor the mind grasp. Him we neither know nor are able to teach. Different is he from the known, and… from the unknown.
- He truly knows Brahman who knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks he knows, knows not. The ignorant think that Brahman is known, but the wise know him to be beyond knowledge.[2]
The condition for coming to know anything about God (or the Tao) is to realize that truth is found in contradictions (in Taoism, this is called the Tao). So one must meditate to empty the mind of reason and then contemplate such questions as, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” These questions, which have no answer except the question itself, are designed to open the mind to the realization that atman (the world, multiplicity, evil, illusion) is Brahman (God, unity, good, reality). Hence, God is all and all is God. Man exists to realize that he too is God.
Though not known by reason, the essence of God is that He is mind. Hence, there can be no material existence, because mind is all. (What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.) As D.T. Suzuki put it, “This Nature [i.e., man’s spiritual nature] is the Mind, and the Mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the Way, and the Way is Zen.”[3] Likewise, the third-century A.D. philosopher Plotinus said that the first emanation from the Absolute One was Nous (Latin for mind), wherein God thinks about Himself and all multiplicity flows from there.
What Do Pantheists Believe About the World?
The world was not created by God, but eternally emanates from Him. Theists say that God created from nothing (ex nihilo), but pantheists say that God brings forth the world from Himself (ex Deo). Of course, some pantheists (such as most Hindus and Mary Baker Eddy) say that the world does not really exist at all. It is illusion (maya). In order to overcome the illusion of matter, pain, and evil, we must learn to believe that all is God, including ourselves, and the illusion will have no grip on us.
Because God is not beyond the world but in it, there can be no miracles in the sense of supernatural events. There can be supernormal events, though, such as levitation, prophecy through channeling, healings, and ability to resist pain (like walking on hot coals). These things are not done by any power outside the universe, however. They are accomplished by people realizing their divine potential and using the divine power all around them.
What Do Pantheists Believe About Evil?
“Here also is found… the cardinal point in Christian Science, that matter and evil (including sin, disease, death) are unreal.”[4] That is the consensus of pantheism. If God is all, and God is good, then anything evil must not really exist. After all, if it existed, it would be God. On a higher level, however, God is beyond good and evil. Those are rational opposites that cannot exist in the Absolute One. Many of the images for God in Hinduism are ugly and evil to demonstrate that truth. The goddess Kali the Destroyer is also the symbol of motherhood. The truth of her being is that she is both kind and cruel and, at the same time, neither kind nor cruel. God is beyond good and evil.
What Do Pantheists Believe About Values?
Pantheist writings are filled with moral appeals to goodness and self-sacrifice. However, these only apply to the lower levels of spiritual attainment. Once an initiate moves beyond these levels, his goal is to achieve union with God and “he has no further concern with moral laws.”[5] If he is to be like God, then he too must be beyond good and evil. Ethical conduct is a means for spiritual growth. There is no absolute basis for morality.
The following is a typical statement about pantheistic values:
- …Every action [meaning any kind of action], under certain circumstances and for certain people, may be a stepping-stone to spiritual growth, if it is done in a spirit of detachment. All good and evil are relative to the individual point of growth…. But, in the highest sense, there can be neither good nor evil.[6]
How Should We Respond to Pantheism?
Pantheism requires absolute devotion of its followers and it provides an overall view of all reality. Also it rightly stresses the fact that we cannot place the restrictions of our limited language on God. However, the basic claim of pantheism is self-defeating.
For example, the claim that reason does not apply to ultimate reality is also self-defeating. The statement, “Reason can tell us nothing about God,” is either a reasonable statement (meaning it is either true or false, for that is the essence of all logic) or it is not. On the face of it, it appears to be a reasonable statement that reason gives us no information about God—except that it just did.
It just told us that we can’t use reason. So we have to use reason to deny the use of reason, which makes logic an inescapable reality. If the pantheist avoids this by saying that it was not a reasonable statement, then we have no reason to believe it. It is simply gibberish on the order of a two-year-old’s singsong.
Further, pantheists believe that there is one absolute, unchanging reality (God). They also believe that we can come to realize that we are God. However, if I come to realize something, then I have changed. But God cannot change. Therefore, anyone who “comes to realize that he is God” isn’t! The unchanging God always knew that He is God.
Also, we must ask why the illusion of matter seems so real to us. If life in the material world is a dream of our own creation, why are we all having such a bad dream? Why are physical relations still needed to produce children? Why do devout Christian Scientists, who deny the reality of matter and renounce pain, still suffer and die in childbirth? (The childbirth sanitarium in Los Angeles was closed by the health department because of the number of deaths that occurred there.) Even devout pantheists who have supposedly mastered life in the world still live with physical limitations like eating, or moving from here to there. Mark Twain pointed out this dissonance of proverb and practice in his treatise on Christian Science:
- “Nothing exists but Mind?”
- “Nothing,” she answered. “All else is substanceless, all else is imaginary.”
- I gave her an imaginary check, and now she is suing me for substantial dollars. It looks inconsistent.[7]
The lack of moral foundation in pantheism is quite unsatisfying. It not only leaves one with no rule to guide his actions, but actually promotes cruelty in the name of spiritual expansion. This is seen quite graphically in the traditional lack of social concern in India. If people suffer because of their karma (the law of cause and effect that determines destiny, not to be confused with moral guilt), then to help that individual would be working against God. It would stop him from working off his own karmic debt, and it would show that I am still attached to the world rather than indifferent to it. Hence, it is better to ignore all suffering than do anything to alleviate it. Action beyond good and evil equates evil with goodness.
Notes
- ↑ Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Bible, ed. by Douglas Lurton (New York: Wilfred Funck, 1943), p. 132.
- ↑ “Kena,” The Upanishads: Breath of Eternal, trans. by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester (New York: Mentor Books, 1957), pp. 30-31.
- ↑ D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, ed. by William Barrett (Garden City, NJ.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 88.
- ↑ Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings (Boston: Trustees under the Will of Mary Baker G. Eddy, 1924), p. 27.
- ↑ Swami Prabhavananda, The Spiritual Heritage of India (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1963), p. 65.
- ↑ Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, “Appendix II: The Gita and War,” in Bhagavad Gita (Bergerfleld, N.J.: The New American Library, Inc., 1972), p. 140.
- ↑ Mark Twain, Christian Science (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, n.d.), p. 38.
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