I had an interesting experience yesterday. I posted my first Thketch, pretty sure that nobody would notice. Within an hour I had a response–a really BIG response–from someone who pretty much shredded each piece of my video. The commenter proposes PanDeism as the best alternative. You can read the rebuttal here.
Any thoughts?
I haven’t watched your Thketch yet, but his rebuttal stands on it’s own in most ways.
Here is my first thought: he quickly disqualifies the Bible as having any role in the debate, leaving it at the level of competing assertions. Yet if true, the biblical record quickly answers a lot of his points/objections. The reality that God has self revealed in a direct way and His interventions in history — especially at the incarnation — are huge. Jesus is not just a bridge like a Buddha. He is God in flesh, uniquely conceived, and not just an avatar. This concept is not even minimally discussed.
Now I will go watch the vids.
Interesting stuff. How did you respond to that?
There is a reason that the validity of scriptural/revelational assertions are “not even minimally discussed” is simple and straightforward. It is that all of them are fully accounted for, and so superseded by, the pandeistic model itself. Naturally it could be claimed that the Old Testament, or the Qur’an, or the Vedas, Book of Mormon, New Testament, Popol Vuh, any one of those would be “huge” and would answer this question or that “if true” — but this is where Pandeism rises above all of these, for Pandeism answers those questions no matter whether any book is true, and it does so for all the books out there.
Now, I take it as a given that were there empirical truth in any one scripture, this would be perceptible to the truth-seekers abiding in any corner of the world. If for example the Vedas were objectively “true” then all rational people to whom this was explained would quickly come around to believing in the truth of the Vedas; and the same holds true for the Bible and Qur’an and the Book of Mormon and the rest. But, obviously, none of these books is true enough to persuade any substantial number of adherants to any other of them. And so you have Muslims and Hindus who’ve studied the Bible and find it unpersuasive; Jews and Mormons who believe parts of the Bible but find the NT account lacking in some respect; Christians and Hindus who’ve studied the Qur’an and found it unpersuasive. All of which undergirds the proposition that each of these traditions offers something only partial, a glimpse of a higher connecting truth but never that truth itself. And this eventuality is entirely consistent with all scriptures and revelations and visions and oracles and prophecies spiritual dreams and so on and so on simpy being unconscious manifestations — even as extremly complex and involved as they may seem to our comparably limited minds — misinterpreted and miscomprehended through the narrow, biased funnel of the human brain.
And that is how Pandeism fully accounts.
I have posted my above response as a separate blog post at http://pandeism.blogspot.com/2012/02/counterarguer-has-raised-some-issues-in.html, so that we may carry forth discussion as needed, without encumbering this page and where I will be more likely to see any refutations which may be forthcoming. So have at it!!