E-027 SEP CTHE - God and Other Ultimates (Thesis 2 Excerpt)

Exact excerpt

On the other end of the spectrum from these varieties of theistic dualism, we find pantheism, the species of monism that takes the One to be God (a general model, 13). All monisms face a problem of unity : how are the many things in the world integrated enough to call them One? But pantheisms face an additional problem of divinity : even if all is truly One, does the One have what it takes to be God? Here we will focus on two contemporary pantheisms, both in Buckareff & Nagasawa (2016): what we might call a “one-thing” pantheism by Peter Forrest (2016) (a specific pantheism, model 14), where the One is a count noun (as in “a walrus is sleeping over there”), so the cosmos as a whole is One thing, and a “one-stuff” pantheism by Karl Pfeifer (2016) where the One is a mass term (as in “that little lamb is made of butter ”), so everything in the cosmos is made of the same kind of One-stuff (model 15). Unlike the Advaita pantheists who take the universe to be a mere appearance, Forrest and Pfeifer definitely take the universe to exist. So for them (and pantheists like them), the One will have to be identical to the universe, and the work is to show how the universe can be identical to God. In other words, this is not all builder no house as in Advaita; the builder is the house, and the builder-house is special enough to call it “God”. Forrest’s main move to effect this is to take the universe to be a conscious self, by way of a “properly anthropocentric” non-reductive physicalism: just as our brain processes correlate with our mental states, so also the universe’s physical processes correlate with universal mental states, which on the model involve a unity of consciousness and thus a sense of self. Forrest has a strong reply to the problem of unity here: the One is an integrated Self precisely because of what emerges from the processes of the many. But is the Self conscious in high enough ways to meet the problem of divinity, to count as God? Though Forrest does not argue like this, the resources for nascent perfections are here, such as omnipotence (the Self has all the power in the universe), omniscience (It could know the entire universe by biofeedback), good will for all (since to hurt any part of the universe is to hurt Itself) etc.—enough in theory to count as God in the classical or at least neoclassical sense. For Pfeifer’s view, instead of picturing the universe as a person, picture it as an “intentional field”, like an electromagnetic field except spread physical dispositional states across space instead of magnetic forces and electrons. Because those physical dispositional states have the same extension as intentional states, [ 39 ] intentional states are effectively spread everywhere too. That spreading means there is a kind of “panintentionalism”, and if the intentions are divine enough, then a panGodism, i.e., pantheism. So if Forrest is right, the universe is God itself, and if Pfeifer is right, the universe is made of God-stuff, this field of divine intentional states—both strong thoughts. How plausible, though? On the plus side, Forrest’s view is an instance of “cosmopsychism” (“the cosmos as a whole is phenomenal”, i.e., the Cosmos as a whole has conscious states) and Pfeifer’s an instance of “panpsychism” (“everything in the cosmos is phenomenal”, every particular in the cosmos is conscious), both of which are receiving growing attention in philosophy of mind since, e.g., cosmopsychism may solve physicalism’s problem of strong emergence and panpsychism’s combination problem at once (Nagasawa 2019, for more on these views and their link with Hinduism and Buddhism see, e.g., Shani 2015, Albahari 2019, Mathews 2019). However, even if either the cosmo- or panpsychic aspect of Forrest’s or Pfeifer’s views turns out to be true, the divine part seems doubtful for a reason Pfeifer enunciates: the kind of intentionality the universe would have within it (on Pfeifer’s view) or that would supervene on it (in Forrest’s view) seems likely to be at best the consciousness of an animal, or a comatose or schizoid human, etc.—not even close to the kind of consciousness that would make it count as God (see Pfeifer’s footnote on 2016: 49).
 
In the middle, between the theistic dualisms and the pantheisms, stand the merotheisms and the panentheisms (two general kinds of models, 16 and 17, again, species coming). As indicated above, the merotheisms are rare, the “odd bird” idea that God is in the world, but the world goes beyond God. Though the term “merotheism” was coined only recently by Paul Draper for his own view (2019: 160), merotheisms have been around well before, for example, in divine emergence theories such as Samuel Alexander’s (1920, a specific model 18) on which the world is metaphysically ultimate and God arises in it. [ 40 ] So on the metaphor, the house comes first, then God grows within it. Alexander, for instance, thinks the rock-bottom reality is space-time, and that when “patterns” or “groupings” of it become complex enough, matter comes to evolve in it, then life, then mind and then deity (257). The universe now is at mind, so we are waiting for deity to emerge, not from small “groupings” of things as with the other levels, but from the universe as a whole. Because things can think only about the things below themselves in the hierarchy, we cannot know what deity will be like when it comes (Thomas 2016: 258)—a nice way to explain why God is ineffable and unknowable, albeit one that gives no (other) content to say why Alexander’s “deity” should count as God. In contrast to the emergence merotheisms, Draper (2019) offers a sheer “meros” one (model 19), in which nature, instead of growing God, always has God as one proper part. Specifically, nature is composed of two parts which are both metaphysically ultimate: fundamental matter, and fundamental mind. So what there is not only all the familiar material stuff but also one and only one immaterial mind, i.e., God—“the single subject of all phenomenally conscious experiences”, located in and coextensive with space (2019: 163). Assuming that minds are the source of value, this one mind is the fundamental “source of all the value there is”, and hence is axiologically ultimate (2019: 163). Interestingly, just like prisms immersed in sunlight naturally diffract the electromagnetic spectrum (2019: 167, originally from William James), our brains, which are with everything else immersed in this omnipresent universal mind, naturally diffract what we might think of as the divine spectrum—displaying aspects of the universal consciousness by generating one of its “multiple streams”, “making use” of it for our own ends, tuning in to it in mystical experiences, etc. (2019: 163, 170). So brains don’t produce consciousness—they tap into it—and God doesn’t make the universe or emerge in it—God is the mental part of it that gives it value, and gives us a hope for a form of life after death because the consciousness that runs through our brains and that we mistakenly call our own continues to live on after the brain dies as the aspect of the enduring universal consciousness it always was. This hope secures some soteriological ultimacy: though it makes sense to mourn our deaths, we should “not despair” (2019: 170) since, if we ally ourselves with our consciousnesses, we are even after death still what we always were, an aspect of the mental fundamental reality, as Shankara and Ramakrishna and others would tell us.
 
Panentheistic models of God (on which the world is in God but God goes beyond the world) have been popular for millennia, to the point that John Cooper calls them “the other God of the Philosophers” in the title of his book on panentheism (Cooper 2006, a general model, #20 in this entry). There are literally too many panentheistic models of God to count, from a star-studded list of historical thinkers including Plato, Pseudo-Dionysius, Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Kant, Hegel, Peirce and more, with a resurgence in the last decade owing at least in part to Yujin Nagasawa and Andrei Buckareff’s Pantheism and Panentheism Project (2017–19 [see Other Internet Resources ]). Though some complain that the “in” in panentheism is so ambiguous it is not obviously a single view (see Gasser 2019), Chad Meister suggests that the recent appeal of panentheism is a direct result of (1) some of the neoclassical revisions to the idea of God (more immanent, more passible, etc.) which can be explained by the world’s being in God, as well as (2) the advent of emergentist theories in science which make room not only for the emergence merotheisms sketched above (on which God emerges from the world) but also for their converse, the emergence panentheisms (on which the world emerges from God), among other reasons (Meister 2017: section 4).
 
Hartshorne’s process theology is a great example of the first impulse Meister identifies (so it is a specific panentheism, model 21). Hartshorne’s process view begins with Whitehead’s metaphysics from Process and Reality —with the idea that the world is dynamic, not static, and indeed that the fundamental units are events, “actual occasions”, not substances, which
 
do not endure through a tiny bit of time unchanged but [take] a tiny bit of time to become…concrete (“concresence”, Cobb & Griffin 1976: 15)
 
and which are thus dynamic all the way down. Hartshorne then places this dynamic world of events in God, by taking a page from Ramanuja’s book and saying that all of it—this “totality of individuals as a physical or spatial whole is God’s body, the Soul of which is God ” (Hartshorne 1984: 94, quoted in Meister 2017: section 5, italics added)—a move which cements his view as a panentheism, since the world is literally in God, but God, as Soul of the world, goes beyond the world. The practical pay dirt of the view is that, in the same way we feel our bodies, so also God as the Soul of the world feels the world—feels every last “drop of experience” as Whitehead says, every last bit of change happening in every last actual occasion. Moreover, just as we respond to what we feel in our bodies, so also God responds to each felt occasion, and in that instant does two things: runs through a catalog of all possible next occasions, next moves as it were, and then “lures the world forward” with suggestions for the best next moves to actualize in the next occasion. The world can “listen” or not to these suggestions as the next occasion concresces, and then God will regroup again, moment after moment after moment. This is the dynamic process of perfecting—from the world to God back to the world again—which gives process theology its name, and makes it a kind of “becoming-perfect-being” theology.