Showing posts with label pantheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pantheism. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Naturalism and lovability

  1. If naturalism is true, Stalin is not lovable.

  2. Everyone is lovable.

  3. So, naturalism is not true.

Here, by “lovable”, I don’t mean that it is possible to love the person, but that it is not inappropriate to do so.

Premise 2 follows the intuition that it is permissible for every parent to love their children. It also follows from the more controversial claim that everyone should love everyone.

The intuition behind premise 1 is something like this: Stalin’s actions were so horrible that the only plausible hypotheses on which he is lovable are that there is some deeply mysterious and highly valuable metaphysical fact about his being, such as that he is in the image and likeness of God, or that his Atman is Brahman, a fact incompatible with naturalism. For if all we have are the ordinary naturalistic goods in Stalin, these goods are easily outweighed by the horrors of his wickedness.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Pantheism and denial of divine simplicity

Pantheism presents this metaphysical picture of the world: The world consists of two kinds of things, namely God and his proper parts. Theists who deny divine simplicity then seem to be committed to the claim that while pantheism is actually false, its metaphysical picture is possibly false. For if God isn't simple, then had God not created anything, the world would have consisted of two kinds of things: God and his proper parts.

Monday, March 3, 2014

Pantheism and omnipresence

If a view falls short with respect to the main doctrine it's organized around, that view is seriously flawed. For instance, if Calvinism fell short with regard to sovereignty, it would be seriously flawed. For pantheism, the relevant doctrine is omnipresence. On its face, pantheism is designed to make omnipresence work out perfectly: if God is everything, then he is where anything is.

But is that enough for omnipresence? First, perhaps omnipresence should also imply that God is in the places where nothing other than God exists—in otherwise empty space. Whether pantheism can account for that perhaps depends on whether it's deflationary (God is nothing but everything) or inflationary (everything is God, in addition to what it ordinarily is, and there may be more to God than ordinary things—and hence in particular God might be where there is nothing ordinary). That said, perhaps this is not so serious. If substantivalism about space is false, then maybe there are no empty places, except in a manner of speaking.

More seriously, by making God be everything, God comes to be only partly present everywhere. Only a part of God is in this room where I am—a very small part and, at least on the deflationary variant, a very insignificant part. Yes, God is in the stone and the butterfly and the galaxy—but all of these are very small bits of God. Classical theists, however, have the doctrine of divine simplicity and so we can say that where God is, all of God is.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Two kinds of pantheism

There are two kinds of pantheism. One might call them: reductive pantheism and world-enhancing pantheism.

Reductive pantheism says that the world is pretty much like it seems to us scientifically (though it might opt for a particular scientific theory, such as a multiverse one), and that God is nothing but this world. In so doing, one will be trying to find a place for the applicability of divine attributes for the world.

World-enhancing pantheism, however, says that there is more to the world than meets the eye. There is something numinous pervading us, our ecosystem, our solar system, our galaxy, our universe and all reality, with this mysterious world being a living organism that is God. World-enhancing pantheism paints a picture of a divinized world.

World-enhancing pantheism is a genuine religious view, one that leads to distinctive (and idolatrous!) practices of worshipful reverence for the world around us. Reductive pantheism, on the other hand, is a philosophers' abstraction.

It is an interesting question which version of pantheism is Spinoza's. His influence on the romantics is surely due to their taking him to be a world-enhancing pantheist, and he certainly sometimes sounds like one. But it is not clear to me that he is one. Though it may be that Spinoza has managed to do both: we might say that under the attribute of extension, we have a reductive pantheism, but the availability of the attribute of thought allows for a world-enhancing pantheism.

World-enhancing pantheism is idolatrous, while reductive pantheism is just a standard atheistic metaphysics with an alternate semantics for the word "God".

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

A defense of an ontological argument

Given an appropriate notion of maximal greatness, maximal greatness entails maximal greatness in all worlds. By the S5 axiom of modal logic, it follows that that if possibly there is a maximally great being, there is a maximally great being. Thus discussion of the modal ontological argument focuses on the possibility premise, the claim that possibly a maximally great being exists.

  1. If a belief that p is within the center of the motivational life of a person or community, and that life is generally flourishing, then, probably, p is possible. (Premise)
  2. There have been persons and communities that have led generally flourishing lives within the motivational center of which there was the belief that a maximally great being exists. (Premise)
  3. Possibly, a maximally great being exists. (By 1 and 2)
  4. A maximally great being exists. (By 3 and S5, as per opening remarks)

The idea behind (1) is that a life within whose motivational center there was an incoherent proposition would be unlikely to be flourishing. It would be a life that would, most likely, come apart. The flourishingness of a life is evidence of the coherence of the concepts by which that life is lived. And coherence is either identical with or evidence for possibility. In favor of (2), I cite such people as Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Calcutta, Jean Vanier or Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps such communities as the first generation Franciscans. And I even think the synchronic and diachronic Christian community over the ages, despite sins of many individuals, qualifies.

One might try to come up with parallel arguments for incompatible premises. For instance, deeply committed pantheists like Ghandhi appeared to live flourishing lives, and if pantheism is possibly true, it is true, a conclusion incompatible with (4). Two responses can be made. First, pantheists may well believe that a maximally great being exists, and think that the whole of existence is necessarily identical with it. So maybe what is at the motivational center of their lives is just the belief that a maximally great being exists, and the further claim that the whole of existence is necessarily identical with it is less central. This may not be very plausible, though. It seems that the divinity of everything is motivationally crucial to them.

A second response is to admit this. Yes, the existence of pantheists leading flourishing lives at whose motivational center pantheism was found give evidence for the truth of pantheism. So we have evidence for theism and evidence for pantheism. And maybe as far as this goes, the evidence is balanced. But, note that both the evidence for theism and the evidence for pantheism is evidence against atheism. We have evidence for theism and evidence for pantheism. Now we need to see what independent considerations we can bring against theism and against pantheism. (Note, for instance, that the problem of evil is more pressing given pantheism, if the world-deity is good.)

I doubt that there are people living flourishing lives at whose motivational center lies atheism. I do not here deny that atheists may lead flourishing lives, but I deny that if they do, their lives have atheism at their motivational center. For one (this suggestion is due to a grad student here), atheism is a negative doctrine, and lives centered on negative doctrines are unlikely to be flourishing. More likely, the motivational center is morality, love of fellow man, loyalty to friends, etc. In the committed theist or pantheist, these things are closely tied to the theism or pantheism. But in the atheist, these things are, I think, largely independent of the atheism, except maybe in the case of a kind of tragic loyalty in the face of the terrors of the unfeeling world, as in Russell, which I think is not going to lead a fully flourishing life, falling short in respect of the joyous aspects.

[Note added later: This was, of course, written before the revelations about Jean Vanier's abusiveness. I would certainly have chosen a different example if I were writing this post now.]