A Concise Grammar of Pantheism (original) (raw)
Pantheism – roughly, the view that all things are in God – seems to be enjoying a genuine renaissance of late. Arguably, pantheism (in its various forms) is attractive to our age not only because it is more amenable to a naturalist conception of both God and humanity, but also because it has been traditionally associated (in Christendom) with heresy. In this sense pantheism offers a certain form of religiosity that is detached from the burden of old religion and its violent, dogmatic, and intolerant history. Though I am a proud card-carrying member of the pantheistic club, I will not at all argue for this view in the current paper. My aim here is much more modest and rudimentary: to clarify the logical space of the family of views that are commonly put together under the rubric of pantheism or panentheism. Such a clarification is urgently needed for two main reasons. First, agreeing on a common terminology for the various branches of pantheism will help us avoid the unfortunate, yet quite common, state of talking past each other, rather than engaging in genuine philosophical debate. Second, some of the folk formulations of pantheism seem to prejudge its very possibility. For example, if one defines pantheism as the view that “all things are parts of God,” and one is committed to a mereology in which parts are prior to their whole, it would seem that the road to pantheism is virtually blocked unless one is willing to embrace the unpalatable view that your smallest left finger and Billy the porcupine are prior to God. To avoid such pre-judgements, we will allow for a variety of ways in which things can be “in” God, i.e., we will allow for things to be in God, but not as parts of God. In the first part of this paper, I introduce a distinction between Substance-Mode Pantheism and Whole-Part Pantheism. The Substance-Mode Pantheist holds that all things (bodies, thoughts, and everything that is) are modes or states of God, while the Whole-Part Pantheist holds that all things are just parts of God. As noted, the distinction between these two forms of pantheism is related to one’s premises about (1) the priority relation holding between parts and wholes and (2) the possibility of allowing God to be posterior to anything. In the second part, I suggest two alternative ways to draw the dichotomy between pantheism and panentheism. According to the one, pantheism asserts a symmetric dependence between God and the world of finite things, while panentheism asserts an asymmetric dependence of the world on God. An alternative way to draw a distinction between pantheism and panentheism is to say that pantheism asserts an identity between God and nature – as the totality of bodies and mental items – while panentheism asserts that all bodies and thoughts are in God, yet they do not exhaust God, i.e., there are some aspects, or elements, of God beyond physical and mental nature.