What Kind of ‘God’ do Hindu Arguments for the Divine Show? Five Novel Divine Attributes of Brahman

Abstract

This article describes the ultimate ground of reality, Brahman, as a single power unfolding in concert in all things. It uses counterfactual argumentation to imply that a cosmos must consist of telic causal orders or manifested ‘powers’ as its most granular building block – and that they must be unified into a single whole. It is based on an argument for a single causally-conditioning substrate of all things recorded in India’s classical Sāṃkhya Kārikā and Brahma Sūtras; this was used by scholastic Vedāntic thinkers including the non-dualist Śaṃkara and the ‘transformationist’ Bhedābheda thinker Śrīnivāsa. It takes up arguments for satkārya, the pre-existence of a thing’s various transformations in potentio within its substrate, and employs them to paint a picture of reality as an ordered yet entangled pattern of causal trajectories. These manifest as the changing world we know. While Vedānta’s main motivation for making the arguments was to prove monism, this conception of an ‘immanent cause’ of all was also seen as divine. We see how this accords with moves in contemporary analytic philosophy to shift away from a broadly Humean model of constant conjunctions (reminiscent of key Buddhist approaches) toward a Neo-Aristotelian ‘metaphysics of powers’. But we also indicate how it may go further than most modern powers-metaphysicians in proposing a deeper connection between powers and what it is for there to be a cosmos at all.

If the standard arguments for the existence of God in classical theism try to show a self-existent, sentient designer with massive power and benevolence… then what do Hindu arguments for the divine try to show? Hinduism’s Vedāntic school of philosophy had its own tradition of ‘natural theology’. The schools that they opposed – Buddhists, atomists, Jains, Sāṃkhya, Carvaka materialists – often believed in some kind of deity but they did not see such deities as ultimate beings in the sense of a self-existent, ungrounded, unified and sole material, efficient, formal and sustaining ontological ground of the universe. By contrast, those features were central to Vedānta’s idea of the divine as an all-creating, all-animating, and all-encompassing reality called Brahman. Whether these thinkers went on to argue for personal theism, or for pantheism, or an idealist divinity of pure consciousness, they almost all used these arguments for a divine ground of Being that ensures a continuous medium, coherent nature, and combined power to all things.¹ One of the earliest Indian texts to discuss this universal ground, likens Brahman to a creative blaze that generates cloud after cloud of sparks:

As from a well-stoked fire sparks fly by the thousands, all looking just like it, so from the imperishable issue diverse things, and into it, my friend, they return. (Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 2.1)²

The idea that there must be an eternally existing complete foundation that is the naturally creative source of all beings was one of the most powerful Indian instincts motivating philosophical ideas of the divine. This ontological role inspired analogies likening the divine to malleable gold, a many-limbed tree, an inexhaustible fire, an ingenious web-spinning spider, a consciousness dreaming worlds, or a dancer. The world’s objects, ‘looking just like’ their divine source, both shared in that nature and were clues to a clearer understanding of it.

But a challenge remained for philosophical defenders of the tradition: what kind of thing would this divine ground be like metaphysically? This article seeks to reverse-engineer philosophical characteristics of the divine from some of the most common arguments and defences used by Vedāntic thinkers. Firstly, I set out some arguments used in scholastic commentaries on the Brahma Sūtras (BS), Vedānta’s core text. The main argument, reasoning counterfactually to the need for an inheritance for modal specificity, resembles a class of counterfactual arguments which aim to show that ‘the grounding of modality requires a global principle of causation’ (Koons, 2014, 254; see also Gale & Pruss, 1999). I select thinkers according to the degree of succinct clarity with which they express the core idea. Secondly, we look at the implications of responses to objections. Thirdly, as a way of distinguishing this conception from the God of ‘classical theism’ in Christian thought (following the definition of the term widely used and defined by Davies as that which is found ‘in writers like Augustine, Anselm and Thomas Aquinas’; Davies, 2000, 549),³ I note how the standard divine attributes of self-existence, simplicity, design, goodness, and personalism would be modified in the light of this picture.

Methodologically, it is important to note that across the range of Hindu philosophical schools (and often even within a given treatise), there are diverse and sometimes even conflicting portrayals of the divine. The picture elicited from these arguments does not claim to capture them all; other views and arguments pertaining specifically to monotheism can be found in Flood, (2020), and Nemec, (2022) . However the arguments in this article were used in philosophical exposition of the divine as ground of reality in almost all of Hinduism’s Vedāntic schools, serving as philosophical building blocks for ideas of Brahman, Īśvara, Bhāgavan, or other notions of the ultimate. Insofar as this article seeks to highlight the presence and implications of these arguments, it aims to contribute to the intellectual history of Vedānta and its dialectic with Sāṃkhya and other schools. But perhaps the stronger motivation is to unpack the philosophical implications of these arguments, and show their implicit claims. This might be called a ‘constructive’ or ‘contributive’⁴ application of these arguments to the Philosophy of Religion, somewhat in the way that Ganeri applies Nyāya Buddhist, Jain and Carvaka thought to philosophy of mind (2012, 2017), and Westerhoff applies Madhyamaka to problems of foundationalism (Westerhoff, 2020). But it aims to be ‘constructive’ only insofar as the ideas here are genuinely based on and entailed by what I take to be the original Indian ideas.

With this in mind, we will set out the main arguments for the divine as ground, describing the core moves in these arguments assessed independently from other claims made about issues such as religious language, epistemology, personhood and soteriology, or further arguments that some used to argue specifically for personal theism. We assess the arguments specifically in order to elicit the main claims to which they lead. We then consider the philosophical and theological objections addressed in debates with other schools, and point to their impact on the evolution of these views. Finally, we shift into a more constructive mode – inferring the divine attributes and the resulting conception of the divine entailed by these arguments. The goal is to give a focused, well-founded basis for engaging with the idea of God as ground of reality in the Hindu tradition.

A core insight emerging from the arguments is that all existence, manifestation, action and creativity can be traced to their ultimate ontological and causal ground, so that everything is directly rooted in the divine Being. For branches of Vedānta which saw empirical phenomena as real, the divine grounds everything in a holistic way, effectively containing all of us, at every stage of our lives, as well as all times, places, beings and experiences. Even branches which saw empirical phenomena as a mere illusion constructed by the imagination, the divine was still necessary as an ontological ground for that very process of illusory construction: without it, nothing would exist. Some schools of Hindu theism argued for a more distanced, mediated relationship between God and the world. The Madhva ‘dualist’ school of Vedānta, for instance, adopted a triadic model of creation that saw God as acting on ‘a pre-existent subtle matter’ to shape a reality in which ‘a hierarchy of powers’ are at play, dispensing power loaned them by God.⁵ Others like Rāmānuja navigated a middle way by acknowledging the material causation of the world by its all-grounding divine reality; but he also allowed that minds, forces, and insentient matter represent a secondary part of God’s Being, ‘a sacramental presence of God “outside” of God’ allowing divine intra-relationship of a kind that may feel familiar to Trinitarian theologians.⁶ The classic Bhedābheda tradition of Vedānta, sometimes called Svabhāvika Bhedābheda or ‘intrinsic difference and non-difference’, affirmed that both the material and the agency of all things flow from their divine ground, and it is a curious truth that even Śaṃkara, the arch-idealist of Vedāntic thought, also upheld divine material causation. From schools that upheld an impersonal idea of the divine to others that were at once ‘hyperpersonalist and realist, if simultaneously monist’,⁷ there was a broad agreement that everything is in God and everything is a manifestation of God.

There are many precedents for this idea in theologies and literatures that have tried to evoke all things at all times seen sub specie aeternitatis as Spinoza might have put it. In a scene in the Bhagavad Gītā the metaphysically curious prince Arjuna asks about the nature of the divine, and God (in its personal form) replies ‘Behold now, Arjuna, the entire universe, with everything moving and non-moving, assembled together in my universal form’⁸; Arjuna is then awarded a vision of all times, all worlds, contained within the divine being which is ‘the endless time’ so that God says ‘I know all of the past, present, and future, and I also know all living beings; but no-one knows me’.⁹ Unintentionally echoing the Gītā, Anthony Kenny imagined God outside of time, watching Nero fiddle heartlessly over the flames of Rome, while simultaneously God also watches Anthony Kenny write about God watching Nero fiddle. This idea of an all-comprehending vision also recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s 1945 short story The Aleph in which there exists ‘a small iridescent sphere’ somewhere in the cosmos in which one can find all places, ‘every angle of the universe’, open to simultaneous view. Such images grope towards ways of imagining all things at all times, comprehended in their intricate pattern of relations, from the ground of being upward.

Metaphysically speaking, what we see here is an Indian approach to metaphysical grounding, or ontological ‘foundationalism’ – that is, not the epistemological concern with grounds that justify belief, but a metaphysical concern with ultimate determination or explanation of things in the fact and nature of their existence. We see this kind of ultimate grounding or what following Westerhoff we will call metaphysical ‘foundationalism’ addressed by philosophers such as Schaffer, 2009, Trogdon, 2013, and Sider, 2020, and it was central to Indian philosophical debates about the divine. The view that we will examine yields a God’s eye view of reality in its timeless essence because it tends toward a strong programme of reducing supervenient properties, in their whole ordered trajectory, onto the ultimate grounding nature that generates them. The world’s forms become ‘powers’ of the ultimate ground, resulting in a view that resembles the contemporary metaphysics of ‘powers’ in certain respects (e.g. Armstrong, 1999; Cartwright, 2009; Crane, 1996; Harré & Madden, 1977; Marmodoro, 2010; Molnar, 2003; Mumford & Anjum, 2011).¹⁰ Yet these powers are also a single complex power that creates all reality; rather than a ‘new Aristotelianism’ (e.g. Groff & Greco, 2013; Novotny & Novak, 2016; Tahko, 2013).¹¹ With this in mind, perhaps these arguments suggest the basis of new philosophical wats of construing Vedānta.

Natural Theology in Vedāntic Philosophy

In Indian history even schools of thought sometimes branded as atheistic (e.g. Buddhism) believed in immensely powerful eternal deities at work in the empirical world. We might call these ‘divine doppelgangers’ – metaphysical phenomena that play a similar role to a ‘God’, but lack at least one of the usual divine-making features. These included the atomists’ Īśvara, a deity who appoints the structure of the cosmos and aggregates its constituent parts but does not cause them to exist. It also includes prakṛti, the Sāṃkhya dualists’ eternal ‘prime matter’ or fundamental substance that evolves into the many worldly realities we know and reabsorbs them—but does not have the efficient causal impulse to do so without a catalyst. Even the Buddhists’ idea of karma, the eternal chain of consequences of action, served as the un-originated source of all order in the cosmos, but without being divine or sentient.

The Vedāntic school by contrast, developed arguments for a single reality that combined key divine-making features in line with an overarching foundationalist framework (discussed below¹²). These arguments implied that the divine is a) the constitutive material cause of all things, b) the efficient cause that both causes the cosmos to exist rather than not, and also continuously impels all arising and change, c) the formal cause that shapes all things via the creative patterns of its own nature, d) classically divine in the sense of being uncreatedly self-existent and originless, imperishable and sovereign, all-pervasive, possessed of all powers, usually consciousness (though not always ‘a person’) and subjectively felt to be blissful. These arguments were not always used consistently with each other, and not all of their advocates conformed their other doctrines accordingly. Yet they became important tools for defending metaphysical foundationalism, and the existence of the divine (see Frazier, 2022a for a summary of three key arguments). Below, we outline the basic arguments and see what picture they paint of the divine nature.

The Argument From Origination

One of the earliest metaphysical intuitions of ancient India was that there must be some source of the existence of the universe. This intuition emerged from speculation on fundamental metaphysical questions about causation and grounding. One text wonders about the impulse that propelled the universe from a state in which there was neither existence nor non-existence as we know it, into one in which we have space, time, presence and absence.¹³ Another speculated on the material of the cosmos, which might be the ‘body’ of a great being,¹⁴ or a ‘forest’ of primordial building materials.¹⁵ Possible answers were proposed (such as a God who shapes all forms),¹⁶ even while hymns acknowledged that no direct empirical knowledge of that earliest time was possible.¹⁷

Like Aquinas’s third way, one of the earliest arguments held that there must have been an original self-existent source of everything. This is because empirical precedent shows that things cannot spontaneously generate out of nothing. This is found in Chāndogya Upaniṣad (CU) 6.2.1–3, and many exegetic uses of it in classical and medieval thought resemble standard cosmological arguments. As the earliest extant statement puts it:

“In the beginning, son, this world was simply what is existent—one only, without a second. Now, on this point some do say: ‘In the beginning this world was simply what is nonexistent—one only, without a second. And from what is nonexistent was born what is existent.' "But, son, how can that possibly be?" he continued. "How can what is existent be born from what is nonexistent? On the contrary, son, in the beginning this world was simply what is existent...¹⁸

Presumably generalising from experience, this reasons that nothingness cannot bring anything into existence, and that the universe came into existence, so it requires a cause or some determining precondition. Furthermore, the prerequisite of everything must be a cause that is itself self-existent so that it does not need to come from non-existence itself. For where there is nothing, there is no capacity for new arising. This differs subtly from the Cosmological Argument in that it does not rely on assumptions that a causal regress is impossible, or that causation operates in strict temporal successions requiring a ‘first cause’. Read generously, the claim is simply that since nothingness cannot generate anything, there must be something self-existent from or in which all else is derived.

Texts mining this intuition questioned the temptation to resort to over-simplistic ideas of a first cause as just another thing, agent, or source. Existence as we know it—a realm of ‘creators… forces… action… [and] energy’ – can be nothing like the ‘existence’ that led to the cosmos.¹⁹ So the nature of this self-existent thing still needed to be filled out convincingly. But, the persuasive power of this argument was threatened by competing schools which held either that the string of caused things might go infinitely back, or they might simply be an eternal, natural material – unexceptional in every way other than its primordial existence. So a different argument developed that addressed some of those weaknesses.

The Argument From Modal Inheritance

A different argument developed – not from Vedic cosmology but out of the Sāṃkhya school of classical metaphysics. It is based on Sāṃkhya Kārikā verse 9, is found in the commentary attributed to Gauḍapādā on that verse. It took as its starting point the fact of ordered change in the cosmos: eggs become birds who make more eggs, seeds become trees, fires make smoke, etc. From this the argument inferred the i. existence, ii. fundamentality, and iii. unified nature of some total ground of reality. Early Sāṃkhya was fascinated with enumerating the elements and processes that make up reality. Central to its views was an influential theory called the Satkārya or ‘existence of effects’ theory. This held that the stages of a thing all exist in potentia (even before they appear) in their ‘cause’. This cause was mainly seen as the material cause substrate of a thing, also serving as its immanent cause: so a seed is the immanent cause that contains the tree and its fruit. So the entire trajectory of a thing’s development always exists within its own ground as a potentiality or power. While Sāṃkhya was ‘spiritual’ in its concern to help us transform our psycho-physical state and thereby end rebirth and suffering, it was not religious in the sense of advocating the existence of a God or divine ground of the cosmos. Instead it was strongly committed to the existence of a metaphysical ground of all empirical reality. It called this divine doppelganger prakṛti (‘the procreative’) or pradhāna (prime matter), and developed an argument meant to defend the idea against metaphysical pluralists (the Vaiśeṣika atomist school) and sceptics (Buddhism’s Madhyamaka school). But unlike most forms of cosmological argument, it argued for a modal, rather than a material ground of the universe. Many philosophical implications flow from this, as we will see.

The argument starts with the idea that things observably change, but they do so in a coherently patterned way. They highlighted this idea through a counterfactual thought experiment: if there were a universe with no governing ground or nature determining the changes, then we can imagine three possibilities that would result. Things would either not arise in the first place (yielding a void), or they would have existential inertia and so once existing in any state would not change (yielding a universe frozen into a single state), or new forms would arise randomly (yielding a total chaos). But none of these is the way the world actually is. Instead we see that all phenomena follow patterns of order everywhere: seeds become trees, and cows make milk. We cannot expect or (or even force) the cow to evolve naturally into a tree; only seeds do this. This implies that there are natural dispositions for diachronic evolution at play, ensuring the patterned progression of things. Such determinants of ordered change are also the reason why our reality takes the form of a cosmos rather than a stasis or chaos, enabling all continuous identities to perdure through space and time.

The determinant of change for any given thing spans all of the forms a thing takes, and in the sense that it determines them, it contains them… so that for Sāṃkhya, nothing really changes or arises or ends. All that really happens as time passes is that different potential forms are actualised in their specific order (see Larson, 1975 for an exposition of this view, and Ray, 1982 and Burley, 2012 for more philosophical interpretations). The modal reasoning in this argument – contrasting this world with other possible ones without such a ground – highlights the need for a specific kind of ontological inheritance: a modal or determinative inheritance that explains not only why things exist, but also why they exist in the way they do. It also reminds us that the power of generating the cosmos is ongoing, and should be seen as an important indicator of the nature at the bottom of things. And it says that if there were no such foundational disposition then we would live in a very different world; indeed, we could never have existed at all.

The Argument From Coherence

The idea of a modally determining ground was influential and turns up in many philosophical literatures. But it only suggested a foundation for each trajectory individually – so that no one all-shaping reality was demonstrated by it. But the school of Vedānta was committed not only to foundationalism, but also to an all-grounding single divine foundation. In Brahma Sutra Bhāṣyas on verses 2.2.17 or 18 depending on the text, a number of Vedāntic thinkers made sure to highlight the monistic implications of the argument. It did this by emphasising the coherence of change not only as localised in individuals only over time, but also across different cases that we would not normally see as sharing a single material or ground. Not only some, but all chickens develop from eggs – no matter where they are in space and time. All of our empirical experience tells us that a chicken cannot simply assert its ontological freedom by arising out of a stone, or radically changing its typological trajectory to grow into a tree. Thus there must be a determiner of all chickens – and so too mutatis mutandis for all other diachronically coherent phenomena. That is to say that since we see the same patterns globally, the modal ground must apply globally, shaping the whole realm of appearances in a coherently regulated way.²⁰

The Arguments From Shared Powers and Intrinsic Connections

This idea that there is a modally determining nature that spans all cases of coherence was augmented by an argument that shared powers in the underlying substrates must co-determine the new natures that emerge out of complex combined materials.This is seen in the elaboration of arguments from a coherent modal inheritance in the commentary to 2.2.17 or 18 (see for instance both Śaṃkara's and Rāmānuja's commentaries. In the world we observe that apparently separate building blocks with separate natures (e.g. atoms and molecules), can combine to reveal previously unseen shared capacities (e.g. life, and arguably consciousness, language and emotion). We see this when apparently new and irreducible emergent phenomena arise from the combination of underlying parts. But this implies that the separate building blocks actually possess shared powers. We do not see in their basic separate state but they become apparent when they are properly combined.

In Vedānta’s argument the existence of shared properties at the fundamental level (despite their invisibility until the right conditions catalyse them) was supported by a reductionist analysis: in the union of atoms to make up a cow, which of the constitutive atoms possess the powers of mooing and making milk that emerge later? In the many different bits that make up a person, which particles possess the power of mental activity that is never seen when they exist in isolation? These actions are only possible through combination. It must be all of them together that ‘contain’ the potential for these higher level features, so that they have some shared power of grounding from the beginning. These emergent powers must be unified as a single capacity at the fundamental level (see Frazier, 2022a, 7–10 for a fuller exposition of this argument). This argument was backed up by what may be called the 'Connection Argument' usually elaborated in commentaries to Brahma Sūtra 2.2.12 (see Frazier, 2022a, 10-11). This argument used an earlier version of what is commonly called 'Bradley's Regress' to question whether any kind of inherence or aggregation bonds can successfully explain the way that separate, autonomous fundamental entities would connect into mereological wholes making up the visible world. If the idea of bonds linking separate things was incoherent because those links would need links, and so on, then a different solution must obtain. At a more fundamental level the entities must already be part of a shared medium. A further counterargument to the Buddhist idea that perhaps aggregated things were like clusters of tropes or flocks of birds: adjacent but not touching. This could similarly only create complex entities if there were some medium of relation and juxtaposition (see Śaṃkara's commentary to Brahma Sūtra 2.2.24).

A Total Ground of Things

These arguments from origination, modal inheritance, coherence, and combination were combined to produce a picture of an eternally-existent all-determining, all-spanning and unified source. In summary, they claimed that:

• i. There cannot have been an initial nothingness, since spontaneous generation is impossible and a world now exists. So something has existed that did not need to be caused (whether that is a self-existent original cause, or an infinite series or circle of causes).

• ii. Empirically, we can see that there is an observable order in the cosmos, evident firstly in consistent diachronic development, and secondly in typological coherence of development across cases.

• iii. An explanation is needed for this order because, counterfactually, this seems improbable. This leads to a kind of foundationalism if one accepts that the explanation must be situated in the fundamental nature of things.

• iv. Thanks to the failure of other attempts to explain how separate fundamental building blocks would connect, we have good reason to think that all reality is part of a shared medium that allows for mereological relations, clusters, and the macroscopic objects that they create.

• v. Further, the powers that the ground of things possesses are individuated in many overlapping ways (seen in cases of emergence) that make it difficult to separate it into more basic discrete parts. This augments the foundational monism: the modal ground cannot be discretely decomposed into ultimately separate powers, and so has an inseparably entangled nature.

Together these arguments make Skrzypek’s (2021, 1) recent point that ‘dynamically complex’ entities which maintain an overall coherence rather than changing randomly seem to imply ‘a guarantor of diachronic identity’. They also touch on Schaffer’s (2010) point that the world of things displays internal constraints on their possible relations and combinations, amounting to a shared constraint on the modal range of reality. Like Koons (2014, 254) they use the argument that ‘the grounding of modality requires a global principle of causation’ to reason not only toward a unified foundation, but toward a single divine ground. The original Sāṃkhya argument had called this locus of potentiality a ‘material cause’ and termed it merely a kind of prime matter. But Vedāntic thinkers questioned whether materiality was the right way to think about it. If we think of a person being themself despite the change of cells, or a living being dying and decomposing into mere soil, then we might say that it is not the material that determines a thing; it is really the structure, as Larson (1975) notes in his interpretation of the Satkārya theory. The arguments for the ‘connectivity’ of reality in a single overarching constitutive medium of interaction between all things paralleled points in favour of monism in Vallicella, 2002; see Frazier n.d.b). Together the whole portfolio of views seemed to show that the universal ground of modal coherence is fundamental (its nature goes ‘down to the bottom’), is unified (it acts as a single whole not as disjoined separate influences), is constitutive (it does not just connect or house individual things; it is that of which they consist), and in its generation of things is creative (it leads to a complex and changing cosmos).

Nine Philosophical Objections

These arguments painted a multi-facetted picture of the cosmos that many found intuitive. It also accorded with the ancient cosmological instinct that all things we know emerge from a more fundamental reality that encompasses them. But the conclusions of these arguments were ambiguous and could be put to use by all sorts of foundation-monists to argue for a range of metaphysical positions. Reality might consist of substance, or powers (both proposed by Bhedābheda Vedānta thinkers like Nimbārka and Śrīnivāsa), or unified consciousness (according to Pratyabhijña and some Advaitins), or linguistic structures (according to followers of Bhartṛhari). Furthermore, they faced robust criticism from opposing Indian ontologies explaining reality in terms of aggregates of atoms (Vaiśeṣika) or extensionless tropes (Abhidharma), or fleeting mental phenomena (Yogācāra) or pure conceptual conventions (Madhyamaka. For reason of space, we cannot go into all of the critiques, but we can survey some key point that served to develop further the core idea of a divine foundation of reality.

Individuation

One of the most obvious problems of the Satkārya theory was its basic difficulty with individuation. If things pre-exist in the conditions that determine them to arise, then it is not only the tree that is in the seed, but also the fruit it makes, the pies they fill, and the people who eat them. And the tree must also have been in the soil and rain that fed it. This leans into our natural intuition that most things endure over time despite change. It also rejects ‘presentism’ – the idea that only present phenomena exist (a view entertained by some Buddhist schools). But it could not give a rationale by which to determine where the trajectories of particular things begin and end. Do persons begin at conception? In the parents, or grandparents? In the food that feeds them? And do they end at death or in the hundred worms that eat them? To address this, Vedāntic thinkers bit the bullet and accepted that things cannot be wholly individuated at the fundamental level in which they are all ontologically fully grounded in Brahman (according to the argument from coherence). Rain ultimately IS the seeds it nurtures, which are not only the trees but also the tables and sawdust they one day become. In this way this objection supported the monistic conclusion that things are inter-constitutive, ultimately inseparable, and part of a continuous ontological medium and causal power.

Efficient Causes

A connected problem was that embracing the Satkārya theory of foundational causes meant neglecting the role of efficient causation. It emphasised cases where the causation seems limited to a single intransitive ‘material cause’ (upadāna karaṇa). But much of the causation we see shaping things in the world consists of transitive efficient causes: one thing affecting a different one through interaction. Satkārya thought about things through the metaphor of milk naturally evolving into curds, but the atomist school challenged this with the image of threads that need the efficient causation of an external weaver to be woven into cloth. Atomists suggested that Sāṃkhya suffered an explanatory gap in this respect.

Sāṃkhya made little explicit response to this objection, but may have been happy to accept that efficient causality happens alongside the immanent causal trajectories as a secondary less fundamental category of causation (see Ray, 1982). Alternatively, Vedānta’s monistic view that the natures of things are entangled could be strengthened by the implication that things have power to shape each other transitively, according to the argument from shared powers. This strategy would parallel that of the European metaphysical monist Hermann Lotze, who in his 1887 Metaphysic agreed with Leibniz that:

… transeunt causation is to be reduced to immanent causation; but [replaced]… apparent cases of transeunt causation among smaller things with immanent-causal relations among states of the whole universe, [leading]… to "substantival monism"’ (cited in Zimmerman, 1997).

This puts a weighty causal burden on the complex powers of the ultimate foundation – but Brahman was precisely the one kind of self-existent, all-determining, complexly-natured entity suited to carry this heavy load.

Efficient Origination

Efficient causation also featured in another critique. Sāṃkhya essentially saw foundations, including the ultimate foundation, as natural phenomena, lacking the impulse necessary to initiate a change from stasis into the process of development. Consequently, its initial entry into activity must happen by virtue of either inherited causal processes, or an external catalyst. One might think of wood that is set on fire, or clouds that begin to rain: the former is change dependent on a catalyst and the latter is something that is realizing the prior momentum of a natural process (of evaporation and condensation taking place within a system of forces). Classical Sāṃkhya chose the first explanation, positing as a catalyst the influence of proximity to a separate reality (of pure consciousness) called puruṣa. This was described as a case of causation through interaction, like a lame man and a blind man making progress together when neither alone would be able (BS 2.2.7; example from Sāṃkhya Kārikā 21).

By contrast with Sāṃkhya, Vedānta needed to claim that the foundation was the sole existent reality, wholly sovereign and non-dependent, with nothing left over to act as external catalyst. So the catalyst of change would have to be innate to it, like water naturally emerging out of a riverbed or milk naturally turning into butter (to borrow some popular analogies where no catalyst could be seen).²¹ Yet Vedāntins saw how underlying natural processes underpin those examples (so they could not apply to Brahman). So they also turned to the power of sentience (jñaśaktiviyogāt; BS 2.2.9) as the most commonly seen example of causation without an external catalyst. Sentient agents act through their own will, which Vedānta described as possessing impulse and arrangement (pravṛtti and racanā anupapatti; BS 2.2.1–2), and desire (kāma; BS 1.1.18). Thus the foundation’s ability to transform itself supported its sentience, and thus both supported theism in the sense of a divine ground possessed of awareness and will, and solved the mystery of the impulse behind creation.

The Sequence of the Present

The Satkārya theory was also accused of failing to account for the distinctiveness of the present manifestation of things over their merely potential ones – what some have called the spotlight of time. The uniquely concrete, actual character the present moment intuitively has over past and future realities, seemed to demand explanation. For Sāṃkhya it was conceived as a symptom of being manifest (vyakta) into a concrete (sthūla) state rather than a latent or subtle (sūkṣma) one. But a problem remained: Satkārya said little to explain the distinctive ‘wave’ of things becoming present and then past. If all the forms of a thing exist ‘in’ the foundation, then we may ask ‘what causes the difference and order of presentness?’ Sāṃkhya may have seen this as built into the concordance (samanvaya) of powers: having past and future forms means little if there is no sequence to them. But this aspect of the theory either left an explanatory gap, or required an acknowledgement that powers must include a structural sequence.

This issue, again, seemed best addressed by a single divine reality²² which alone could ‘explain the teleological nature of evolution’ (Srinivasacari, 1950, 22) by containing the whole plan and pattern of forms determined together at once from the beginning. The Pratyabhijñā school of idealist theism articulated this rationale, arguing that only a mind could plan out the diachronic temporal order in which things gradually manifest their different powers (see Nemec, 2022). It seemed that not only a single foundation, but a sentient foundation was needed to explain the world’s efficient causation. It is worth noting that a similar argument has been made by Koons (2014, 262) – that the causal power in question resembles sentient agency above all, not because it is appears freely-willed but because it spans a series of changes that together make up whole temporally extended things: ‘The only experience we have of a cause whose effect is temporally extended is that of a person effecting a plan or complex intention. Hence, we can reasonably infer that the activity of the First Cause is analogous’ to that of a person. Koons’ point brings out the aspects of causal cosmological determination that bear resemblance to freely-willed and planned agency.

Determinism and Freewill

One might think that the Satkārya theory would be accused of contravening freewill since all future states already exist. But this did not seem to be a problem for most in the debate, perhaps because within the satkārya-constituted world all the usual conditions for decision-making remain intact. Minds, each with their own histories and personalities, interact in complex situations, influenced by forces, leading to motivations and action that must negotiate all the messy implications of past actions and outcomes that remain unknown in the future to those within each situation. Thus the triangulation of circumstance, causation, analysis, and decision-making generate the kind of deliberation-based personal agency that we think of as freewill. As a result, this picture seemed no more deterministic for a Vedāntin than the universe does for most modern physicists. Further, although it produces a broadly monistic metaphysics we can see how a mitigated realism about the factors that define conventional phenomena (like objects, time, interactions, acts and individual minds) remains intact, explaining the structure of the everyday world (see Frazier, n.d.a, on the way that the agency of the self may be positioned in relation to Brahman as its ultimate ground).

Doubt and Inference

Epistemologically, the theory also faced pressure to justify speculating on phenomena like causation and ontological foundations. The thinkers using this argument were well aware of the Humean-style objection that we only ever see patterns of constant conjunction in the world, but never any underlying purely metaphysical realities. Causation was widely rejected by Buddhists schools in favour of a mere pattern of ‘consistent following on’ (pratītya samutpāda). But Sāṃkhya Kārikā 6–8 strongly defended the necessity of using metaphysical inference to draw up best explanations for things as a matter of course. We infer hidden factors all of the time, and could not communicate or make decisions or even move around a physical space without them. Thus speculation on a ground was defended via the counter-critique that metaphysical sceptics reject the basis for any kind of explanatory understanding, and hypocritically ignore the reasoning practices that are confirmed in empirical experience and used in all our behaviour. Similar arguments have been made in recent defences of metaphysical realism, as by Nancy Cartwright who observes ‘I know that I can get an oak tree from an acorn, and not from a pine cone’ and that these kinds of worldly facts ground ‘the possibility of planning, prediction, manipulation, control and policy-setting’ (Cartwright, 1994, 279).

Probability Not Proof

One objection not used against these views, but that modern philosophers have used against the design argument in Western philosophy of religion, is the problem of probability. It may be true that we see a predominance of order everywhere, but can we infer from this that there is enough order to suppose a cause? We might see merely a local patch of order within a vast or even infinite scale of disordered data. The ‘anthropic principle’ explains that if there is only a limited patch of order in the universe, then beings who evolve in it would think all of the universe to be ordered since they could observe only the ordered portions. The argument for order thus suffers all the weaknesses of arguments from probabilistic reasoning.²³ This objection was generally not put in an explicit way, but it was implicitly present in Madhyamaka's idea that order might only be perceived rather than real. In response the Vedāntin might accept that we cannot ever be sure whether order is only local, but point to the ever-expanding scale of data in favour of order. If there is really no reason why I, you, and everything else should continue into the next moment, then it seems almost unbelievable now, and again now, and again at every successive moment in each case, that the chips should happen to fall in an ordered way across the whole span of observable reality. As the great Vedantic thinker Śaṃkara put it, ‘if irregularity be admitted, then a human body may momentarily become an elephant, or be transformed into a god or back into a human form again (Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya 2.2.19).²⁴ But at each instant anew this does not happen. Thus the temporal aspect of the counterfactual argument builds a constantly growing burden of data that we can see in every micro-momentary process in the physical world (a point made recently by Lazarovici, 2023). The staunch Humean might hold out for the possibility of a larger chaos; but even Buddhist sceptics proposed some explanation for order (whether as a result of past actions or of mental projections).

Anti-foundationalism and Inheritance

Another pressing objection that threatened to undercut the claim that modal coherence indicates fundamental grounding, was that each thing might be determined and explained by a cause preceding it, in a train that goes back infinitely without any ultimate ground that houses the future effects and explains them all. The Madhyamaka Buddhists argued for radical metaphysical anti-foundationalism: the belief that there is no fundamental nature of things at all. Trains of causation might go infinitely backward so that there is no original first cause. Or causation might be circular so that things ultimately cause each other in a self-contained self-existent unit. Some schools accepted that causal phenomena, like karma for instance (causation following from willed actions) could go back eternally, so regress was not enough to require an ultimate ground. Further, an infinite regress might be true of material as well as efficient causation (as discussed by Vedāntins like Śaṃkara, and supported in Westerhoff, 2020 as well as Trogdon, 2017, 188; see also see Frazier, 2022a, 8–9). The stuff of reality might be infinitely analysable into new underlying constitutive entities so that there is no most basic material but only ultimately structureless ‘gunk’. There would then be no foundation in the sense of ‘fundamental objects that can bring about the remainder by recombination’ (Westerhoff, 2020, 163).

The usual arguments to counter this and argue for some ultimate foundation refer to the need for an ‘inheritance’, and the coherence argument suggested a response along these lines, by way of its counterfactual thinking. Even if efficient causes go infinitely backward, and the materiality decomposes infinitely downward, then formal causation would still need a modal ‘inheritance’ explaining why the cosmos is this way rather than any other. Things can all be formally caused by each other in a circle or regress, but none of these would explain the modal specificity of the whole, i.e. why the whole chain is as it is, rather than another way. The explanation might be a nature embedded in some basic level of things, or something outside the cosmos but connected to it causally (which would then count as a foundation for it in Satkārya terms), or it might be that the ‘entire structure can be considered as a foundation’ (Westerhoff, 2020, 163). But something must be able to provide a sufficient reason for the whole ‘conjunctive fact’ of reality as we know it (as Gale & Pruss, 1999 argue) explaining why it is this world that we see rather than other possible ones. An analogy would be an artwork: one could try to imagine simply being passed an artwork, and this process of passing it along going back and back in a circle or infinite line... but for the artwork to exist it must have been created, chosen from among a range of modal possibilities, by an artist: this ontological act is entailed in the very idea of there being an artwork. This is an idea to which we will return, for – if it is right – it would show something strange about the foundational nature.

Divine Doppelgangers

These arguments and their objections cumulatively sketched a picture of a universe underpinned by something extraordinary. Something gives phenomena their consistent shape, coding ordered sequences into reality, impelling the changes spanning the whole realm of our empirical experience. Yet it would possess a nature unformed by prior causes, impelled of itself to creative activity sufficient to generate all of reality. These extraordinary features seemed to indicate something beyond nature as we know it (or at least possessed of features alien to experience).

One objection was that the world-explaining functions might be fulfilled by separate things, ‘divine doppelgangers’ like time (kālā),²⁵ the inherent nature of things (svabhāva),²⁶ necessity (niyati), or chance (yadṛccha), or consistent following-on (pratītya samutpāda),²⁷ that do not resemble anything divine – not least because their explanatory and ontological power would be shared and thus limited. Such divine doppelgangers abounded. Vaiśeṣika atomists posited a deity who organises reality’s atoms (but does little else). Yogacāra Buddhism’s idealist system attributed order to eternal autonomous trains of karma or chains of cause-and-effect. As we have seen Sāṃkhya’s non-divine prakṛti or pradhāna explained the totality of reality’s forms but not its originating impulse. None of these fulfilled all of the extraordinary ontological functions at once, serving as determinative formal cause, impelling efficient cause, constitutive material cause – supporting the whole span of reality throughout time out of its own independent nature. But Vedānta’s Brahman united all the cosmogonic functions in one complete ground. Indeed, Vedānta’s associated ‘connectivity argument’ pointed out that these functions must be united within some ontological context that allows their interaction (see Frazier, 2022a, b and n.d.b). It defined the ultimate ground as precisely the overarching unified framework for all the functions; precisely this ultimacy was central to its definition as divine.

Five Hindu Divine Attributes

These arguments, and the responses that critiques inspired, were used by Vedāntic thinkers to argue for diverse ideas of the divine. Across centuries of internecine competition, Advaita idealists argued for a single consciousness grounding concepts, realist Viśiṣṭādvaita theists described a single personal agency grounding all activity, and Bhedābheda realists described a single substance, energy or nature transforming itself into different forms of reality and different types of agency. But certain core features had to be true of the ultimate foundation for it to be able to generate the cosmos. Like many of the classical divine attributes familiar in Abrahamic philosophical theism – such as immutability, simplicity, eternity, sovereignty – these unique features showed how the foundational reality must be different from the worldly phenomena it generates.

From Self-existence to Self-naturing

The traditional attribute of divine aseity or self-existence is often understood as the quality of not requiring any source or depending on anything else. It indicates something extraordinary because the thing to which it applies is ontologically independent and uncaused. For many this indicates that it would have to be a necessary being, for otherwise it would be contingently dependent on something else. Aseity is an attribute that goes hand in hand with standard cosmological arguments for a first uncaused cause that prevents a regress.

But in this Hindu case we see a modal foundation which is an inherited source from which all natures flow – yet which has its own nature a se, from itself. This is a modal explanation for the nature of all things that could conceivably have been otherwise – yet its nature must not have an explanation itself in order to be an ultimate explanation. As Cornell (2013) has noted, for almost any metaphysics some particularly distributed property must apply to the cosmos at a fundamental level. Thus some extraordinary self-natured ground exists that accounts for my writing this article (rather than watching a good movie), and does so without any ultimate explanatory reason why. Arguably it is this curious nature of true fundamentality to which the doctrine of Divine Simplicity points in claiming that the essence and existence of the divine are one.²⁸

The way that Vedānta put this is that the divine has certain features as its svarūpa or intrinsic form (lit. ‘own form’). Yet in both the Indian and Abrahamic scholastic traditions relatively little is said about this curious quality of having an unformed particular nature that could apparently have been otherwise but somehow causelessly is as it is. Most discussions of self-existence tend to focus on preserving divine sovereignty or necessity or non-dependence from the competing uncaused autonomous existence of other entities such as abstract objects (e.g. Craig, 2016). Nevertheless the attribute of being self-natured is an extraordinary characteristic of the ground of reality (whether it is natural or supernatural), and it awaits further work to see how it can be made intelligible.

From Simplicity to Holism

This very attribute of having a nature disposed to create the complex, changing, relational world around us, contravenes any purist conception of divine simplicity, the doctrine that the divine has no separate ‘parts’ on which it depends. Christian theology has long struggled to make divine simplicity accord with the doctrines of the Trinity, of the other divine attributes, divine action through time, or indeed the Divine Names in Islamic thought. Similarly, Vedānta engaged in many debates about whether the divine is undivided (advitīya), unqualified (nirguṇa), immutable (kūṭastha), and imperishable (akṣara), or whether it ‘flows’ into creation (sṛṣṭi), and undergoes transformations (pariṇāma), has modes and embodiment (vikara, śarīra), and deploys powers (śaktis). A thing’s possession of complexity might seem to imply its having finite parts, and being constituted of and thus dependent on them. Buddhist thinkers had already made it clear that anything with parts in principle could be decomposed or through dependence shown to be inferior to those very parts. Ontological simplicity was particularly prized by the idealist Advaita school, since in that context it was essentially synonymous with consciousness becoming freed of cognitive contents, internal divisions, and finitude. Similarly, an important goal in classical Yoga was to achieve an undivided purity of consciousness within oneself. So across Indian cultures, there was good reason to see complexity a diminishment of both divinity and the soul.

Yet different Vedāntic schools held different views on divine simplicity, although few, if any, advanced the radical view that there is not even a distinction between attributes, or between essence and existence. Some schools of Advaita held out for a foundation so pure that it is attributeless (nirguṇa), but there was much scepticism about whether this is metaphysically possible (as from the eleventh century theist Rāmānuja, for instance); it would turn the divine into a bare particular. More commonly, divine unity (ekatva) referred to what Wolterstorff (1991) has called a ‘constituent ontology’ in which the features we observe co-constitute the thing of which they are aspects; this was in contrast to a ‘relation ontology’ in which features are separate entities brought into contingent relation. Satkārya-inspired foundationalists thus avoided apparent divisibility, dependence and decomposability by treating the different powers not as separate things, but as aspects of a single complex whole. Rāmānuja described these as amśas – ‘parts’ or ‘aspects’, Śrīnivāsa as powers (śakti), effects (kārya) and manifestation (prapañca), and Bhāskara as selective conditions (upādhi). One benefit of this view was that it made sense of the individuation problem that Satkārya had always faced: if one accepts that we do not need to separate out the world into entities that are separate at the level of their fundamental ontological ground, then individuation becomes a matter of degree or context, and a more holistic picture emerges.

Yet this ontological holism was not strictly ‘simple’ since differentiation remains, in the form of diverse types of power and manifestation that give reality its shape. In this sense, it describes diversity in unity – a picture flagged up in the very names of the two largest realistic schools of Vedānta: ‘difference and non-difference’ (bhedābheda) and ‘qualified non-duality’ (viśiṣṭādvaita). The connectivity argument mentioned above follows a similar route to Bradley’s argument for monism in particular, rejecting the possibility of total ontological division between any parts of reality (see Frazier n.d.b). But it does not reject the possibility of qualitative distinctions related in some other way than by partite bonds (more along the lines of a gunk such as Zimmerman, 1996 describes, but with an internally ‘distributive’ nature of the kind suggested by Cornell, 2013). So where satkārya-based foundationalism was core to the divine, its unity could never imply that ‘we must give up the assumption of differentiations or relations… [with] no relations of distinction’ (Della Rocca 2020, xvi). By contrast, in a satkārya monism the ultimate ground would always need to be internally complex in order to explain the qualitative differences between things. Indeed, for the coherence argument to work, not only individuals but also regular types of entity and force must exist – so the holism of the divine foundation is complex not simple.

This reflects the creative nature of the divine; in order to account for reality in this way there must be ‘a very great many powers in nature’ (Cartwright & Pemberton, 2013, 93) that ultimately map onto reality’s foundation, but on the other hand Vedānta’s monist vision implies that the many are ultimately unified as kind-specific portions of a larger complex pattern. This fits well with the ‘complexity’ argument based on the emergence of new features from complex grounds, mentioned above. There, the way that different phenomena emerge from different combinations implies that at the fundamental level upon which all those phenomena supervene, every nature is relationally-defined according to ‘a unique structural position’ within the larger nature that encompasses them (Lowe, 2010, 15).²⁹ This holistic approach to powers may take inspiration from Hindu holistic philosophies of sentence meaning (advanced in the Prabhākara Mīmāṃsā and Bhartṛharian grammatical traditions). In the former properties have an ontologically mutually-constitutive relation with their particulars (‘appleness’ cannot exist without ‘apples’, and vice-versa), while in the latter, individual words only ever have their meaning within the complex network of the sentence. This produced an example of ontological holism that Vedānta could use to obviate the problem of thinking of properties, substance, and even the inherence relation as separate ontological entities (see Marmodoro, 2010, 27–40 on philosophical problems that result from reifying such ontological phenomena). Thus preferring a holistic metaphysics over a partite or a simple one solved a range of problems, and allowed the divine to remain richly endowed with the creative potential that inspired ancient texts to praise Brahman as inexhaustibly full (pūrṇa; as in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 5.1.1).

From Intelligent Design to Natural Creativity

In the metaphysics entailed in these arguments, all things are defined not by their material, or merely the properties they possess, but by their temporally extended shape that works in concert with others. It might be tempting to think of this diachronic form as the result of teleological causation: influence aimed at some purpose, of the sort envisioned in ‘teleological’ or ‘intelligent design arguments’. But here, as we have seen, the cosmos emerges through immanent causation, flowing from a fundamental nature in which it already exists in all its relational and sequential structure. This means that the whole design exists in full as part of the divine nature.

We might ask whether this kind of creation – natural expression of one’s nature, is the same as the kind usually associated with ‘intelligent design’. The conventional conception of design entails a) turning one’s attention to an activity, b) choosing from among different options, and c) working through the possibilities to ‘plan’ specific outcomes. But this divinity does not turn its attention since all time exists contemporaneously, and unless we take it to be arbitrarily changeable it acts according to nature rather than whim so it does not choose between equal options. Further, in containing all eventualities in its own nature, it presumably does not ‘plan’ an outcome in the usual way. Instead, a better analogy than ‘design’ might be the imagining forth of a complete plot—the Odyssey or the Mahābhārata – with all its personas and motives, settings and subplots, points of dramatic tension and aesthetic power intact as a single work. Similarly the world lives within the divine as an instance of its massive creativity, encompassing landscapes and lives, cosmos and whole civilisations.

One way of clarifying this difference between intelligent design and natural creativity is via the distinction between a power that is the willed action of a free agent, and a power that is in the natural disposition of something. This turns on the difference between agency (affectively responding to input, formulating motives and plans, and deciding on an intervention that turns the course of their immediate causal environment), as opposed to expressive process (the unfolding of some natural disposition or drive). On one account agentive design involves a distinctive kind of ‘two-way power’ to choose between options, a power arising emergently in creatures of a certain complexity engaged in ‘actions within the natural universe’ (Steward 2012, 2; emphasis added). The fundamental being envisioned in Vedānta’s arguments has the complexity for such emergent analysis and action, and it does indeed contain sentient agents, will and designers in abundance. But it does not look to a future for some end goal, deciding contingently to create or not based either on an external catalyst or its mood. Brahman actualises the whole schema of reality autonomously as part of its own fundamental nature or life, as it were. Needless to say, philosophically this seems to imply both the comedy and tragedy of life, and some Vedāntic thinkers did indeed envision the divine as analogous to a vast playwright, and at the same time a player in his own work (see Frazier, 2021).

From Divine Goodness to Indexed Values

Divine holism and creativity also imply an altered conception of goodness that differs considerably from the conventional quality of omnibenevolence. Some Vedāntic thinkers perceived two undesirable implications of applying the Satkārya model directly to Brahman. If all of the world’s features exist within God then this also applies both to those that are unpleasant or immoral (like suffering and cruelty), and also to those that seem unsuited to an infinite, ultimate being (like spatial smallness or temporal transience). This created an Indian version of the problem of evil: if all things are directly from the divine, in the divine, and expressive of the divine creative nature, then that divinity must be partly characterised by negative features. This was a concern in the Brahma Sūtras (see Uskakov 2022, chapter five), and it inspired theistic Vedāntins to devise philosophical strategies for distancing divine qualities and actions from worldly ones (see Lipner, 1986 and Frazier, 2021).

One solution was to bite the bullet and accept that the divine being does contain all features of the world. Yet it would remain ‘different-yet-not-different’ from them (bhedābheda) because the divine possesses features at the worldly level (e.g. of being a small bird flying east) that seem to contradict those possessed at the foundational level (being infinite, other than a bird, being in the west, staying still, etc.). By inserting a wedge between localised and holistic features, we can see that values (and all divine properties) need to be indexed to their locus in the whole. Suffering obtains at the time of heartbreak but bliss obtains at the arising of new love, and the significance of Mercutio’s anger is transformed by its relation to Juliet’s suffering and Verona’s remorse. So we should really attribute to the divine only ‘indexed values’ since there is a profound difference between properties that hold at the local level and in totality. It is the latter that applies to the whole nature in which all beings are grounded, inviting us to formulate the kind of ‘goodness’ that best suits this scale.

We thus see a number of things: a kind of value contextualism or value pluralism holds within the divine nature. And the values it generates are both positive and negative ones: there is joy and also suffering. So the divine is a value-maker, responsible for the existence of values of all kinds, not only positive value. And since it makes both basic values like pain and pleasure, and also high-order values like tragedy and a sense of beauty, the creation seems calibrated to cultivate not happiness, but a kind of aesthetic significance. Following the analogy with artworks and plots, we might call this not divine ‘goodness’ or prevention of suffering, but divine ‘art’ and its goodness is of the kind that would apply to ‘the world [as] an essential poem of God’, as Karl Friedrich Krause put it.³⁰ Further, containing our own agency, we can contribute to the world’s ‘artwork’ by undertaking localised actions that accord with understanding reality sub specie totius, to adapt Spinoza’s phrase: from the perspective of the whole of things.

From Theism to Meta-personalism

Finally, we consider the implications for theism. Interestingly, this conception of the divine seems neither to require traditional theism nor preclude it. The majority of Vedāntins were theists of one kind or another, and many qualities attributed to Brahman paralleled the divine attributes of Christian, Muslim and Jewish theologies. But some emphasised that this reality – while supporting all minds and concepts within its nature – would ultimately be very unlike any ‘person’ we know. Its sentience would not be based on spatio-temporal sequences of thought, desire, or action. It would know simultaneously every subjective perspective and every side of every story, all at once. It would interact with no other ‘thing’ than its own nature, including the world it has always contained in potentia. Its generative power would not be structured like the forms of agency of which we know. Presumably, then, it would not reflect, think, desire, or act in ways analogous to those in which we normally understand those phenomena. This idea is far from unfamiliar to Christian philosophers; as Brian Davies (2000, 561) says of any deity according with the doctrine of divine simplicity, ‘I deny that we have a comprehension of something called the personality of God, and I deny that we should talk of god as if he were the man in the next street’. He also notes that one might expect to see ‘a myriad of conflicting images for God’ in such a philosophical theology – taking the appearance of God as ‘father and a judge, but also an eagle, a lamb, and a case of dry rot’ (Davies, 2000, 563). In this light the different Hindu deities, each ultimately to be understood as a manifestation of the divine Being, express its diversity of divine powers and functions.

One way of putting things would be that the divine nature implied in these arguments is a kind of ‘meta-person’ containing all the experiences, existential challenges, lives, virtues, emotions and aesthetic values that we know – and much more in the future, or in other spheres and versions of the universe, or other kinds of consciousness, if they exist. It would contain all the particularities of personhood but in a holistic, triangulated form of being. Whether one should call this sentience depends on our understanding of how sentience is generated and what its possible forms are – something particularly in question just at this juncture in history when AI, animal consciousness and neurodiversity are interrogating our assumptions about mind and personhood. On this point, it might be wise for the jury to stay out for a while. In any case, the 'person' of the divine as conceived according to these arguments amply allowed its adherents to develop of a relationship of awe, love, inspiration and aspiration.

Conclusion

Together, all of these features implied by the core argument we looked at create a challenging vision of something ontologically extraordinary, massively causally powerful, holistically complex, vastly generative, and of a kind of value that can only be conceived in terms of an overarching picture rather than a localised person, act, or situation. It includes not ‘just the universe’ (in the reductive sense sometimes misattributed to ‘pantheism’) but also the realm of thought, the past and future, and all that is emergent in the continuum of reality – including levels that may be hidden from us. This challenges many tenets of traditional theism, but also accords with many of features long associated with ‘the God of the Philosophers’. For certain medieval philosophers of both East and West, the idea of something that is the ‘source of all that is other than Himself’ (Leftow, 1991, 3) goes to the heart of divinity as ground, cause, locus and true identity of all. One of the goals of reviewing these arguments has been to show not only that – if they are right—it must exist, but also that it must possess extraordinary qualities that are unlike anything we have ever known, and which point us toward a better understanding of the essence of divinity.