Abstract
Panentheism seems to be an attractive alternative to classical theism. It is not clear, though, what exactly panentheism asserts and how it relates to classical theism. By way of clarifying the thesis of panentheism, I argue that panentheism and classical theism differ only as regards the modal status of the world. According to panentheism, the world is an intrinsic property of God – necessarily there is a world – and according to classical theism the world is an extrinsic property of God – it is only contingently true that there is a world. Therefore, as long as we do not have an argument showing that necessarily there is a world, panentheism is not an attractive alternative to classical theism.
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Notes
Although from a systematic point of view it is not the case that theists either have to be classical theists or panentheists, I only focus on panentheism and classical theism in this paper, and I bracket other possible theistic positions like pantheism or open theism. My intention thus is not to compare classical theism with all versions of non-classical theism, but only with panentheism. However, the arguments are also sound if instead of classical theism – according to which God is eternal, simple and a necessary being, etc. – a weaker version of classical theism is assumed to hold according to which God is either classical or at least has one of the classical attributes of God.
According to Krause, ‘Panentheism’ is another name for the system of science as such: ‘Since it is found in the intellectual intuition of God that God, as the One, is everything as well as the whole of finitude as such, in, below, and through Himself, we could, following this insight, say that the One is everything in and through itself […]; and since it is recognised in the intellectual intuition of God that God is everything in and through himself, it would not be wrong to call science panentheism’ (Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich: Der zur Gewissheit der Gotteserkenntnis als des höchsten Wissenschaftsprinzips emporleitende Theil der Philosophie. Prague 1869, p. 313, my translation).
Cf. Brierley, Michael: ‘Naming a Quiet Revolution. The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004.
Cf. Gregersen, Niels Henrik: ‘Three Varieties of Panentheism.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004, p. 19: ‘The little word “in” is the hinge of it all.’ Cf. also Clayton, Philip: ‘Panentheism in Metaphysical and Scientific Perspective.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004, p. 252: ‘Already the etymology of the term “pan-en-theism” suggests that the little pronoun “in” linking “all” and “God” must bear the brunt of the interpretive burden. Can it hold up under the pressure?’
Peterson, Gregory R.: ‘Whither Panentheism’ In: Zygon. 36 (3). 2003, p. 399.
Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese (ed.): Philosophers Speak of God. Amherst 1963, p. 16.
Clayton, Philip: ‘Panentheism in Metaphysical and Scientific Perspective.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004, p. 253.
In fact, some of the present interpretations of ‘in’ even seem to entail a strong ontological distinction between God and the world. That God plays with the world, for instance, seems to presuppose that God and the world are distinct entities.
To use an analogy, anything important that can be said about the intimate and internal relation between a mother and the child in her womb shortly before birth can be said of the intimate and external relation between the mother and her child shortly after birth.
Within boundaries, this interpretation is also able to account for an apparently spatial use of ‘in.’ According to it, the sun is in the universe if and only if the sun’s identity is completely determined by the identity of the universe without the identity of the universe being reducible to the identity of the sun. Since the specific identity of the sun is determined by the very nature of the universe without the universe as such being identifiable with the sun, that is, since the sun is the kind of object it is only because the physical universe is the kind of object it is, it follows that the sun is in the universe.
Think of Santa Claus and let us refer to him as ‘a.’ Surely it is true that \( \left\lceil {a = a} \right\rceil \). However, if the identity of Santa Claus were self-explanatory in the way the objection presupposes, then this seemed to justify that – given \( \left\lceil {a = a} \right\rceil \) – we can conclude \( \left\lceil {\exists x\left( {x = a} \right)} \right\rceil \). But it is simply not something that belongs to the identity of Santa Claus that he exists. Therefore, there are cases in which we have to look for something outside the entity in question in order to understand its identity. In the case of Santa Claus we would have to ask whether he could have had existed in other circumstances etc.
Developed further, this track of thought leads to a notion of individual essences, whereas an individual essence E of an entity x is a set of properties such that necessarily whatever entity y exemplifies all the properties in E is identical with x. Plato’s self-identity, for instance, grounds in his individual essence, i.e., in his ‘Platonity’. Cf. Plantinga, Alvin: ‘Actualism and Possible Worlds’ In: Loux, Michael (ed.): The Possible and the Actual. Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality. Cornell University Press 1979, p. 263: ‘Some have displayed a certain reluctance to recognize such properties as this, but for reasons that are at best obscure. In any event it is trivially easy to state conditions under which an object has Platonity; an object has it, clearly enough, if and only if that object is Plato.’
One might object that this just looks like ‘For all x, x = x iff God = God.’ This statement is certainly true, but also completely vacuous. However, it is not what is meant. If we deploy the definition of ‘in’ that I propose, then it follows that for all x, x = x iff God = God and God is not reducible to any x, which is a coherent notion of a first principle or cause: a first principle is such that everything is what it is because the first principle is what it is in such a way that it is not identifiable with anything it is the principle of.
It seems to me that sometimes panentheists assume that panentheism is more compatible with science or is itself more scientific than classical theism. However, this is just postulated. Panentheism in itself is neither more nor less scientific than classical theism. The reason is that both are metaphysical theses the truth of which does entail any particular consequence as regards scientific theories. Only if we supposed that classical theism entails that in order to understand the natural world we have to refer to supernatural causes – as if God was pushing around tiny particles – could such a case be made. However, classical theism simply never was that naïve. One might object that some metaphysical theories are such that their truth would entail the falsehood of many widely accepted scientific claims (e.g., presentism about time looks incompatible with the relativity of the simultaneity relation) and that classical theism and panentheism belong to these theories. While it is certainly true that some metaphysical theories entail the falsehood of currently accepted scientific claims, this is not relevant for the case at hand because I am only arguing that panentheism and classical theism differ only as regards their stance on the modal status of the world, not as regards their stance on scientific claims concerning the nature of the actual world. Therefore, insofar as the empirical sciences are concerned with what is actually the case, and not with what could have been the case, panentheism and classical theism do not entail different stances on scientific claims and the objection is not sound. For an account of panentheism and science cf. Peacocke Arthur: ‘Articulating God’s Presence in and to the World unveiled by the Sciences.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004. For an account of classical theism and science cf. Koons, Robert C.: ‘Science and Theism. Concord, not Conflict.’ In: Copan, Paul and Paul K. Moser (ed.): The Rationality of Theism. Routledge 2004.
Cooper, John W: Panentheism. The Other God of the Philosophers. From Plato to the Present. Baker Academic 2006, p. 14, my italics.
In other words, according to classical theism, it is a Cambridge property of God that there exists a world at all, a property that does not add anything to God as an individual. Cf. also P.T. Geach: ‘God’s Relation to the World,’ in: Sophia vol. 8, 2 (1969), 1-9, for an analysis of God’s relation to the world according to Thomistic theism and for some remarks on Cambridge properties and Cambridge change. According to Geach (1969: 4): ‘The great Cambridge philosophical works published in the early years of this century […] explained change as simply a matter of contradictory attributes’ holding good of individuals at different times. Clearly any change logically implies a “Cambridge” change, but the converse is not true; there is a sense of “change,” hard to explicate, in which it is false to say that Socrates changes by coming to be shorter than Theaetetus when the boy grows up, or that the butter changes by rising in price […]. In each of these cases, there is a “Cambridge” change of an object […] but no real change of that object. Now the denial that God is “really” related to creatures is quite traditionally bound up with the denial that God undergoes change. This latter denial can be true only if we are thinking of “real” change; for all things are subject to “Cambridge” changes – even a timeless abstract entity like a number is subject to a “Cambridge” change if it comes to be thought of by A, or ceases to be the number of B’s living children.’
Charles Hartshorne: A Natural Theology for our Time. La Salle 1967, p. 64.
Although according to the panentheism developed the universe exists of necessity, it does not follow that it is a mereological part of God. Neither the classical theist nor the panentheist in question assumes that God has proper parts in any sense relevant for him to be a mereological sum.
This conclusion enables us to understand in which sense according to panentheism God is dependent on the world: God could not be God if there was no world because the world is an intrinsic property of God the loss of which he could not survive. In other words, if we refer to the world as the realm of finitude and to God as the one infinite being, then the present interpretation can also be paraphrased as saying that in the same way in which the finite needs the infinite, the infinite also needs the finite. Both necessarily co-exist and could not exist without the other.
Cf. William Lane Craig. Time and Eternity. Exploring God’s Relationship to Time. Crossway Books 2001 for an interesting analysis of God’s relation to time.
Cf. Steven E. Baldner and William E. Carroll: Aquinas on Creation. Writings on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 1997, pp. 114-122, in particular p. 119: ‘It is thus, therefore, clear that to say that something has been made by God and that it has always existed is not a contradiction. If there were a contradiction, it is a wonder that Augustine did not see it because this would have been the strongest way of disproving the eternity of the world.’
Cf. Richard Swinburne: ‘God and Time.’ In: Stump, Eleonore: Reasoned Faith. Cornell UP 1993 for an interesting argument according to which time exists even before the creation of the world. For an analysis of this argument cf. Göcke, Benedikt, Matthias Hoesch, Peter Rohs: ‘How to Heckle Swinburne on God and Time.’ In: Nicola Mößner, Sebastian Schmoranzer, Christian Weidemann (eds.): Richard Swinburne. Christian Philosophy in a Modern World. Ontos 2008.
Meister Eckhart seems to have struggled with the same questions as regards God, time and the existence of the world: ‘So when someone once asked me why God had not created the world earlier, I answered that he could not because he did not exist. He did not exist before the world did. Furthermore, how could he have created earlier when he had already created the world in the very now in which he was God? It is false to picture God as if he were waiting around for some future moment in which to create the world. In the one and the same time in which he was God and in which he begot his coeternal Son as God equal to himself in all things, he also created the world’ (Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, edited by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. New York 1981, p. 85). Cf. also Leftow, Brian: Time and Eternity. Cornell UP 1991, p. 290: ‘So if God is timeless and a world or time exists, there is no phase of his life during which he is without a world or time or has not yet decided to create them, even if the world or time had a beginning.’
Polkinghorne, John: ‘Critical Notice of Cosmos as Creation, edited by Ted Peters.’ In: Expository Times 101. 1990, p. 317 [Quoted from: Craig, William Lane: Time and Eternity. Exploring God’s Relationship to Time. Crossway Books 2001, p. 211].
Copan, Paul and William Lane Craig: Creation out of Nothing. A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration. Baker Academics 2004, p. 148.
Against the account developed so far one might object the following: ‘Panentheism denies a fundamental tenet of theism’s picture – God’s transcendence. The theist holds that, whether or not there is a world, it is not in God. God is distinct from and transcends any world that he creates. To deny this the panentheist need not hold that necessarily there is a world. He need only hold that if there is a world, then necessarily it is in God. If panentheism is true, then it is not possible that there should be a world that is not in God. If classical theism is true, then if there is a world, it is necessarily not part of god. In that case, so the objections goes, what I allege of panentheism is plausibly true of pantheism: If God is a necessary being and if pantheism is true, then it seems that necessarily there is a world since that world is one with God (in some sense). What, then, do the pantheist and the panentheist disagree about? Surely it must be that god is not exhausted by the world: the world is a proper part of god – not the whole of God.’ However, this would not be a sound objection. (1) There is not a single panentheist who denies God’s transcendence for the very simple reason that otherwise panentheism collapsed into pantheism. It is precisely the point of panentheism to establish an intelligible synthesis of classical theism and pantheism. (2) The objection supposes that there is a clear and distinct idea of what it means to say that the world is ‘in’ or ‘outside of’ God with which we can work with before we clarified the thesis of classical theism and panentheism. My argument, though, is precisely that an intelligible interpretation of ‘in’ and ‘outside of’ can only be developed in terms of the world’s being necessary, respectively, contingent. That being the case, the objections collapses. (3) Apart from the fact that the objection seems to work with an incoherent concept of panentheism according to which God does not transcend the world but at the same time is not exhausted by the world it relies on a mereological interpretation of ‘in’ and ‘outside of.’ I do not think that there is any reason to share this assumption as God is not a mereological sum, neither on classical theism nor on the panentheism I develop.
Peacocke Arthur: ‘Articulating God’s Presence in and to the World Unveiled by the Sciences.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004, p.147.
The physical realm is the realm of mind-independent entities, their structures and interrelations. For instance, atoms, tables, planets and their relations belong to the physical realm. The mental realm correspondingly is the realm of mind-dependent entities, their structures and interrelations. For instance, phenomenal states, cognitions and their relations belong to the mental realm as well as the transcendental reflection on the categories of reason. The mental world is the world as it is investigated by transcendental epistemology or phenomenology and the physical world is the world as it is investigated by classical ontology. Assuming that every transcendent entity is determined by transcendent categories of being, the thesis that the physical world is in God entails that God is the one transcendent category of ontology that determines the physical realm and everything in this realm. Assuming that everything in the mental realm is determined by transcendental categories of epistemology, the thesis that the mental world is in God entails that God is the one category of transcendental philosophy.
One might object that this conclusion is too strong and that one can have accurate representations R 1 , …, R n of an object x without the object x being present in or isomorphic to that which represents it. I do not have the space to deal with this in detail, but such an assumption, if it is intelligible at all, seems to me to entail the collapse of our concept of knowledge of the world: if it is possible that R 1 is an accurate representation of x (supposing that knowledge is about representations of objects for the sake of argument) without x being present in or isomorphic to R 1 , then certain questions arise: (1) What is the relation between x and R 1 ? (2) What is necessary and sufficient for this relation to be accurate? As regards (1): Causation seems to be the most relevant relation in this case. But if the relation is a causal relation such that x causes R 1 , then it is false that x is not present in R 1 : x is present in R 1 as the cause of R 1 . As regards (2): Ex negativo, if it is not a necessary and sufficient condition for R 1 to be an accurate representation of x that it is isomorphic to x or that x is present in R 1 , then the relation is ontologically entirely arbitrary and epistemologically it is in principle beyond our reach to know anything about x as such. In effect, we ended up with a Kantian Ding-an-sich. The above assumption concerning the identification of the transcendental and transcendent categories avoids these complications and can account for genuine knowledge of the world.
Barnes, Jonathan: The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton UP 1995, p. 686 [Aristotle: On The Soul, 431b20].
In fact, any account according to which genuine knowledge of the world is possible entails that there is a one to one mapping between the categories of epistemology and the categories of ontology. Only accounts that posit a Kantian schism between our transcendental constitution and things-in-themselves cannot explain how genuine knowledge of the world is possible.
It is notoriously difficult to spell out in detail what it means to say that God ‘has’ all the properties that we can find in the world. God does not exemplify properties in a way in which particulars exemplify properties. However, if there is a property F in the world, and if God is the first principle or cause of everything, then it follows that God at least has to have F in the minimal sense that F-ness is part of the divine essence. Otherwise God could not be the first principle or cause of particular’s being F, and thus would not be the first principle.
Denys Turner: Faith, Reason and the Existence of God. Cambridge UP 2004, p. 187/188. Further: ‘That is why we cannot comprehend God: the “darkness” of God is the simple excess of light. God is not too indeterminate to be known; God is unknowable because too comprehensively determinate, too actual. It is in that excess of actuality that the divine unknowabilility consists’ (ibid). However, this does not entail that on my account classical theism and panentheism need to rely on some theory of analogical predication. It does entail, though, that whatever theists and panentheist will have to say about the concept of God as such – independent of the concept of the world – has to be the same due to the logic of the notion of a first principle. Independent of whether predication of God is univocal or equivocal or analogical, both theism and panentheism are on a par as regards their concept of God as such.
Gregersen, Niels Henrik: ‘Three Varieties of Panentheism.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004, p. 24.
Griffin, David Ray: ‘Panentheism: A Postmodern Revelation.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004, p. 44.
This fits well with the alleged fact that according to classical theism the world is a Cambridge property of God. See footnote 16 above.
Cf., for instance, Chalmers, David: ‘Does Conceivability Entail Metaphysical Possibility?’ In: Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne (ed.): Conceivability and Possibility. Oxford 2002.
Rundle, Bede: Why there is something rather than nothing. Oxford 2004, p. 110.
Cf. Gregersen, Niels Henrik: ‘Three Varieties of Panentheism.’ In: Clayton, Philip and Arthur Peacocke (ed.): In Whom We Live and Move and have our Being. Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Eerdmanns Publishing 2004, p. 29: ‘Hegel came to the rescue by proposing a deeper concept of infinity […]. According to Hegel, Fichte was right in insisting that infinity should not be understood in contrast to finitude. Infinity is not that which starts on the other side of finitude. Neither is infinity just the endless process of transcending, in analogy to an endless series of numbers. These examples constitute only the concept of a “bad infinity” (das schlechte Unendliche). The concept of genuine infinity (das wirklich Unendliche) is rather that which includes finitude within itself.’ Also Krause, the unrightfully forgotten German idealist, argued that finitude is an essential element of the Absolut-in-itself such that although properly understood there is Absolute as such is without limitation, it is of necessity limited in itself as finitude.
Of course, this only entails that some world has to be, not that the actual world of necessity is the actual world.
Mary Morris (ed.): Leibniz: Philosophical Writings. J.M Dent & Sons 1934, pp. 25-26.
This contradiction is also implicitly in Leibniz. Cf. Sobel: ‘Leibniz had a problem, for he had two horrors. He had a horror of brute fact, and he had a horror of universal necessity. He wanted to deny the first without falling into the second. And so he ran into difficulty, for he wanted desperately to “square a circle”. He wished for sufficient reasons for all contingencies, whereas sufficient reasons, by their natures, are not possible for any contingencies. He wished to ground all contingencies in necessities. But contingencies can be grounded, if at all, only in other contingencies, so that it is impossible to ground them all’ (Jordan Howard Sobel: Logic and Theism. Arguments for and Against beliefs in God. Cambridge University Press 2006, p. 231.)
Peter van Inwagen argues in a similar way. The principle of sufficient reason, however, ‘has a consequence most people would have a very hard time accepting: that all true propositions are necessarily. In broad outline, the argument is this: if there are any contingent propositions (that is, contingently true propositions), then there is a set of all contingent propositions; but an explanation of any set of contingent propositions must appeal to some contingent propositions outside that set; hence, the whole set of contingent propositions can have no explanation; hence, if every set of true propositions is such that there is an explanation for the fact that it contains only truths (as the Principle implies), there can be only necessary truths’ (Peter van Inwagen: Metaphysics. Westview Press 2002, p. 119). Cf. also Sobel: ‘[The principle of sufficient reason] is inspired by the idea that contingencies, one and all, must be grounded in necessities. In fact, however, necessities can have nothing at all to do with contingencies. […] There is a chasm between necessities and contingencies, and though relations of relevance and of reasons run on both sides of the divide, there are none that run across either way.’ Jordan Howard Sobel: Logic and Theism. Arguments for and Against Beliefs in God. Cambridge University Press 2006, p. 225.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the actual world is in fact the best of all possible worlds, there is, of course, the further problem of whether God – if God is omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect – had to create the best of all possible worlds or whether he could have refrained from doing so. If he had to create this world, then the world exists of necessity. If not, then it is contingent but hard to understand that God is morally perfect and omniscient and omnipotent since it seems to be of positive moral value that the best of all possible worlds exists. And it seems to be ad hoc to argue, as Leibniz does, that ‘God is metaphysically perfect of necessity [but] he is [not] morally perfect of necessity, but rather [only] by choice’ (Robert C. Sleigh: ‘Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.’ In: R. Audi: The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, pp. 425-429.)
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Göcke, B.P. Panentheism and Classical Theism. SOPHIA 52, 61–75 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0292-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0292-y