Defending Pantheism

[vulcanlogician]

I guess I'm a little puzzled as to the value of calling everything "God."  It doesn't help us understand anything, it doesn't have any explanatory power or any utility that you can integrate into your life, it doesn't answer any of the big philosophical questions (why are we here, where are we going, etc).  Is the only reason because it helps some people feel some sort of connectedness?

If that's the case, then that's fine - but a feeling derived from a proposition isn't anything close to a reason to believe that proposition.

The key idea is that pantheism doesn't differ from atheism in any significant way. The pantheist doesn't say, "You atheists are wrong about this factual element of reality." No self-respecting pantheist would try to convince others to share his own high regard for the cosmos. Pantheism isn't a religion. It isn't a set of claims about reality. It's an attitude. And it's an attitude that is adopted for reasons peculiar to the pantheist. Whether they are good reasons or not is a subject for philosophical debate.

Again, pantheism doesn't really differ from atheism all that much. Atheists don't believe in any of the gods described in any religious tradition ever penned. Pantheists don't believe in any gods described in any religious tradition ever penned. Atheists believe that nature exists. Pantheists believe that nature exists.

Pantheism adds something to what is essentially an atheistic outlook. It's important right out of the gate to say just how little pantheism adds. Very little. The only thing that separates a pantheist from an atheist is that an atheist does not necessarily regard anything as a supreme force, worthy of reverence. A pantheist does regard something as a supreme force, worthy of reverence: nature.

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But emergent and reducible are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Emergent properties are not reducible if they disappear when the complexity is taken apart.  Think of disassembling a bird.  It loses both the ability to fly and the property of life.

That is not to say that understanding the components isn't important to understanding how the system works, but that's a different issue.

Let's focus on this particular issue, because I think this is where we disagree.

I get what you're saying. Subatomic particles behave in a certain way. Brains behave in a certain way. When they are not integrated into a cerebral structure, subatomic particles do not behave like brains. Therefore, knowledge of how subatomic particles behave is insufficient to describe brain activity.

But I reject this conclusion. Mind you, this conclusion is practically correct. There is no way that neuroscience would be able to function as a discipline if we forced neuroscientists to explain all brain activity by describing the motions of electrons and other subatomic particles. So (as a matter of practicality) the neuroscientist separates the brain and nervous system into large chunks and observes phenomena on a macro-scale.

But this doesn't mean that all functions of the brain can't be described by looking at individual subatomic particles and molecular forces. It simply isn't feasible to do so.